Gulf Coast Blog
|
GULF COAST DESERVES OUR COMMITMENT
Last week, when I got off the plane in Gulfport, Mississippi, I picked up the local newspaper on the way out of the airport. “AMAZING PROGRESS,” blared the headline. The article described how the Gulf Coast was well on its way to a fast recovery, evidenced by the fact that casinos have been rebuilt and the crown jewel among them, the Beau Rivage, was to open to great fanfare.
As I followed the news clippings, this theme of progress was echoed again by President Bush in his visit to Biloxi. “The progress in one year’s time has been remarkable,” he told the Washington Post on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina—Aug. 29.
But across the street from the Imperial Palace, one of Biloxi’s most prominent casinos, lies another reality. The only surviving commercial enterprise after Katrina struck a year ago is a pawn shop, open 24 hours a day for the desperate gambler. Behind the pawn shop lie ruined communitie—reminders of how things used to be.
An empty parking lot sits where Sharon Hanshaw and her children used to live in a bungalow a few blocks from the ocean. Hanshaw, head of Coastal Women for Change, and her children are now squeezed into a FEMA camping trailer. The parking lot opens into what appears to be a grassy field, except that it is segmented by city streets and the grass is interrupted every 100 feet or so by cement slabs where a home used to rest.
These were neighborhoods which used to have bicycles lying in front yards, porches which gave way to conversations among neighbors, basketball hoops which inspired great dreams. Real estate developers are gobbling up these properties for high-end development as, in the words of one developer, the “right to sell” has trumped the “right to return.”
Many people from the neighborhoods still live somewhere in the area—cramped in trailers, squeezed in with other family members, or risking a return to live in a house still standing. There is a sense that there has been amazing progress, but in a hardscrabble kind of way.
One of Oxfam’s local partners in East Biloxi has helped clean, gut, repair or rebuild 2,200 homes which had been flooded but still left standing. Volunteers using donated materials did the work. Along Fountain Lane in East Biloxi, we spoke with several families that were rebuilding their modest homes with their own sweat equity.
But families rebuilding and financing by themselves aren’t enough for the Gulf Coast to recover. Private aid and volunteers, as crucial as they are, can’t possibly address the human needs in a disaster of this scale. And no economist will argue that in the context of this disaster the market is equipped to deal with the housing and social service needs of more than 750,000 families impacted across the region, a disproportionate share of whom are low and moderate income.
The government must ensure that the needs of the most vulnerable people—those who should be targeted first for assistance in disasters—are addressed. Congress has committed $110 billion to this effort and President Bush in the early days of the disaster called upon the nation to “restore all that we have cherished from yesterday, and let us rise above the legacy of inequality.”
But that hasn’t happened. In our recent report Forgotten Communities, Unmet Promises Oxfam America found that out of the $17 billion of federal funds specifically designated for community development and housing, not a single house had been rebuilt within the first year.
Instead of the most vulnerable people being targeted for assistance, they are often being targeted for exclusion. For example very few federal dollars are designated for rebuilding the affordable rental housing, which means that former renters—who are disproportionately people of color, senior citizens, and households headed by single parents—will be forced out unless changes are made.
On my seventh trip to the region, I’m reminded again how daunting are the challenges and how long are the odds to “build back better,” but the lives of too many people are caught in the balance to make inaction an option.
Recently, Oxfam sent an email out to 225,000 of our supporters asking them to do whatever they can do to help the Gulf Coast communities rebuild. One simple action is to join Oxfam America in urging President Bush to redouble his efforts to ensure that government at all levels keeps the promises that this nation made to the people of Louisiana and Mississippi.
When I returned home, my last conversation while still in Mississippi was with the Delta ticket counter attendant. For the past year, she and her family have been living in a FEMA trailer parked near the long-term lot of the Gulfport airport.
She recounted to me that she had lost everything, including pictures of her deceased parents and of her children while they were still young. Anxieties rose to the surface as she described that tropical storm Ernesto appeared to be bearing down on the region and that a trailer is no place to ride out a storm.
As her nervous hands passed me my boarding pass, I was struck that it was a freak of nature and an accident of birth that my family is safe, comfortable, and protected in our home while her family is not. This brave woman, whose name I do not know, and the people in the Gulf Coast deserve the commitment of this country, and of each of us individually, to honor our promise to rebuild the Gulf Coast equitably.
