Background

Oxfam engages local residents and community groups in advocacy efforts to ensure that the reconstruction process fully addresses the needs of the region’s most vulnerable people.

Today, affordable housing is not being rebuilt along the Gulf Coast at the scale or pace needed, and it is communities of color and low-income people who are disproportionately affected. Perhaps most astonishing is not only is there insufficient affordable housing available now, there are no plans to restore all the housing that was lost.

The difference between those neighborhoods that were able to recover and those that were not lies in a series of state and federal policies that either neglect or were designed to exclude low and middle-income people, especially renters. In Mississippi, state officials only began spending money to rebuild affordable rental housing in the spring of 2008, two-and-a-half years after the storms. In addition, the governor’s office denied homeowners assistance for wind damage, which particularly affected lower income areas, and created a two-tiered grant program that effectively penalized lower-income homeowners. Furthermore, Mississippi requested and received waivers from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) releasing it from the obligation to ensure that at least half of the state’s recovery funds benefit low- and moderate-income people.

In Louisiana, the state’s “Road Home” program offers grants for homeowners to repair their homes or relocate. But nonprofit groups working with Louisiana homeowners report that many people did not receive enough money to rebuild in the current high-cost environment. What’s more, poorer applicants, primarily African-American and other ethnic minorities, are receiving less grant money, as well as much lower flood and private insurance payments. Predictably, neighborhoods dependent on Road Home funds are struggling to recover; locals have nicknamed it "the slow road home."

For seniors, many of whom are retired and on fixed incomes, returning home is a particular struggle. Throughout the Gulf Coast, 12,600 elderly people earning less than $9,000 a year were displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Now, for every unit of senior housing in the Gulf Coast, there are 10 eligible senior citizens on the waiting list. There are hundreds of state subsidized units that could offer appropriate senior housing, yet many developments remain closed because they lack operating subsidies required to accept occupants—subsidies that HUD has done too little to provide.