Mayor C. Ray Nagin recently suggested a way to reduce this city’s post-Katrina homeless population: give them one-way bus tickets out of town.
He says that was a joke.
Ha. Ha.
What isn't a joke is the number of Katrina victims left homeless by the storm who are still homeless three years after the storm passed.
Not far from the French Quarter, flanking Canal Street on Claiborne Avenue, they are living inside a long corridor formed not of walls and a roof but of the thick stench of human waste and sweat tinged with alcohol, crack and desperation.
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By one very rough estimate, the number of homeless people in New Orleans has doubled since Katrina struck in 2005. Homelessness has also become a much more visible problem — late last year, Unity of Greater New Orleans, a network of agencies that help the homeless, cleared an encampment of 300 people that had sprung up in Duncan Plaza, in full view of City Hall. About 280 of those people are now in apartments, but others have flocked to fill several blocks of Claiborne Avenue at Canal, near enough to the French Quarter to regularly encounter tourists.
Nagin's "joke", besides being decidedly unfunny, is endemic to the way NO's re-builders have been thinking. They don't want the New Orleans of before the hurricane. They want a cleaner, brighter, whiter New Orleans that more resembles, oh, I don't know, Disneyland, and they're not going to lift a finger to save anybody who doesn't fit that image. Neither is FEMA, who have been moving at a snail's pace catching up their benefits with exiles who try to come back.
Lurlene Newell, 54, said the Federal Emergency Management Agency had paid her rent in Texas after the storm, but when she moved back to New Orleans, she could not find a place to live.
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[P]ermanent housing with supportive services, like counseling, has become a preferred method. But it takes time, patience, money and one thing New Orleans is short of: apartments. Many apartment developers who applied for tax credits after Hurricane Katrina were required to set aside 5 percent of their units for supportive housing, but because of high construction costs and other factors, far fewer units than expected are in the pipeline. And without the vouchers, even those units will not be affordable.
Unity has already moved 60 of the most vulnerable people from the camp to hotel rooms, paid for with a city health department grant, including a woman who is eight months pregnant and a paranoid schizophrenic who is diabetic and a double amputee. In the filth of the camp, the amputee’s stumps had become infected.
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Mr. Moore had lived in a Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer, then a FEMA-financed hotel room, but had not realized that he was eligible for further assistance after the 30-day hotel stay ended last fall. Tipped off by his brother, Mr. Moore had only recently rented a house under the emergency management agency’s program, but had yet to pay the deposit or turn on the utilities because he had no money.
All the authorities have continued to treat those made homeless by Katrina as if they were drug addicts, alcoholics, or crazy. This NYT article concentrates on those because they're most dramatic, most vulnerable, and most fit the stereotype people want to believe. But the fact is that many of the homeless in NO are only on the streets because they've been abandoned by EVERYBODY.
For example, as far as I know, though reporter Shaila Dewan doesn't mention it HUD still hasn't released some $70M earmarked for rebuilding federal housing, including the projects, damaged by the storm. In some cases, the damage was so light people should have been allowed to move back into their apartments mere weeks after it was over but Nagin, FEMA, and HUD refused to open them. They are still locked behind barbed wire and security gates. Why?
Because Nagin has been promising for 3 years that the Feds were going to replace that antiquated housing with brand-new housing more in keeping with the NEW New Orleans' image. Of that Federal housing not one thin dime has been allocated. All the money has been going to help corporations establish a presence in the NEW New Orleans, except for the part that's been paid out to developers building country clubs, casinos, hotels, etc in upstate Mississippi.
This isn't about getting brand spanking new housing to low-income folk. This is about getting money into the pockets of the rich and using the "opportunity" of Katrina to clean the city of its non-rich, non-white majority. Packing the homeless into buses and giving them one-way tickets to somewhere else is precisely how Nagin, Bush, and Cherthoff would prefer to handle the whole thing if, you know, nobody was looking. Dump 'em on somebody else...
It's a shame we can only excuse our own greed and the failures it leads to by blaming the victims.
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