Biloxi Revisited: Scant Progress for Residents Living Beyond Glow of the Casinos

Posted: 6 September 2006

by Coco McCabe

Affordable rental housing becoming scarcer along the Gulf Coast.

As the dusk deepened, two boys picked their way through the tangle of weeds and grasses that crowded a vast and empty stretch of East Biloxi, Miss., not far from where the towering Beau Rivage casino shimmered with light and a $550 million makeover.

One year ago—before the storm surge from Hurricane Katrina swallowed this end of town—rows of small wooden houses lined this stretch of blocks on Holley Street and Lilly Lane, where some families had lived for decades paying rents they could afford on their small incomes.

Who would recognize the neighborhood now?

“All of them got torn down,” said Jessie Walker, who used to live in one of those houses for $225 a month.

“We couldn’t do nothing,” added his wife, Sherry Walker, sitting hunched on the stoop of their FEMA trailer in a cluttered lot nearby.

That could be the refrain for countless families in Biloxi—and beyond—who are struggling to avoid a second swamping from a wave of rebuilding that will soon be sweeping the Gulf Coast. Congress has allocated almost $6 billion to help Mississippi restore its housing and community infrastructure, yet the state has no plan at all to bring back affordable private rental housing like that on Holley and Lilly.

Though many tenants there returned in the days after the storm to muck out their homes with the hope of making them habitable again—and in some cases had even moved back in—the landlord sent eviction notices claiming mold had made the properties unfit for living. Soon the houses were torn down. Curb cuts leading to weed-covered driveways remain the only sign of the once-vibrant neighborhood.

The Gulf Coast is now facing a severe shortage of affordable rental housing, which is only going to get worse if there is no extension offered to the 18-month allowance for families squeezed into more than 100,000 FEMA trailers.

“We ain’t got nowhere to stay,” said Mary Jane Nixon who used to live on Lilly Lane and is now settled in a FEMA trailer parked on a lot for which she is paying $150 a month in rent. “We looked for a house to move in. You can’t find a house.”

Asked what she would do if FEMA reclaimed its trailer, Nixon’s face went blank. The question seemed unanswerable.

Waiting to Rebuild

A few blocks away, on Elmer Street, Derek Pride Sr. surveyed the almost empty lot where his house once stood—a house that had been home to four generations of his family. In its place was $3,000 worth of dirt that Pride had used his FEMA assistance check to buy and have trucked to the site. His goal was to raise the level of the ground and make it safer for the next house he hoped to build there someday.

But when that day would be, no one on Elmer could hazard a guess.

A year after the storm hit, Pride and some of his neighbors have made little progress toward reclaiming the lives they once had. Government-issued trailers dotted the street amid wrecked houses caving in on themselves. Outside a tent pitched in the corner of an empty lot a heap of bedding aired in the shade. At the end of Elmer—in a telling sign of just how forgotten parts of East Biloxi have become in the rush to rebuild the casinos—a mass of weeds crept over the asphalt, narrowing the road as if to close it off.

“You can’t hardly go down the street,” said Pride, disgust in his voice.

“Back of town, we’re not getting anything,” added his neighbor, Veronica Davis.

Both marveled at the size of the $6 billion pot Mississippi is sitting on, and wondered about its distribution.

“They put all kinds of stipulations on it. If you’re poor, you don’t get it,” said Pride.

Despite the fact that it is the poorest state in the country, Mississippi is not obliged to guarantee that any of the federal money for housing reconstruction will benefit low-income families. And dollars that the state has doled out have been mighty slow to reach the beneficiaries. Eleven months after Katrina hit, not one house in Mississippi had been rebuilt with that money.

“My question is everybody who was affected has a FEMA number: Why can’t they distribute it to people with those numbers?” asked Pride.

“If we had the money, we’d all be in our homes,” said Davis.

Instead, home for Pride is a FEMA trailer that he shares with two other people—his fiancé and a stepson. It’s a squeeze for a man like Pride who stands six feet, three inches tall.

“I’ve got about this much of my feet hanging out of the bed,” he said, holding his hands two feet apart. “And you have to duck.”

Still, the trailer beats the living conditions his family endured for two months after the storm.

“I thank God for it,” said Pride. “It’s better than a tent.”

Concerns for the Future

Lovie McCray, up Elmer Street a short distance from Pride, got her trailer in June. It’s outfitted to care for her handicapped granddaughter and elderly mother, but she’s still worried about what may happen next to the people she loves.

“It’s rough,” she said of life in East Biloxi as she kept one eye on the TV news. “They need to see about the older people. The younger people can bounce back.”

Flashing across the TV screen was the anxious face of an elderly woman—a friend of McCray’s—who had just lost $20,000 in a house reconstruction scam.

“It happens to a lot of old people,” McCray said, worrying that her own mother could be a victim, too. “They’re dependent on people.”

McCray said government officials should be paying more attention to the needs of the elderly, or at least be honest about the future of the community people like her mother have called home for more than half a century.

“What they ought to do is go ahead and tell the truth,” she said. “They want Biloxi to be a casino town.”

The Mississippi Gaming Commission has predicted that in the next four years, the gambling industry in Biloxi could increase more than threefold to a $4 billion market. Before the storm, it was a $1.2 billion market.

“As much as they’re getting from the casinos, they should have a fund for older people and middle-aged people,” said McCray.

If she had the money, she’d be rebuilding her house on Elmer Street.

“It come off the pillars, sit down on the ground, and cracked in half,” said McCray. “I had it demolished. It wasn’t livable.”

These days, for residents living beyond the glow of the casinos, not much seems to be livable in East Biloxi. Division Street—the main drag—feels like a ghost town. The heaps of trash piled high on curbs and sidewalks a year ago are gone, but buildings remain boarded up and commercial activity is scant.

Nevertheless, for people like McCray and her 89-year-old mother, Mannie Mitchell, East Biloxi is where they want to be.

“This is home, ain’t it,” said Mitchell.