[Mb-civic] Louisiana in Limbo....The Catastrophe Is Not Over

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/30/opinion/30mon1.html?th&emc=th

Louisiana in Limbo
NY Times Lead Editorial: January 30, 2006

New Orleans waits. While some heroic efforts at rebuilding are taking
place, hundreds of thousands of residents have put their lives on hold
until they know what the government's next steps will be, leaving the
shells of their houses as placeholders. But the Bush administration has
now rejected the most broadly supported plan for rebuilding communities
while offering nothing to take its place.

It has been five months since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and
for many the norm is still the claustrophobic new reality of tiny trailers
and multiple families crammed into single apartments. Louisiana is trying.
You can hear jackhammers pounding and buzz saws whirring on Canal Street
in New Orleans. Dedicated workers endure a grinding daily commute from
points north, like Baton Rouge, as they try to make the city and the
region whole again. But the mission is far from complete and the challenge
is beyond the scope of a broken city and a poor state.

New Orleans's crisis has little relation to anything the nation has faced
in modern memory, and traditional solutions will simply not help.
Homeowners — many very poor people whose houses had been in their 
families
for generations — had varying degrees of insurance before the disaster.
When entire neighborhoods are devastated, their mildewed furniture and
drywall piled on the roadsides, it's impossible to tell the people who are
well insured to rebuild and hope that the houses all around them will
somehow be reclaimed somewhere down the line.

But the Bush administration refuses to support the plan of Representative
Richard Baker, Republican of Louisiana, which would give everyone the
capacity to rebuild and which had the backing of the mayor, the governor
and the state's Congressional delegation. (To add insult to injury, two
days after the White House shot down Mr. Baker's proposal, President Bush
suggested at a news conference that Louisiana's problem was the lack of a
plan.)

Instead of an alternate solution, the president's Katrina czar, Donald
Powell, has offered sleight of hand, touting $6.2 billion in development
money for Louisiana passed last year by Congress as if it were somehow a
substitute. And in an attempt to narrow the scope of the problem, Mr.
Powell says the government first needs to care for the roughly 20,000
homeowners without flood insurance who lived outside the federally
designated flood plain. The real tally of destroyed or damaged homes in
the region is well over 200,000. And the real need is housing for
residents, whether they were renters or owners, insured or uninsured,
living above the flood plain or trusting the federal government's levees
to protect them from storms.

Perhaps too much emphasis has been placed on the wreckage of poor,
low-lying New Orleans neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward. That has
sparked the unproductive, blame-the-victim debate revolving around whether
people should have lived there in the first place. The Ninth Ward provides
a misleading picture of the city, as do the relatively unscathed tourist
areas like the French Quarter and the Garden District. Huge swaths of the
city have the empty quality of a ghost town. Stores wait for residents to
reopen; residents wait to see if neighbors will return. The city and
surrounding parishes will not meet Mr. Powell's neat categories, when
renters lived beside owners, insured next to uninsured. He is talking like
an actuary when a leader is needed to rescue this region.

Now, Congress has a responsibility to follow its own lead rather than the
president's. We were outraged once, shocked at the images on our
television sets, at the poverty in our collective backyard and at the
devastation of a great city. As the disaster threatens to become
permanent, we have every reason to remain so.


***

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2006/01/27/AR20060127
01207.html

Washington Post
January 28, 2006

The Catastrophe Is Not Over

By Jennifer Moses

BATON ROUGE, La.

While the rest of the country wakes up in the morning
to read about the latest round of Washington scandals,
the misery in Louisiana continues unabated. Except for
a few older, historical neighborhoods on "high ground,"
New Orleans is uninhabitable, and Cameron Parish, in
the southwest corner of the state, basically no longer
exists, having been wiped out by Hurricane Rita.

Meanwhile, though Congress passed a $29 billion aid
package for the Gulf Coast region, it's being split
between Mississippi and Louisiana, perhaps because,
even though Mississippi has fewer than one-fifth the
number of affected households Louisiana does, its
governor, Haley Barbour, an ex-Republican National
Committee chairman, is a pal of the president. But with
all the problems Louisiana is facing -- including a new
round of budget-slashing -- no one seems to be talking
about the looming human crisis: Where will the tens of
thousands of evacuees living in hotels go when the
Federal Emergency Management Agency stops paying the
bills in February?

Here in Baton Rouge, housing experts fear a new storm
surge -- this one of people with no jobs, no insurance,
no one to take them in and, as of next month, no roof
over their heads. In the meantime, the local low-income
housing market has never been tighter, as both FEMA and
HUD have bid up housing and rental prices, leaving
longtime working-class residents of Baton Rouge
scrambling to find even minimally decent housing. As
soon as their leases expire, rents for apartment
dwellers, most of whom are on year-to-year leases, are
being jacked up. The St. Vincent De Paul Society (among
other institutions that serve the poor) is providing
more than 25 percent more meals than it was before the
storms. And homeless shelters have gone begging for
permission to add beds. As for the thousands of
families desperate to move out of government-sponsored
hotels: tough luck. Because even if you've managed to
find yourself a job, the chances of finding affordable
housing are next to nil.

Nationally, the number of families dwelling in FEMA-
sponsored hotel rooms is just over 25,000, with more
than half of those in Louisiana and Texas. FEMA is
paying for some 8,600 hotel rooms in Louisiana, most of
which are concentrated in the southern swath of the
state and are occupied by more than one person. The
government, in its demonstration of Oprah-era
sensitivity training, is urging these families to
relocate -- to go somewhere far, far away, Minnesota,
say, which has generous welfare benefits, or Oklahoma,
which has lots of open space -- but for some reason,
most of the families living in hotels just want to go
home.

Of course, it could be worse. FEMA might have stuck to
its earlier cutoff date of Jan. 7, as many hoteliers in
New Orleans did, booking rooms occupied by homeless
evacuees for the Mardi Gras tourist season, resulting
in storm victims being evicted just in time for winter
to set in. (A federal judge, hoping to prevent this
trend, recently ruled that evacuees in New Orleans will
be allowed to stay in government-funded hotels until
March 1, the day after Mardi Gras.) And let's give FEMA
credit where credit is due: The agency has promised --
in writing, no less -- that it's going to help
rehabilitate sections of neglected working-class
neighborhoods in Baton Rouge to accommodate the newly
and about-to-be homeless. The only problem is, so far
at least, the contract is worth just about as much as
the paper it's written on. On the other hand, FEMA
continues to award storm-cleaning contracts to some
out-of-state companies that sprang up just a few days
after Hurricane Katrina lunged ashore. So at least
someone's being helped.

According to Randy Nichols, executive director of Baton
Rouge's Alliance for the Homeless, the real hitch is
that FEMA is still treating the disaster in Louisiana
as a historic, one-time, one-size-fits-all catastrophe,
rather than as a long-term problem that requires a
long-term fix. One long-term fix -- not just for
residential planning but for flood control in general
-- is restoring Louisiana's wetlands, which in the
olden days acted as a natural buffer to storm surges,
and without which none of South Louisiana would have
been inhabited in the first place. But no one's talking
much about the wetlands, perhaps because the subject is
too, well, environmental. (And we know how the Bush
administration regards the environment.)

In the meantime, however, the problem of homelessness
isn't just local. All the president of the United
States has to do to glimpse the horrors of homelessness
up close and personal is walk over to St. John's Church
on Lafayette Square, where every night a dozen or more
homeless men and women congregate for a good night's
sleep. Surely there's room in there for a few thousand
more.

Jennifer Moses is a writer.

(c) 2006 The Washington Post Company

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 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

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