FEMA Trailer Update
Monday, August 4th, 2008The New York Times: August 4, 2008
Doris Fountain was in a comfortable hotel, waiting on a water heater and an air-conditioner for her once-flooded house in New Orleans.
Matthew Bailey had just received his first check — $48 — for selling diet products via the Internet, a source of income he insisted would ultimately pull in $5,000 to $20,000 a month.
Their plans, the fragile products of battered optimism, have been derailed by bureaucratic obstacles and the evacuees’ own tenuous abilities to cope.
Mr. Love is living in an apartment paid for by an agency for the homeless but has no job or transportation. Ms. Fountain, still at the hotel, has the appliances, but new problems have cropped up at the house, including sparking electrical outlets and a strong odor of sewage. Mr. Bailey has moved to a studio apartment paid for by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but is still paying far more for his membership in the Internet company than he is earning.
“Hopefully things will pick up, though,” Mr. Bailey, 43, said. “That’s the way I see it. Things are bound to pick up.”
At the end of May, the doors closed at Renaissance Village, the FEMA trailer park outside of Baton Rouge that had been home to hundreds of families, its end hastened by an official acknowledgment of unhealthy levels of formaldehyde in the trailers. Those who were left at the park at the end, most of whom were among the neediest of the evacuees, began moving out on their own.
In light of the early promise that the recovery from the hurricane would provide the chance to address New Orleans’s social ills, the farewell to the trailer park might have been an opportunity for a fresh start, with families fortified by more than three years of government support and charity programs. But when the park closed earlier than expected, government planners said they were left unprepared.
State and federal officials blamed each other for the plight of those whose mental limitations, physical afflictions or addictions, exacerbated by their exodus, have kept them from taking advantage of what help was available. Now those people have left their cramped quarters behind but taken their problems with them.
Support systems have been slow to catch up. Red Cross money for necessities like furniture, work clothes and, in some cases, cars, ran out just as Renaissance Village and most of the other trailer sites were closing, and many residents are making do with nothing but a mattress. A contract for case managers who helped evacuees get back on their feet ended in March, and a new case management pilot program is still in the planning stages almost three years after the storm.
“I know we’re behind the eight ball,” said Paul Rainwater, the executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. “People talk about recovery, but on one level, we’re still responding.”
The problems these families face are complex. Ms. Fountain, 65, could afford to fix the faulty repair work at her house if she had an award from the state’s Road Home program for homeowners. But Ms. Fountain’s husband of three decades died in 2007, and she cannot get the money until she can establish that the house is rightfully hers, a process that costs upward of $1,500. The legal service hired by the state to help low-income people with such issues has a long waiting list.
Meanwhile, Ms. Fountain, still in the Baton Rouge hotel, still grieving for her husband and worried about a son who has just been deployed to Iraq, has given in to incoherent fits of anger. Only recently, the lap dog she got after her husband’s death had to be euthanized.
“She’s had mental issues to break out before,” said Ms. Fountain’s daughter Jean Marie Selders, who is living with a friend in New Orleans and saving part of her paycheck to help with her mother’s house. “The longer it takes, the more distorted she gets.”
Many evacuees are not easy to help, especially when their situations are at least partly the products of their own bad decisions. Take Mr. Love, who back in May jauntily said, “I don’t have no sorrows.” Now, he is at what he calls an all-time low.
At Renaissance Village, Mr. Love took advantage of free job training to get his commercial driver’s license. But he lost his first job, at a cement plant, when he backed into another truck. With his tax refund this year, he bought a car that did not run. And when it came time to leave the trailer park, the first place that accepted him despite his bad credit and his history of arrests was miles from the cement companies where he had applied for jobs.
The commute, if it were even possible given the limitations of the Baton Rouge bus system, would mean leaving his daughter, Adrian, at dawn and getting home long after she returned from school. (Her mother, living in New Orleans, is a crack addict, Mr. Love said.) But the jobs within his reach — at Domino’s Pizza, say, or as a member of the support staff for Louisiana State University, struck Mr. Love as paying far too little for a man who used to make $20 an hour in the New Orleans shipyards.
Although a mechanic has declared the car worthless, Mr. Love has clung to the idea of using his federal stimulus check to salvage a junkyard motor for it. With a car, he said, “I know I can get a decent job. I know I can make this work.”
Sister Judith Brun, a nun who has been working with evacuees since before Renaissance Village was established, has offered to make up the difference between Mr. Love’s paycheck if he gets a job and the $13 an hour he would make driving a cement truck, putting the extra money into a savings account for a car. But Mr. Love, determined to use his commercial license, has yet to accept her offer.
On a recent afternoon, with Adrian away at a free camp in New Jersey, Mr. Love sat on his bed, poring over the help-wanted ads with some disgust. “I can’t get mad with nobody,” he said. “I got in this situation myself. But I’m not going to let this situation drown me, and I see I’m drowning.”
Because Mr. Love lived with his brother before the storm, he and Adrian are ineligible for the rental payments that most families who left the trailer park receive. For now, the Capital Area Homeless Alliance is paying Mr. Love’s $585 rent. In a month, he will be required to start contributing a third of it.
To help her charges become self-sufficient, Sister Judith has recently arranged for a team of psychologists to evaluate those who are willing, in hopes that it will dislodge them from the ruts that have only deepened — the comfort zones that have only contracted — since the storms.
The Homeless Alliance and the Community Initiatives Foundation, directed by Sister Judith, are part of a small consortium of agencies that is trying to keep those ineligible for FEMA assistance from becoming the homeless. Their clients include more than 200 households, and ineligible people continue to materialize — early this month, a Hurricane Rita evacuee was found sleeping in the doorway of a Baton Rouge office building with her newborn daughter.
No one is sure how many ineligible people there are, but what is certain is that their numbers far exceed expectations and many are mentally or physically disabled. In New Orleans, a program to prevent homelessness set aside only 9 of 91 housing vouchers for disabled people coming off FEMA assistance; most of the rest are for the chronically homeless, whose numbers have overwhelmed the city since the storm.
“It was never anticipated that the permanent supportive housing program was going to take responsibility for all of FEMA’s disabled clients,” said Martha Kegel, the executive director of Unity of Greater New Orleans, which is running the federally financed program. “When we put this together we did not anticipate how much homelessness was going to explode. We had always been hoping that FEMA was going to continue to support these people instead of just dumping them on us.”
FEMA workers were supposed to refer disabled clients for the nine slots, Ms. Kegel said, but did not. Two were given to former Renaissance Village residents, Laura Hilton and her two younger children, and Theresa August, who has AIDS and shows signs of mental illness, after they were featured in an earlier article in The New York Times.
Ms. Hilton’s application has been approved and a two-bedroom apartment she found with the help of caseworkers is under inspection. Ms. August, who was living in an apartment that she paid for from her monthly disability income, was recently hospitalized after her new caseworkers took her to get medical attention for the first time in months. The other slots have been filled.
There is little other money in the system to aid those ineligible for FEMA rental payments. Of the $11.5 billion in federal community development block grants allocated for housing in Louisiana, $25 million has gone for homelessness prevention and $72 million for the supportive housing voucher program. A block grant for social services was much smaller, $220 million, of which some $100 million went to the state Department of Health and Hospitals for medical and mental health care. An additional $260,000 of that grant was recently given to the Louisiana Family Recovery Corps, a nonprofit group that works closely with the state recovery authority, which it plans to use for the ineligible people.
And it is not only that group that is in need of help.
For those who are eligible for FEMA-financed housing but have yet to find it, the agency has agreed to pay for a new case management program but not direct assistance like furniture, utilities or deposits.
Those who have found housing will have their rent paid through February 2009 but will receive little other assistance. Monette Romich, who moved with her eldest daughter and 3-year-old grandson to a town house in New Orleans when Renaissance Village closed, recently returned to Baton Rouge to have a cancerous kidney removed.
Ms. Romich, a seamstress, lost her Medicaid coverage when her youngest daughter turned 18. She has not yet qualified for disability payments and has no source of income other than the purses she makes and sells for $10 each. Except for three beds, the town house is unfurnished.
Katie Underwood, the relief and recovery program manager for Family Road of Greater Baton Rouge, another aid group, said caseworkers there had recently been assigned to families who moved out of the trailer parks months ago and were living in subsidized apartments. “They’re finding people with no furniture and their lights off,” she said.
But with few resources to help those people, the state is looking to the time when the rent subsidies expire, yet another transition for families who were placed in apartments they cannot afford on their own. “March 2009,” said Christina Stephens, a spokeswoman for the Louisiana Recovery Authority, “is a date that’s seared in our minds.”
