Down to the wire: Advocates call on FEMA to provide extensions to trailer dwellers facing eviction
As Facing South reported earlier this month, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has announced plans to evict more than 5,000 people in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama who are still living in temporary FEMA trailers and in hotels financed by the agency by May 30.The agency made this announcement even though Gulf Coast advocates and legal service agencies have pointed out that remaining trailer residents have had limited support and have faced insurmountable barriers in their efforts to find permanent housing.
At a glance:
- May 1 marked the end of the Temporary Housing Program for Katrina victims, and FEMA told residents they must vacate the trailers by May 30.
- Nearly 5,000 FEMA trailers continue to provide housing to residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
- Some 2,800 FEMA trailers remain occupied in Louisiana, with 1,000 of those trailers located in Orleans Parish, and some 2,000 FEMA trailers remain occupied in Mississippi.
- Most FEMA trailer occupants are elderly and/or disabled persons in desperate need of effective support and case management services to stabilize their housing and well-being.
- FEMA trailer occupants are displaced homeowners and renters still struggling to rebuild their homes or secure affordable housing after Katrina and Rita. In fact, 80 percent are homeowners, and most of them told FEMA in a survey this year they want to return to their storm-damaged homes.
This week Gulf Coast advocates went into action. The US Human Rights Network, coalition of more than 250 human rights groups from around the country, issued a call to action Thursday urging the Obama Administration and FEMA to extend the May 30th deadline. Gulf Coast advocates are calling on FEMA to provide an extension to all homeowners and renters living in FEMA trailers to allow them sufficient time to repair their homes and/or find alternative housing. Advocates say additional time would allow: Louisiana homeowners to appeal denials of Road Home grants, or go to a Road Home closing; Mississippi homeowners to be matched with available Katrina cottages that sit idle; and renters more time to obtain rental assistance or other permanent affordable housing.
Fighting rights violations
In January 2008, the Institute for Southern Studies released our report, "Hurricane Katrina and the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement," the first in-depth look at how closely U.S. officials have abided by the U.N. Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement in the wake of Katrina. We pointed out that federal policies effectively discriminated against poor and predominantly African American residents who were displaced by the storm. As a result federal policy contradicted the Guiding Principles' ban on discrimination against IDPs on the basis of race, social status or property.
Human rights advocates point out that evicting residents without providing access to safe, permanent housing will not only lead to homelessness and further destabilize families, it is also a continued violation of human rights.
As the Katrina Action Network, a collaboration of advocacy groups working for Gulf Coast recovery, pointed out in a recent call to action:
The United Nations' Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement is a human rights policy that, for several years, has guided our government in providing temporary and permanent homes for people in foreign countries displaced by earthquakes, typhoons, and flooding. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton only recently announced that the U.S. will apply the UN's standards to assist displaced persons in Pakistan.
Hurricane Katrina displaced over a million people, many of whom have yet to fully recover as a result of governmental actions that are contrary to the UN's standards and human rights treaties ratified in the US. Gulf Region residents, both renters and homeowners, have worked tirelessly to access safe, permanent housing, and should have the support that our government provides to foreign countries under the Guiding Principles.
A failed policy, continued?
Gulf Coast advocates say that the forceful eviction of residents is just the latest instance of FEMA and the federal government's failed reconstruction policy. From the beginning, Gulf advocates have pointed out that FEMA's response to the housing and relief needs of Katrina survivors has been inadequate, ineffectual and full of delays and bureaucratic red tape. The 143,000 FEMA trailers provided to residents after the hurricane was the largest undertaking in the agency's history, but the delivery of the trailers was sluggish and inefficient. Moreover, many of the trailers were later found to contain dangerous levels of formaldehyde, a health crisis that FEMA was also slow to respond to.
In Louisiana, state programs have also done little to help, residents argue. On top of the failed "Katrina cottages" program, the Louisiana Road Home program, which is intended to provide large grants to homeowners for repair, has been beleaguered with red tape, bureaucratic delays and administrative problems, which resulted in a sluggish pace in delivering grants. Grants have also been inadequate for meeting rebuilding needs. Studies found that two out of three Louisianans who received rebuilding money did not receive enough to cover needed repairs. Renters didn't fare any better: a government program intended to repair more than 18,000 damaged rental units resulted in fewer than 1,200 repairs by late March 2009.
Soaring rents in New Orleans have further complicated a difficult housing situation. Rental rates in the city have skyrocketed (HUD estimates that average rents in the city have risen by more than 52 percent since Katrina), and for many low-income residents the available apartments are simply not affordable. The homeless population has doubled since the hurricane, and case workers continue to find more and more people living in abandoned buildings. And come May 30, thousands more may be homeless.
The failure of federal and state recovery programs like Louisiana's Road Home program can also be evidenced by the blight rates that now plague New Orleans. A recent analysis by the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center found that as of March 2009 nearly a third of New Orleans properties were empty or blighted. Even though blighted housing dropped by 3 percent in the past year, with 31 percent of all residential properties either unoccupied or blighted, New Orleans continues to lead all U.S. cities in blight.
Observers have pointed out that FEMA's formaldehyde-ridden trailers have become a symbol of the Bush administration's botched response to the storm, which flooded 80 percent of the city, killed 1,500 people and caused more than $80 billion in damage. Gulf Coast activists hoped that a new administration would represent a new attitude in Washington - one that would put rebuilding the Gulf Coast back on the national agenda. The Obama Administration has promised a new course of action on the Gulf Coast, and Gulf advocates are calling on the federal government to uphold its promise this week.
Final eviction
Even four years after Katrina, most of the trailer residents are homeowners still struggling to find the finances to rebuild their homes. For some residents in New Orleans, they struggle to deal with inadequate insurance settlements and inadequate grants from Louisiana's Road Home program that don't cover the needed repairs. Some residents are even struggling to rebuild having received no financial help at all.
Earlier this month, the media reported the story of Ernest Hammond, a 70-year-old former New Orleans homeowner who could not get financial aid from Louisiana's Road Home program, even though he has appealed several times without success. To help himself, Hammond collected almost $10,000 in aluminum cans but that won't even begin to cover the costs to rebuild his home in the 7th Ward. And every day he worries that FEMA might tow away his trailer, the one thing keeping him off the street while he struggles to return home. But how long he'll be able to stay he does not know -- FEMA ordered him, by letter last month, to leave his trailer.
The Times-Picayune recently told the story of two other residents facing eviction:
On Howze Beach Road in Slidell, Nancy Hirschfield, 67, lives in one of St. Tammany Parish's 239 remaining trailers. She got her Road Home grant in December, but it's not enough to replace the mobile home she lived in before Katrina, she said."I just don't have it in me to fight everything," Hirschfield said.
In New Orleans' Broadmoor neighborhood, Philipp Seelig, 70, said he was released from the hospital April 26 after a 10-day stay for a staph infection, the latest in a series of recent health setbacks. Seelig said he thinks he is within 60 days of getting back into his house, which still lacks floors, appliances and drywall. But now both he and his longtime tenant, Jane Batty, are facing eviction from their trailers.
Now advocates are wondering if federal and state officials will step in to offer these residents support, or if the residents will continue to receive more failed policy and programs. As the Katrina Action Network pointed out this week, residents like Hammond exemplify the "thousands of families living in FEMA trailers because they are either caught in a web of deeply flawed, bureaucratic home repair grant programs, a victim of all too rampant contractor fraud or simply priced out of a rising rental markets where affordable housing is being demolished or gentrified."
