Shelter Crisis: Housing Crunch on Gulf Coast Could Grow as FEMA Deadline Nears

Posted: 30 December 2005

As winter deepens, families and individuals now living in more than 10,000 hotel rooms scattered across Mississippi and Louisiana face an unsettling question: Where will they go after Feb. 27? That’s the new deadline the Federal Emergency Management Agency has set for ending the hotel program for Gulf Coast residents left homeless by hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

But hotel-dwellers are not the only ones still enduring uncertainty months after the storms damaged or destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes, says Oxfam America’s Ashley Tsongas.

“Some people are about to be worse off than they were immediately after the hurricanes when temporary stopgap measures dry up,” said Tsongas. “That includes people staying in hotels, living with family, and living off their credit cards. Hosts are exhausted and cards are maxed out. People will be on the move again.”

Uneven Response

The response of coastal communities to that reality may be uneven. A tent city in one community is planning for a surge in people seeking shelter, while another down the coast plans to close by the end of January.

In Pass Christian, Mississippi, volunteers at a tent city are preparing for what may become a new wave of displaced people when the FEMA deadline hits. At the moment, the 74 tents in “the village,” as it is known locally, are less than half full, but that could change.

“We’ve had quite a few move to trailers,” said Anna Plage, who has been volunteering at the tent city seven long days a week. “Currently, 120 are living there. We’re expecting an influx when the FEMA funding for hotels runs out.”

What newcomers will find are accommodations for up to 300 people in raised tents, a bank of showers, and a dining tent that serves three hot meals a day. Organizers—who don’t claim any expertise in settling roommate disputes—place up to four individuals in each tent with the understanding that they can section off their own quarter with curtains or a tarp. The tents measure 16 feet by 32 feet and come equipped with electricity, heat, and air conditioning.

“We try to make the place livable,” said Plage, noting that the village has a community center and is in the process of trying to get a row of washers and dryers hooked up so that people won’t have to trek to the next town to do their laundry. Built on the site of a former Little League ballfield, the tent city now has 24-hour-a-day security to address concerns that the facility wasn’t safe.

“Generally, spirits are pretty high,” said Plage, when asked to describe the mood of the residents. “The community is growing pretty strong here.”

And that’s despite the incredible destruction left in the wake of the storms, which wiped out virtually all of Pass Christian’s economic activity.

“It’s going to be a while before Pass Christian gets on its feet,” said Sonny Alford, the operations manager for VIP Grand Events, which has contracted with FEMA to provide meals at the tent city and at two others in the state—in D’Iberville and Long Beach. “You’ve got many people economically depressed by the storm.” Proof of that is the long line at suppertime. It’s not just tent city residents Alford’s operation is feeding each day, but hundreds of others—up to 650 for the evening meal—who have no easy access to a food supply. Plage said the community has no functioning grocery store.

Scramble for Trailers

Eastward along the coast, in D’Iberville, the tent city that opened in early November and can house up to 250 people is due to close a week before the FEMA hotel deadline.

“FEMA wants to have everybody in trailers by that date,” said D’Iberville City Manager Richard Rose. But the agency has a way to go before it meets the target it has set for itself.

FEMA is projecting it will need to provide 35,000 travel trailers for the state and 4,000 mobile homes. As of Dec. 22, the agency was reporting that people have already moved into 28,858 of the trailers and 323 mobile homes. But some people can’t wait, and are crowding in with neighbors—or taking matters into their own hands.

“We have a lot of trailer surfing,” said Courtney Littig, a spokeswoman for U.S. Rep. Gene Taylor, referring to people who are forced to double-up in trailers come nighttime. “We had one woman call up and report her travel trailer was stolen.” The thief apparently backed a vehicle up to the trailer and towed it off.

Jesse Lee Beck knows what it’s like to long for a better home than a tent. He lost everything when his Gulfport apartment was destroyed in the storm. After evacuating to Nebraska, he returned to the Gulf Coast to be near his young daughter, but found there was nowhere to live except in the tent he pitched next to a convenience store. He paid the store $10 a week in rent.

In mid-December, he finally got a trailer, which is now parked in a commercial lot in Long Beach with about 50 others.

“I’m living day by day right now,” said Beck. His old job as a bond bailsman is gone, and now he’s earning far less as a heavy equipment operator. “My next step is getting a house clear away from the beach. I’m talking 50 miles.”

FEMA allows people to stay in their trailers for up to 18 months, but in this case, the agency may find itself granting extensions to that deadline. Some Gulf Coast residents report that the pace of repairs to damaged homes is painfully slow.

“There may be a sizeable percentage of people who do go beyond” the 18-month deadline, said Len DeCarlo, a FEMA public affairs officer for six Mississippi counties. “This is extraordinary.”

Comprehensive Assessment Needed

Some of the difficulty with the Gulf Coast reconstruction efforts, said Oxfam’s Tsongas, is that no one really has a clear idea of the full scope of the damage.

“Part of the problem is there hasn’t been a comprehensive assessment to know the true extent of any of these problems,” she said. “We have an idea, but we don’t know any of the specifics, and that’s what you really need to rebuild, to hold agencies accountable, and to make a good case for why we need more federal aid.”

Meanwhile, some coast residents are rushing to make decisions they may later be sorry for, added James Crowell, president of the Biloxi, Mississippi, branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), one of Oxfam America’s partner organizations.

“More than three-quarters of the houses [in Biloxi] are still not ready to be moved back into,” said Crowell. People are feeling pressed and asking themselves if they want to bother going through this kind of thing again. “And here come the condo and casino people saying, I’ll give you X numbers of dollars for your property.”

Some folks have given in and taken the money, Crowell said.

“Probably, when this is all over, they’ll regret it,” he added. What’s needed, he said, is community attention to long-range planning, but so far he has seen little of that in Biloxi.

“You’ve got to organize and have some leadership to fight off these people who want to take the property,” he said, noting that point was made at a recent town hall-style meeting organized by the NAACP.