LAT: "The Land of 10,770 Empty FEMA Trailers" & Katrina housing EXPLAINED

Nothing Without Hope

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Fri Feb-10-06 05:52 AM
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LAT: "The Land of 10,770 Empty FEMA Trailers" & Katrina housing EXPLAINED

Edited on Fri Feb-10-06 05:55 AM by Nothing Without Hope

Here are some pieces we need to put together and show to other people. The whole housing aspect of the Katrina/hurricanes disaster is a major scandal on its own and it reveals very clearly the priorities and deliberate cruelty and greed of the Bush administration. The BEST solution was and is clear: housing vouchers. But instead, the Bushies insisted on FEMA trailers and hotels although this is more constly and has many other downsides. There are REASONS why this choice was made, and the fact is, not even the FEMA trailers were not followed through on. Now that the hotel payments are being ended, many people are becoming homeless. We need to see the whole story and understand the reasons behind the Bushies' actions. Here are some of the dots to connect, and be sure not to miss Paul Krugman's explanations in the final opening post article:

Thousands of FEMA trailers promised to the victims of the hurricanes last fall are STILL sitting around empty. This was reported last October:
http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051012/NEWS0110/51012008/1260
article title (October 12, 2005): "9,000 trailers meant for hurricane victims unoccupied"

and as today's LA TImes article shows, nothing has changed:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-trailers10feb10,0,3135692.story?track=tothtml
February 10, 2006
latimes.com : National News
THE NATION

The Land of 10,770 Empty FEMA Trailers

Far from the victims of Katrina for whom they are meant, the furnished shelters crowd an airport, benefiting only the town of Hope, Ark.

By Johanna Neuman, Times Staff Writer

At Uncle Henry's Smokehouse Bar B Que in Hope, Ark., the lunchtime crowd filled every table Thursday � all 10 of them. At City Hall, the phones were ringing off the hook. And out at the airport, a private pilot who just turned 45 said she didn't expect to live long enough to see things get back to normal.

All because of the latest example of how federal, state and local officials have responded to Hurricane Katrina. Time was, Hope was known primarily as the childhood home of President Clinton. Now it's Trailer Town, USA.

After the Aug. 29 storm left thousands homeless on the Gulf Coast, officials in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama began calling for trailers to provide temporary shelter. More than 100,000 were requested, and somebody decided to create holding areas for the trailers outside the hurricane zone.

Today, legions of wide-bodied mobile homes sit empty at Hope's Municipal Airport, a sprawling former military base. After all these months, storm victims can't seem to get the trailers, which are proving a mixed blessing to Hope and Arkansas.

(snip)

Mark Keith, director of the Hope-Hempstead County Chamber of Commerce, is quoted: "It just boggles the mind in this day and time. There are 10,770 trailers at Hope Airport. That's one for every man, woman and child in Hope, with a few left over to send to Emmet, down the road."

Rep. Mike Ross (D-Ark.), a graduate of Hope High School, said: "It cost $431 million and they're all sitting there, 75% of them literally parked in a cow pasture. They are brand-new, all totally furnished, and yet people have been living in tents for five months in a row. It just makes you sick to your stomach."

Meanwhile, FEMA is evicting Katrina evacuees from hotels, making them homeless:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x350683
thread title (2-7-06 GD): Thousands of Katrina evacuees EVICTED from hotels, now homeless

And ever more documentation is coming in from investigations, proving that the WH KNEW the New Orleans situation and STILL failed to act to avert the deaths and devastation:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x377040
thread title (2-10-06 GD): NYT: WH knew early about levee breaks - and BUSH POWER GRAB ALERT!
(and the links in this thread)
The Bush WH's response to all this is to duck all culpability and continue to try to use this terrible and ongoing disaster as an enabling event for a Presidential power grab.

Clearly, the best solution to the housing problem for people driven from their homes by hurricanes would have been HOUSING VOUCHERS, but the Bush Administration has fought this. Instead, we have these FEMA trailer parks, and even those haven't reached the victims:

http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F40C17FE3B5A0C778DDDA80994DD404482
EDITORIAL DESK

Stonewalling the Katrina Victims

Published: November 14, 2005

Public outrage is clearly growing over the federal government's woefully inadequate program for housing the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Last week a group of survivors filed the first of what are likely to be several lawsuits alleging that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has failed to live up to its responsibilities. The recovery effort has been subject to blistering criticism from conservative, nonpartisan and liberal groups alike.
The same basic question is this: Why did the Bush administration focus on trailer parks built by FEMA -- which is actually not a housing agency -- instead of giving the lead role to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which has so much experience on this issue?

Many, including the Brookings Institution and the conservative Heritage Foundation, urged the administration to switch on HUD's famously successful Section 8 program, which gives families government vouchers to find decent housing in the private real estate market. That program worked well after the 1994 Northridge earthquake in California. But the White House -- which seems less interested in conservative philosophy about how to make government programs work than with simply cutting the amount of money that gets spent on poor people -- has been working feverishly to cripple HUD and destroy the Section 8 voucher program for years.

So the administration rigged up a hastily thought out program that is less flexible and less helpful than Section 8 -- and confusing in the bargain. Still focused on tax cuts for the wealthy, the administration is apparently hoping that people who need housing will be frustrated by the difficult process of applying for federal relief dollars and simply give up and go away.

Paul Krugman's important NYT editorial on the Katrina housing crisis is available free at Truthout and should be read to help understand the apparently crazy decisions by the WH on choosing FEMA trailer parks instead of housing vouchers. He explains what is REALLY happening here:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/100305N.shtml

Miserable by Design

By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Monday 03 October 2005

(snip)

But the administration has chosen, instead, to focus its efforts on the creation of public housing in the form of trailer parks, which have been slow to take shape, will almost surely be more expensive than a voucher program and may create long-term refugee ghettoes. Even Newt Gingrich calls this "extraordinarily bad policy" that "violates every conservative principle."

What's going on here? The crucial point is that President Bush has been forced by events into short-term actions that conflict with his long-term goals. His mission in office is to dismantle or at least shrink the federal social safety net, yet he must, as a matter of political necessity, provide aid to Katrina's victims. His problem is how to do that without legitimizing the very role of government he opposes.

(snip)

As for the administration's odd insistence on providing public housing instead of relying on the market, The Los Angeles Times reports that Department of Housing and Urban Development officials initially announced plans to issue rent vouchers, then backed off after meeting with White House aides. As the article notes, the administration has "repeatedly sought to cut or limit" the existing housing voucher program.

(snip)

So here's the key to understanding post-Katrina policy: Mr. Bush can't avoid helping Katrina's victims, but he doesn't want to legitimize institutions that help the needy, like the housing voucher program. As a result, his administration refuses to use those institutions, even when they are the best way to provide victims with aid. More generally, the administration is trying to treat Katrina's victims as harshly as the political realities allow, so as not to create a precedent for other aid efforts.

(snip)