Billions Allocated, but Home is Only a Dream for Many on the Gulf Coast

Posted: 28 February 2007

by Raymond C. Offenheiser

Tens of thousands of residents from Mississippi and Louisiana still find themselves doubled or tripled up in the homes of others or packed—whole families of them—into tiny white boxes for shelter.

Five weeks was all it took a group of volunteers from the Friends Disaster Assistance to build a new house high on pilings in Lafitte, La., for a widow and her two teenage children after hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed theirs. The workers came with a truckload of tools and towing their own showers—a model of supreme efficiency.

That aerie, moss green and dreamlike for the small family that has now moved into it, stands out in its neighborhood, not for its size—it’s small and the design came out of a catalogue—but because of what’s around it: wreckage, dotted with FEMA trailers.

A year and a half after the storms slammed into the Gulf Coast severely damaging or destroying 300,000 homes, that Lafitte house is the exception rather than the rule. Tens of thousands of residents from Mississippi and Louisiana still find themselves doubled or tripled up in the homes of others or packed—whole families of them—into tiny white boxes for shelter.

What’s it like to live in a FEMA trailer? After 17 months, the small indignities—the beds that are too short, the rats in the cupboards, the bathrooms into which wheelchairs just can’t squeeze—become close to intolerable. And the feeling of abandonment hardens into a certainty confirmed by our president: Neither a word of compassion nor a line of prescription for the devastation still saddling the Gulf Coast found their way into his recent State of the Union address. His fiscal year 2008 budget was equally empty: It didn’t include one extra cent for the rebuilding of housing.

What a time to put on the brakes—in the middle of the marathon. The road home for countless Gulf Coast families is going to be long and bumpy, especially for the poorest among them. The back-to-back disasters wiped out whatever limited assets they had, robbed them of jobs, and banished them to remote trailer parks without transportation. A recent study by the Children’s Health Fund and the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University found that almost 40 percent of study participants in Mississippi no longer held jobs after the storm.

But the awful irony is that jobs, for skilled and unskilled workers alike, are going begging in both states. It’s the affordable housing near those jobs that is lacking. Rents have soared and many apartments that once served as the home base for workers remain wrecked and boarded up. Housing for renters, many of whom could be fueling the recovery if they just had a decent and affordable place to live, was not a high priority for Mississippi officials who preferred to bank on the casinos instead. They got the early breaks, but now they, too, are having trouble finding homes for their employees.

Homes are the foundation on which communities and local economies are built. Yet it is volunteers, with hammers and heart, to whom the task of rebuilding them has fallen—-a task that should not be their responsibility. Relying on volunteers is an approach you would expect an impoverished government in another part of the world to depend on—not one with the resources of the United States. We have allocated billions of dollars for this recovery, yet it is volunteers and donated labor that are producing the only noticeable results. Why?

Part of it is bureaucracy, thick as the bayou mud, plugging progress every step of the way. In Louisiana, for instance, more than 105,000 people have applied for grants to rebuild their homes and 30,000 of them have received word that they’ll get a chunk of some of the $2.49 billion set aside for them. But, by early February, just over 500 people had a check in hand. Donated materials, volunteer labor, and their own backbreaking work still serve as the fallback for untold others.

Congress is now conducting a series of hearings on our woeful recovery from these disasters. And sensational stories about some undeserving individuals cashing in on the government’s largesse may well grab the headlines. But there is only one story that should really shock us: Why, after a year and a half and billions of dollars later, are homes still only dreams for tens of thousands of families on the Gulf Coast?