This column was printed in the Oregon Daily Emerald on May 11.
Forty-four months after Hurricane Katrina descended on New Orleans and its surrounding parishes, there are still 4,600 Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers inhabited by hurricane victims. The majority of them are elderly, poverty-stricken, disabled or mentally ill. Some are still rebuilding homes that were destroyed during the storm, a process fraught with red tape and governmental delays. Others have sunk into a state of severe and unremitting depression. Unable to adjust to the chaos and instability of the storm, they have simply tuned out of life. Now, it appears many of these individuals will soon be booted from their homes, as well.
By: Patrick Finney
FEMA recently announced its intention to repossess all trailers on May 30, and evict those still residing there. It’s not a surprising response, considering the colossal inefficiency the organization displayed from the get-go in providing Katrina aid. From its bungling of the initial emergency effort to its inadequate housing relief, FEMA has routinely appeared out of touch with the full effects of the storm on residents of the Gulf South.
In fact, being wrested from their trailer homes is just one of the many burdens Katrina victims have had to bear. Almost four years after the storm, none of the 500 Katrina cottages that state officials agreed to build to offset housing problems has been erected. The Louisiana Road Home program, which is intended to provide large grants to homeowners for repair, has been beleaguered with red tape and administrative problems. Additionally, a caretaking organization, authorized by the Louisiana Recovery Authority, never materialized, leaving local aid organizations to combat the homelessness and poverty still associated with the storm.
The 143,000 FEMA trailers provided to residents after the hurricane was one of the organization’s most visible and robust undertakings. They did not arrive in the timeliest manner, and many of them were later found to contain dangerous levels of formaldehyde, but for hordes of Katrina victims, they provided a home. Now, most of these trailers have been dragged away as the majority of Katrina victims have rebuilt, but there are still a fraction of residents who call the trailers home. And while a handful or so of these individuals may be looking to freeload off the government’s dime, most of them would love nothing more than to secure their own residence. They simply don’t have the funds or the resources to do so.
However, some people think they’re not trying hard enough. Bruce Ramsey, a columnist for The Seattle Times, supports FEMA’s decision to give hurricane victims the boot. Ramsey criticized a New York Times series on the trailer debacle as a “compendium of hard luck stories.” He was especially irked by the focus on a man who was attempting to finance his home by selling aluminum for soda cans.
“Collecting pop cans is a wino’s job. It is no way to finance the repair of a building,” Ramsey squawked. He called the man irrational and suggested he attempt to sell his gutted, flood-damaged home, or take out a second mortgage.
Ramsey’s right. Collecting cans isn’t the best way to finance the repair of a building. It’s a desperate and an ill-conceived plan. However, it’s nowhere near as ill-conceived as suggesting that a 70-year-old, poverty-stricken man with no resources have his home stripped from him because he hasn’t dealt with his finances adroitly.
The Katrina reconstruction effort has cost hundreds of billions dollars. It’s been a long, painstaking process, and one that’s done little to quell the bitterness many victims feel for the government’s initial response. Now, FEMA wants to evict people from their domiciles with no contingency plan for how they will survive, and pundits like Ramsey support such a plan. What sort of rational idea is that?
FEMA should not only extend the housing privileges in the trailers, they should simply give the trailers away. The demonization of these individuals as freeloaders is not just insulting – it’s absurd. Furthermore, regardless of whether they’re genuinely trying to find alternative housing, it’s inane to suggest evicting an already disadvantaged population for such an insignificant amount of money.
FEMA’s mission is to provide disaster relief, and as long as the ramifications of Katrina are still being felt it should stay the course. Pundits such as Ramsey need to discard their Horatio Alger fetishes and realize it’s hard to pull yourself up by the bootstraps when you’re poor, disabled, disadvantaged, discarded and unstable. The victims of Hurricane Katrina deserve more sympathy, or at the very least, a dose of common sense.
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