Homeless again in New Orleans: thousands of Katrina victims in the streets

[KamaAina]

So many paragraphs, so little fair use: a must-read.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/02/07/hotels/print.html

Officials say New Orleans can't handle an influx of traumatized, homeless families, but that may be what it is about to get. Five months after Hurricane Katrina, many of the storm's victims are facing a second crisis. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is ending its hotel subsidy program despite the fact that thousands of Katrina victims have nowhere else to go. Thousands of evacuees will be cut off Feb. 7, and almost all will lose their hotel rooms by early March. Advocates for Katrina evacuees are terrified about what will happen next....

Across the country, tens of thousands of Katrina evacuees remain housed in about 26,000 hotel rooms; 10,000 of the rooms are in Louisiana. Many in New Orleans say they've yet to receive help finding more permanent quarters from FEMA or any other government agency. Lawyers for evacuees say that thousands of applications for other housing aid have yet to be processed. Howard Godnick, an attorney representing Katrina victims in a class action suit against FEMA, says that since Dec. 12, three-quarters of applications that have been processed have been rejected, sometimes for minor errors in the paperwork.... (emphasis mine :grr: )

"FEMA's response has been, 'We've got housing all over the country, we just don't have it in New Orleans. These people need to move,'" says Washington. FEMA spokesman James McIntyre told the Times-Picayune: "People now will have to make some hard choices. We have mobile homes and travel trailers available in parishes in northern Louisiana, or they can take advantage of housing opportunities in other states or metro areas."

Please, Mr. McIntyre (if that is your real name), don't get me started. Thousands upon thousands of New Orleanians had never left the city in their whole lives until they were evacuated. And now you, former Mike Brown toadie, presume to tell them they must simply trudge off to a home in what, for them, might as well be a foreign country? :banghead:

Sitting in a lobby bar in the Sheraton Hotel on Canal Street one day, Lloyd Frischhertz, a lawyer from Lakeview, a largely white, upper-middle-class suburb of New Orleans (sic -- it is a neighborhood within city limits) , strikes up a conversation with me. He is a leader of a Mardi Gras Krewe, the local organizations, often composed of business and civic personages, that put on the city's famous parades. He is angry that the evacuees are occupying hotel rooms in New Orleans that could otherwise go to tourists who would help stimulate the economy.

:wtf: I wish I knew which krewe it was so I could go and moon their parade (next year)! Where's John Edwards when you need him? His "two Americas" have become neatly crystallized as "two New Orleanses": the largely white "Sliver on the River" or better still, "Isle of Denial" -- and everything else.

[Mnemosyne]

1. The newest shame on America. n/t