FEMA trailers in St. Tammany to be outlawed by Katrina's 3rd anniversary

St. Tammany Parish President Kevin Davis will hold an 11 a.m. press conference to announce that FEMA trailers will no longer be allowed on private property as of August 29, the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

Davis said the executive order signed during the parish's state of emergency will be allowed to expire on that date.

The press conference will be held in the St. Tammany Parish Council Chambers in the parish administration building on Koop Drive in Mandeville.

Resources Scarce, Homelessness Persists in New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS — 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.

Mr. Nagin later insisted the off-the-cuff proposal was just a joke. But he has portrayed the dozens of people camped in a tent city under a freeway overpass near Canal Street as recalcitrant drug and alcohol abusers who refuse shelter, give passers-by the finger and, worst of all, hail from somewhere else.

While many of the homeless do have addiction problems or mental illness, a survey by advocacy groups in February showed that 86 percent were from the New Orleans area. Sixty percent said they were homeless because of Hurricane Katrina, and about 30 percent said they had received rental assistance at one time from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

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.

The inhabitants are natives like Ronald Gardner, 54, an H.I.V.-positive man who said he had never before slept on the streets until Katrina. Or Ronald Berry, 57, who despite being a paranoid schizophrenic said he had lived on his own, in a rented house in the Lower Ninth Ward, for a dozen years before the storm. Both men receive disability checks of $637 a month, not nearly enough to cover post-hurricane rents.

“If I could just get a warm room,” Mr. Gardner said, sitting on the cot under which all his belongings are stored, “I could take it from there.”

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.

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.

Unity workers are hoping that Congress will include $76 million in the supplemental appropriation for Iraq to pay for vouchers that would give rent subsidies and services to 3,000 disabled homeless people.

On Thursday, the Senate passed a version of the bill that included the vouchers; the current House version, not yet approved, does not include them. Without the vouchers, said Martha J. Kegel, Unity’s executive director, even those people already in apartments will be in jeopardy. Their current vouchers, issued under a “rapid rehousing” program, expire at the end of 2008.

New Orleans had 2,800 beds for the homeless before the storm; now it has 2,000, Ms. Kegel said. Those beds are full, but even if they were not, many of the people living on Canal Street are not the sort who can stay in a group shelter. According to the survey, which was conducted before dawn one morning so that only those who actually sleep in the camp would be counted, 80 percent have at least one physical disability, 58 percent have had some kind of addiction, 40 percent are mentally ill, and 19 percent were “tri-morbid” — they had a disability, an addiction and mental illness.

For these difficult cases, permanent 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.

Outreach workers have found clients with cancer and colostomy bags, and one so disabled that he was unable to talk. On average, people have stayed in hotels for six weeks before Unity finds an apartment and cobbles together the necessary funds.

Mike Miller, the director of supportive housing placement at Unity, said the camp had become a public health hazard since the city removed some portable toilets in February.

“Two outreach workers have tested positive for tuberculosis,” Mr. Miller said. “There’s hepatitis C, there’s AIDS, there’s H.I.V. Everyone out there’s had an eye infection of some sort. I got one.”

On Thursday, Herman Moore Jr. was hanging out with a friend in the camp. 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.

“If I had a TV and some electricity, you all wouldn’t even see me,” he said.

Clara Gomez, 45, told an outreach worker that she had just discovered she was pregnant. Like about 14 percent of the homeless people under the bridge, Ms. Gomez had come to New Orleans to work as a builder, but acknowledged that she had problems with drug and alcohol abuse.

After getting fired from one job, she wound up under the bridge, where she met Patrick Pugh, 36, a New Orleanian who said he had been in drug rehabilitation, turning his life around, when the storm hit. Their IDs had been stolen, they said, making it difficult to get jobs or food stamps.

Seated on a mattress, Ms. Gomez shifted nervously, changing positions every few seconds, all the while keeping her arms anchored around Mr. Pugh’s neck.

“We’re ready,” she said. “We’re ready to get out of here.”

FEMA parks closing June 1

BILOXI --Residents living in FEMA trailer parks are panicking about where they will live when the temporary housing program ends June 1.

Some residents have flooded a local mission group with phone calls, asking for help finding and moving into new homes. Roughly 6,800 families in South Mississippi still live in the temporary trailers, as the third anniversary of Katrina nears.

"There's just an outpouring from the community of people desperate to try to scrape together dollars here and there to pay deposits on rentals to move out of their FEMA trailers," said Dena Wittmann of Back Bay Mission. The United Church of Christ group is focusing on emergency housing assistance.

The residents, Wittmann said, have been told by their housing advisers that they will be evicted, and the trailers will be removed, by June 1. They want to know where they can get the money for a deposit on a rental, which usually is the cost of one month's rent.

"These deposits are the largest impediment to people moving into more permanent housing," she said.

FEMA has provided the residents with a list of rental properties available, and other resources, including nonprofit agencies that assist with deposits.

Back Bay Missions was on that list, but Wittmann said the group could not afford to cut families a check for more than $800 each - the average cost of a two-bedroom apartment.

"If we were to pay 10 families (the deposit), that would eat into our entire budget for the month," she said. "It's just gotten really scary for a lot of these families that are coming to us and are just desperate for help."

BAKER, La. — It was not long after Hurricane Katrina, in late 2005, that local governments all over Louisiana started saying no to clusters of the tinny white shelters now known, infamously, as FEMA trailers.

They did not ban all the trailers, of course; just the ones for people who did not own land, who had no place else to go, who were mainly poor and black and from New Orleans’s toughest neighborhoods. Just the trailers for the hurricane’s most desperate victims.

But when everyone else said no, Harold M. Rideau, the mayor of this small city outside Baton Rouge, said yes.

“We agreed we’d do what’s right,” Mr. Rideau said recently. “It was a no-brainer as far as I was concerned.” Of course, it was not as simple as that.

But in large part because of the mayor, this city — nestled rather uneasily between farm country and the state capital — became home to Renaissance Village. With almost 600 trailers lined up like big tombstones, it was by far the largest encampment for hurricane victims run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Now, almost three years after the storm that left New Orleans under water, the trailer park is closing. FEMA’s deadline is May 31. The number of trailers in the “village” is dwindling, to fewer than 200. White pipes mark trailer sites, but more than half of the pipes just poke up out of the weeds, with only muddy tire tracks or old Mardi Gras beads to show that anyone lived there.

As the remaining residents worry about where they will go next, the mayor took time before a recent Rotary Club lunch to talk about the lessons he had learned and how he had become a champion for people who sometimes seemed to get a kinder welcome in Houston than they did in their home state.

The biggest lesson from Baker’s experience may be how few of the predicted problems actually materialized, which Mr. Rideau attributes to lots of planning. Early on, he came up with a long list of things that he felt the trailer community would need, including laundry facilities and legal services.

Some of them he got, like bus service to and from town, job training and a shaded picnic area. But telephones were never installed, and he could never persuade anyone to open a small store so residents would have an easier time buying necessities like milk.

There were struggles, he said, to get the federal government to reimburse the city for its costs, to get post office boxes installed at the trailer park, to ease traffic jams in town, to get the dusty gravel roads around the park paved, and — oddly — to find a home for a new playground donated by the Baton Rouge Rotary Club and Rosie O’Donnell’s For All Kids Foundation. The state and federal governments did not want the liability, Mr. Rideau said, so the playground was installed in a park next to the municipal building, one of the few tangible changes that will remain in Baker after the trailer park closes.

Baker’s City Hall and its churches opened shelters before Hurricane Katrina hit, “with no thought that New Orleans would flood,” Mr. Rideau said. More than 2,000 evacuees poured into a city with a population of less than 14,000; about 500 children enrolled in Baker’s already struggling schools, he said.

He had expected to house people for two days; they stayed in the shelters for two months.
Traffic jammed the city’s streets, grocery stores were packed, lines at Wal-Mart seemed endless. Residents remember a lot of tension between the 504s (people with New Orleans area codes) and the 225s (those with Baker-Baton Rouge area codes).

Meanwhile, the mayor had been approached by a federal contractor about building a trailer park on state-owned property just outside the city limits. The city was asked to provide water and fire protection.

Not everyone in Baker was welcoming; there was a lot of worry about crime, the mayor recalled. Race may have played a role; Mr. Rideau, who is black, said that he was first elected in 2004 in part because of his vow to heal the racial divide in Baker, which before the storm was split almost evenly between whites and blacks.

But the mayor, a Vietnam veteran and graduate of Southern University at Baton Rouge who had retired after working for decades at the Exxon Mobil chemical plant here, said he felt compelled to help evacuees the way he had been helped when he was growing up poor in Bunkie, La.

“I’m going to die, I’m going to have to stand before the good lord and account for what I’ve done,” the mayor said. Besides, the evacuees “had nowhere to go — what are you going to do?”

Nobody who has visited the camp, much less lived in it, thinks it was an ideal place for evacuees, especially after it turned out that many trailers were tainted by formaldehyde fumes. But many people who have worked there credit the mayor with making it a more humane place than it otherwise would have been.

“I’m his biggest fan,” said Sister Judith Brun, executive director of the Community Initiatives Foundation.

Wilbert L. Ross Sr., a member of the residents’ council at the trailer park, said the mayor had intervened in crises, like when water was shut off to some trailers on the Fourth of July. Mr. Rideau also helped with some nagging problems, Mr. Ross said, like telling the police to back off when residents were getting tickets for trespassing or jaywalking because there were no sidewalks on which to walk to town.

In fact, Mr. Ross said, “I really care more about the mayor of Baker than I do about Ray Nagin,” the mayor of New Orleans.

For his part, Mayor Rideau said he thought that the federal government should have done more to rebuild housing in New Orleans, and more to help poor residents of the trailer park move on with their lives. But in general, he said, “I have no regrets.”

Neither, apparently, do most of his constituents; in February, Mr. Rideau was re-elected, by a margin of two to one.

Panel questions law as solution to homeless colony

Councilwoman Shelley Midura on Monday summarized why Mayor Ray Nagin's administration wanted a new public habitation law to move vagrants to a bunkhouse at the New Orleans Mission.

"What you're saying is that we need a way to round them up and get them into the bunk beds. Is that a fair statement?" Midura asked Anthony Faciane, deputy director of neighborhood stabilization for the city's Office of Recovery Development and Administration.

That was fair, he told the council's Housing and Human Needs Committee.

But more than a month after city officials announced an initiative to enact a new law, which outlaws people living in public spaces and replaces one declared unconstitutional more than 20 years ago, the homeless compound under the elevated section of Interstate 10 remains entrenched.

"Is it legal? Has it worked?" Midura asked.

"Has the method worked anywhere?" Councilman James Carter asked.

When told by Faciane that the city couldn't yet afford to house and provide social services to Claiborne Avenue denizens, Carter responded, "So, the ordinance is premature?"

The meeting was punctuated with expressions of impatience about the visible homeless colony, a collection of people and bedrolls just off Canal Street. "What button needs to be pushed -- what needs to happen?" Midura asked Faciane.

Discussion about the public-habitation ordinance gave way to its underlying motive: making the Claiborne Avenue tent city disappear.

In the end, Faciane and Martha Kegel, head of the homeless-services collaborative UNITY of Greater New Orleans, agreed: The colony's days are numbered. Within three months, it'll be gone, said Kegel, who said state funds expected within the next few weeks will help move many of the homeless from under the bridge into government-subsidized apartments.

Moving many of the homeless awaited completion of a city-financed renovation of the dayroom at the New Orleans Mission, Faciane said. Finished Monday, it transformed the shelter from nights-only to a round-the-clock operation. Next week, the mission also will open a family center, for women with children, he said.

What the mission calls its "bunkhouse," an air-conditioned, heated Quonset-style tent erected at the back of its property, can hold 140 men. About 100 more men can sleep on the mission's second floor, but only if the shelter hires a "firewatch," because of its building's current fire hazards. Women stay in a separate house, which has space for eight more, said Ron Gonzales, the shelter's director.

But the Nagin administration insists that the proposed ordinance is intimately connected to the fate of Claiborne Avenue's tent city.

"The public-habitation ordinance is a critical tool that will greatly enhance our ability to address issues of homelessness in New Orleans .¤.¤. such as what is occurring near the intersection of Claiborne Avenue and Canal Street," Nagin said in a statement released during the committee meeting.

In February, Nagin announced a plan to move the camp to the mission. New Orleans would begin enforcing its "habitation laws," he told WWL-TV. "We have beds for these folks and they just don't want to take them. ... So we're going to try to push the issue, if you will," he said.

But in 1986, a federal judge found the city's public-habitation ordinance unconstitutional. It was stricken from municipal code six years ago.

As drafted, this ordinance is different, in several ways. The newly proposed law mandates that no one will be arrested for inhabiting public spaces if all local shelter beds are filled. Neither Faciane nor the city attorney's office lawyers could provide detail about ordinance-described "safe" zones: public places to sleep lawfully on public property.

Still, a long line of citizens spoke against the ordinance. Offering shelter beds in lieu of arrests won't work for those suffering from mental illness, who typically cannot tolerate the crowded, noisy conditions in a shelter, said Kathleen North, a social worker who works with the homeless. "To many mentally ill people, saying, 'You have to go to a shelter,' is like saying to someone in a wheelchair, 'You have to go up those stairs.' "

N.O. housing is still in crisis

While more than 70 percent of New Orleans' displaced public housing residents want to return to the city, most of those surveyed recently by the University of Texas at Arlington said they have no desire to return to New Orleans' public housing complexes.

And there's another striking finding, especially when cast against the backdrop of a raging debate over plans to demolish the city's "Big Four" complexes: More than 80 percent of those families who lived in C.J. Peete, B.W. Cooper, St. Bernard and Lafitte, the developments slated for the wrecking ball, said they now would prefer to live elsewhere.

Among pre-Katrina HANO tenants who say they favor living back in their old apartments, 20 percent of the total -- virtually all of them -- are already doing so, survey results show.

The survey of 2,109 families who lived in Housing Authority of New Orleans complexes before Hurricane Katrina was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the agency that wants to demolish most buildings in the storm-damaged developments and replace them with a newer model of mixed-income units.

HANO plans to replace 4,500 demolished public housing units with 3,200 public housing units and 1,765 subsidized affordable units, for people at slightly higher income levels.

While the survey seems to validate HUD's strategy for ensuring housing slots for all displaced HANO residents who want to return, Bill Quigley, a lawyer for demolition opponents, said the broader housing needs of low-income families must be addressed.

Competition is fierce

"They're saying 3,200 is enough for the ones who lived in HANO units, but there are many more who lived in other subsidized housing," he said. "The competition for the 1,765 affordable subsidized housing units is 7,000 people," according to an earlier survey by the social action group PolicyLink, he said.

In addition, Quigley said, Katrina's destruction created a new population of needy families who also weren't considered in HUD's survey.

"At the end of the day, you can't then say this is enough housing for them (HUD) to meet their duty under the law, which is to provide enough housing for the community," he said.

The number of survey respondents equaled 41 percent of the 5,146 families who occupied HANO units at the time of Hurricane Katrina.

HUD hailed the survey as highly representative because, in addition to the large sample size, the distribution of respondents' pre-Katrina residences closely mirrored how families were spread among the 10 public housing developments and scattered-site HANO units in New Orleans.

C. Donald Babers, the lone member of the HUD receivership board that runs HANO, said the survey proved that the government's plan to replace traditional public housing with mixed-income complexes and other homes would be sufficient to meet the needs of those who want to come back. He said that flew in the face of housing advocates' demands for a one-for-one replacement of the traditional complexes.

It also could be used to counter arguments by housing advocates and even two United Nations experts that HUD's demolition plans discriminated against black people and violated international human rights law.

'Ready to move'

The HUD survey results were announced just hours before a U.N. panel, meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, was scheduled to rule on whether the U.S. response to Hurricane Katrina had violated an international anti-racism treaty, but Babers said the timing was purely coincidental.

If the preferences expressed by the survey respondents were to bear out for all 5,146 affected families, about 1,800 will want to return to HANO facilities and 1,900 would prefer obtaining Section 8 vouchers for private apartments in New Orleans. Public housing residents and advocates generally accepted the survey results as highly indicative of the desires of the displaced, some representatives said.

"It's true, a lot of people were ready to move and wanted to get Section 8 vouchers even before the storm," said Cynthia Wiggins, a current resident of the Guste complex who was part of a residents group that helped formulate the survey questions and track down the displaced. "There's no doubt in my mind that is the case."

Responses to some questions may be affected by what residents knew about plans for their old neighborhoods. Former residents may have been aware that their old apartments were scheduled for demolition, or that they are already gone. Also, Quigley said the question of whether people want to return to their old apartments doesn't make clear that renovating the old units would make them better.

The University of Texas at Arlington researchers and a contracted survey team from Survey Communications Inc. of Baton Rouge developed the survey questions in consultation with HUD and resident leaders, with input from critics of HUD's plans, such as U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., and housing activists.

Don't know about benefit

The survey included former housing complex residents who are now scattered around the country, but half of the respondents are back in New Orleans, either living in restored HANO units or in private apartments on HUD vouchers.

The survey also probed still-displaced residents' reasons for not coming home, and exposed a weakness in HUD's relocation efforts. Nearly 80 percent of those outside New Orleans who want to return said they wanted to be back home within the next six months, but the vast majority of that group said their return would be delayed by a lack of transportation or by moving expenses.

Babers said it was disheartening to see the persistence of such perceived barriers when HUD has a contract with U-Haul to pay for travel and moving expenses of returning families. He said HUD needs to do a better job of advertising and explaining the program.

Time runs short for Jeff trailer dwellers

After next week, Jefferson Parish will turn its caseload of residents who still have FEMA trailers over to attorneys who will start filing lawsuits to extract people from their emergency housing units.

The move marks perhaps the final major push in the parish's yearlong effort to eradicate trailers from front lawns and driveways. Calling for a post-hurricane return to normalcy, parish officials last year reactivated codes that prohibit trailers as permanent housing in residential neighborhoods. The restrictions include trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, privately owned trailers and storage units.

March 1 is the deadline for residents to remove trailers from unincorporated areas of Jefferson before parish attorneys begin filing suits in 24th Judicial District Court. The parish will ask judges for orders compelling homeowners who are still trailer dwellers to comply with the zoning rules. Judges also could consider the arguments from residents that their houses remain unlivable with storm damage as they wait on contractors, insurance or money from the state's Road Home program.

Previously, residents had been able to win extensions from parish-hired inspectors and parish hearing officers as long as they could demonstrate that the people living in a trailer were the same residents of the household as before Hurricane Katrina and that they faced legitimate hardships in fixing their houses.

"This will allow a judge to make that determination," said Matthew Friedman, an assistant parish attorney handling trailer cases, about the new parish strategy of filing lawsuits. "It takes it away from the parish attorneys, the Parish Council."

Homeowners who have asked FEMA to take their trailers can avoid a parish lawsuit by filing an affidavit with parish attorneys indicating they have contacted the federal agency but are waiting for a crew to arrive. The affidavit also authorizes parish officials to call FEMA on behalf of homeowners and press for trailers to be hauled away.

"The affidavit is probably the new twist on this," said Bert Smith, deputy chief administrative officer for Parish President Aaron Broussard. "It puts the brakes on the lawsuit the parish attorneys would be filing."

Jefferson officials estimate about 1,500 trailers remain in residential neighborhoods in unincorporated parts of the parish, a count that has steadily dropped from more than 17,000 in the months after the 2005 hurricanes.

Officials have been urging people who still need housing assistance to contact FEMA about a rental assistance program now being run in conjunction with the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The FEMA telephone number is (888) 294-2822.

To get a copy of the affidavit indicating that a homeowner has asked FEMA to remove a trailer, residents can visit www.jeffparish.net and click on the news release about the March 1 deadline. Residents also can pick up copies of the affidavit at the Joseph S. Yenni Building, 1221 Elmwood Park Blvd. in Elmwood, or the General Government Building, Suite 5200, at 200 Derbigny St. in Gretna.

9 / 11 Victims' Kids Help in New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS-- Sixteen-year-old Caitlin Leavey remembers people she didn't even know coming to her family's aid with food and comfort after she lost her firefighter father in the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11.

On Wednesday, she and more than a dozen other young people who lost parents in the terrorist attacks were hanging siding on a house in New Orleans -- their way of helping a city and its residents recover from the loss inflicted by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

''It feels so good to be able to give back,'' Leavey said as she hammered away. ''I know what they went through. I know what we went through, and I wanted to give back.''

This week, Leavey and the others are working with Habitat for Humanity in the Musicians' Village, a housing initiative launched by New Orleans natives Harry Connick Jr. and Branford Marsalis in the Upper 9th Ward to help displaced musicians.

More than 40 candy-colored homes have already been built, and 23 more are under construction, project spokeswoman Aleis Tusa said.

The youth, ranging from 9th- to 12th-graders, arrived in New Orleans on Sunday with the help of Tuesday's Children, an organization that provides support to family's affected by the Sept. 11 attacks.

Besides manual labor, the teens took a tour of flood-damaged neighborhoods and learned about the city's levee system. They also visited the Aquarium of the Americas and French Quarter.

''It helps so much to be here because we're working with people who have been through what we've been through and care just as much as we do,'' said Thea Trinidad, 17, of Pawcatuck, Conn.
Adult chaperones say the visit goes beyond helping storm victims.

''Helping heals,'' said Candy Cucharo, program director for Tuesday's Children. ''Doing for others, you're no longer viewed as the one needing help. Helping others builds resistance and helps strengthen your mental and emotional well-being.''

Leavey was 10 when she lost her father, Joseph G. Leavey, a New York City fire lieutenant who led firefighters from Ladder 15 as high as the 78th floor of the south tower before it collapsed on Sept. 11. She said the New Orleans visit was a rewarding way to honor his memory.
'
'My dad was always helping people, painting and fixing the firehouse, just doing whatever he could do,'' Leavey said. He even helped a woman get her cat down from a tree.

''He was great,'' she said, smiling.

CDC: Gulf Coast Trailers Have Toxic Air

U.S. health officials are urging that Gulf Coast hurricane victims be moved out of their government-issued trailers as quickly as possible after tests found toxic levels of formaldehyde fumes.

Fumes from 519 trailer and mobile homes in Louisiana and Mississippi were -- on average -- about five times what people are exposed to in most modern homes, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In some trailers, the levels were nearly 40 times customary exposure levels, raising fears that residents could contract respiratory problems.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency -- which supplied the trailers -- should move people out quickly, with priority given to families with children, elderly people or anyone with asthma or other chronic conditions, said Mike McGeehin, director of a CDC division that focuses on environmental hazards.

''We do not want people exposed to this for very much longer,'' McGeehin said.
In New Orleans, Jim Herring, 63, who recently moved back into his partially renovated house in the badly flooded Lakeview neighborhood, said he wasn't surprised about the finding.

''The workmanship is pathetic,'' said Herring, a retiree who worked for 25 years in a chemical plant.

Herrings and his wife Susan decided not to stay in their trailer, which they received in April 2007. Both Herrings are smokers, but Jim said he did not have a cough until they moved into it.

''Let's face it, these things were not meant to be lived in for a year,'' Jim Herring said.

While there are no federal safety standard for formaldehyde fumes in homes, the levels found in the trailers are high enough to cause burning eyes and breathing problems for people who have asthma or sensitivity to air pollutants, said McGeehin.

CDC officials said the study did not prove people became sick from the fumes, but merely took a snapshot reading of fume levels. Only formaldehyde was tested, they added.

FEMA provided about 120,000 travel trailers to victims of the 2005 hurricanes Katrina and Rita. In 2006, some occupants began reporting headaches and nosebleeds.

The complaints were linked to formaldehyde, a colorless gas with a pungent smell used in the production of plywood and resins.

Commonly used in manufactured homes, formaldehyde can cause respiratory problems and has been classified as a carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer and as a probable carcinogen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Last May, FEMA officials dismissed findings by environmentalists that the trailers posed serious health risks. They said the trailers conformed to industry standards.

By August, about 1,000 families in Louisiana asked FEMA to move them to other quarters. In November, lawyers for a group of hurricane victims asked a federal judge to order FEMA to test for hazardous fumes.

The CDC, working with FEMA, hired a contractor. The firm -- Bureau Veritas North America -- tested air samples from 358 travel trailers, 82 park model and 79 mobile homes.


Analysis of the samples, taken from Dec. 21 through Jan. 23, came back last week, McGeehin said.

They found average levels of 77 parts formaldehyde per billion parts of air, significantly higher than the 10 to 17 parts per billion concentration seen in newer homes. Levels were as high as 590 parts per billion.

The highest concentrations were in travel trailers, which are smaller and more poorly ventilated, McGeehin said.

Indoor air temperature was a significant factor in raising formaldehyde levels, independent of trailer make or model, CDC officials said. McGeehin said that's why the CDC would like residents out before summer.

A broader-based children's health study is also in the works, McGeehin said.

Last week, congressional Democrats accused FEMA of manipulating scientific research in order to play down the danger posed by formaldehyde in the trailers.

In its initial round of testing, FEMA took samples from unoccupied trailers that had been aired out for days and compared them with federal standards for short-term exposure, according to the lawmakers.

Legislators also said the CDC ignored research from -- and then demoted -- one of its own experts, who concluded any level of exposure to formaldehyde may pose a cancer risk. A CDC spokesman has denied the allegations.

FEMA Looks at Trains for Evacautions

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- The Federal Emergency Management Agency may expand the use of passenger trains to evacuate the sick and elderly in advance of hurricanes across the Gulf Coast, a FEMA official said.

Glenn Cannon, a FEMA assistant administrator, told a congressional subcommittee meeting in New Orleans on Monday that his agency is looking at passenger trains as a method of getting people out of harm's way.

After Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005, Amtrak was hired to be on hand to evacuate people with special needs if another disaster hit. Cannon said FEMA is now devising disaster plans for other Gulf Coast cities based on the New Orleans model.

''We're changing our whole planning focus now from Louisiana-centric to Gulf Coast-centric,'' Cannon told the subcommittee.

But, he said, turning railways into evacuation routes won't be easy.

Rights of way for most railroads are privately owned by freight companies, and there is no congressional mandate to use railroads for evacuations. Also, the existing stock of passenger cars cannot accommodate evacuees unable to walk, he said.

City may move homeless from underpass to shelter

Mayor Ray Nagin's administration appears to be preparing to move the city's biggest homeless colony, a highly visible collection of people and bedrolls just off Canal Street, to a Central City emergency shelter.

Some City Council members and leading advocates for the homeless say they are not aware of the plan, although the director of the New Orleans Mission confirmed that the city accepted his proposal on Friday.

Nagin alluded to a plan for the homeless last week during an appearance on WWL-TV. He said he had recently seen a man in the encampment on Claiborne Avenue beneath Interstate 10 "drinking beer and just flipping the bird to citizens."

Calling the scene "a mess," Nagin said that before the end of February, the city will begin enforcing its "habitation laws."

"We've got more mental cases out there," the mayor said. "It's unsanitary under the bridge. And we have beds for these folks and they just don't want to take them. . . . So we're going to try to push the issue, if you will."

While Nagin did not specify which local habitation law he was referring to, the most often-used ordinance was found unconstitutional by the courts more than two decades ago and stricken from the municipal code six years ago. But in past years it still has been seen as a tool by local officials who wring their hands at the homeless people who linger in public spaces.

The fast-growing colony on Claiborne Avenue, now drawing more than 200 people a night, was repeatedly cited at a recent City Council meeting that featured testimony from social service officials.

"We cannot accept this any longer," Councilwoman Stacy Head said. "We've got to fix the problem and we've got to fix it in short order."

Martha Kegel, head of Unity of Greater New Orleans, a coalition that is working to house 250 people who previously camped out in Duncan Plaza, across from City Hall, told the council that homeless people are suffering at Claiborne Avenue. "We still have a humanitarian crisis," she said.

When asked about the mayor's plan to clear people out of the Claiborne site, neither Kegel, Head nor council President Arnie Fielkow knew anything about it this week.

Better or worse?

News of the mayor's televised comments traveled quickly to the hodgepodge of tents, sofas, blankets and mattresses now stretching across five blocks on a cement neutral ground beneath I-10.

People sleeping there said they feel targeted. Shouting to be heard over the din of cars passing overhead, they said they have little choice but to sleep at the site.
We're already on the streets, where else are we supposed to go?" asked Sara Brown, 40, who before Hurricane Katrina rented an apartment Uptown and worked as a dishwasher in the French Quarter. Like many others interviewed beneath the expressway, Brown is a native New Orleanian who was displaced by the storm and returned to the city to find rents sharply raised.

During a news conference called Wednesday to react to Nagin's comments, Mike Howells of the activist group C3/Hands Off Iberville said, "We're going to make the situation worse by arresting people for things we failed to do."

Sgt. Joe Narcisse, a spokesman for the New Orleans Police Department, said there are no orders to crack down on the homeless. "No plans have been shared with us," he said.

Law was struck down

According to mayoral spokeswoman Ceeon Quiett, the city planned to work with the NOPD Homeless Assistance Collaborative, a unit begun several years ago that uses social service methods, rather than arrests, in moving homeless individuals off the streets. But Quiett also said: "The habitation laws, as all city laws and ordinances, are enforceable and all citizens are expected to comply."

However, New Orleans' "unlawful public habitation" ordinance was thrown out by the courts more than 20 years ago, said Judson Mitchell, a Loyola University law clinic attorney.

Even if the mayor asked police to enforce public-habitation laws, the charges are sure to be thrown out in Municipal Court, he said.

Homeless people sleeping in public once were routinely charged with "unlawful public habitation," but the ordinance was successfully challenged in federal court in 1986 by the New Orleans Legal Assistance Corp. and the American Civil Liberties Union.

But such arrests continued until recently. In 2000, for instance, N.O. police booked 657 people on the charge, according to police records at the time. In September 2001, the ordinance was wiped off the books. Still, during a French Quarter cleanup in 2002, five people were arrested under provisions of the defunct ordinance, records show.

Mitchell hasn't seen anyone charged with it lately. "The police seem to know that the ordinance doesn't exist anymore," he said. Municipal Court judges Paul Sens and Sean Early both labeled the once-common public habitation charge as "rare."

Mission to offer beds

People at the Claiborne encampment recalled seeing the mayor's sport utility vehicle pass. Referring to the mayor's comments about an obscene gesture, Brown said, "That man, he was flipping off the mayor . . . because we're out here and he's doing nothing for us."

In fact, the mayor is trying to find relief for the Claiborne assembly, Quiett said. What the mayor was speaking about on television was his work "with the religious community to make available additional bed space," she said. This month, the city plans "to transition many, if not all, of the homeless citizens inhabiting the areas under the Claiborne bridge to locations where they can receive shelter and social service care," she said.

More than 100 beds, Quiett said, will be provided in a tent behind the New Orleans Mission on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard in Central City. The mission's director, Ron Gonzales, confirmed that the mayor's office on Friday accepted his plan to provide shelter for the homeless on Claiborne Avenue. A timetable hasn't yet been set, he said.

Late last year, the city awarded the mission $100,000 to buy a tent with air-conditioning and heating that can sleep 130 men, he said. A facility for women run by the mission currently has openings for about a dozen people, he said.

In exchange for housing people, Gonzales has proposed that the city pay $200 a night to pay for a fire marshal who would stand guard at New Orleans Mission, a measure made necessary by fire hazards caused by storm damage. He also is asking the city to pay for some storm-related repairs to eliminate his code violations for good, he said.

Gonzales plans to keep people in his shelter while they grapple with addiction, mental illness and other challenges, he said.

"They'll be better able to deal with those issues because they'll be there with us," he said.

He conceded, however, that the mission isn't set up to deal with intensive mental illness. He said he has a case worker but no licensed social worker on staff.

The mission plan faces other hurdles. Brown said she would not go to the mission because she would have to be separated from her boyfriend. Others said they wouldn't sleep there because there's nowhere to stay during the day, forcing them to tote their possessions around town from morning until evening.

Gonzales said the new plan for housing the homeless is not yet final. But he talked optimistically about approaching the Claiborne crowd with a team of outreach workers, accompanied by police.

FEMA trailers deadline looming

Only three weeks remain for people living in FEMA trailers to get out for good under Jefferson Parish's continuing crackdown on the emergency housing units.

March 1 is the no-exceptions date when residents in about 1,500 remaining trailers will no longer be able to ask inspectors for more time. All cases will instead switch from inspectors to parish attorneys and be decided by parish hearing officers or in the courts.

Zoning laws against using the trailers as permanent housing in residential areas will return to full force, said D.J. Mumphrey, an executive assistant to Parish President Aaron Broussard who supervises the crackdown. He said residents' arguments that they still need the units as they rebuild from the 2005 hurricanes will be closely scrutinized.

It's going to be under a microscope," Mumphrey said, suggesting the parish will turn to judges in the 24th Judicial District Court or other venues to force residents out of their trailers. "It's our intent to go to the courts with this."

Mumphrey estimated that about 1,500 trailers remain in front of houses in the unincorporated parts of Jefferson that fall under the trailer removal campaign. Including cities and one remaining trailer group site operated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a total of 2,168 units still dotted the parish at the end of January.

The big white boxes that symbolized the early phases of Hurricane Katrina recovery peaked in Jefferson Parish in 2006, when FEMA counted more than 19,000 of them in the parish.

Arguing for the need to restore normalcy in neighborhoods, the parish last year launched its effort to remove them, reestablishing the codes that prohibit them and sending teams of inspectors to post violation notices on trailer doors.

Inspectors granted extensions to residents who demonstrated their houses remained unlivable with storm damage, while other cases went to hearing officers who listened to residents' cases and allowed extensions or imposed fines.

The remaining cases involve disagreements between residents and the parish that inspectors and code officials cannot resolve, so parish attorneys will now take over the effort, said Louis Savoye, code enforcement director.

"There's a vast majority that probably, in our eyes, aren't justified," Savoye said. "In the owners' eyes, they are."

We feel like these decisions are too critical for us bureaucrats to make," he said.
Because FEMA must honor local laws, Savoye said the parish might refer some cases to the federal agency, giving federal officials notice that trailers are in violation of codes and must be removed.

"We have been as cooperative and as helpful as we can to the vast majority of the citizens," Savoye said. "You have to be compassionate, but if you sit around, people will take advantage of you. You have to be compassionate, but aggressive."

Trailer dwellers who still need housing help as they recover from Katrina can seek rental assistance through FEMA, parish officials said.

Gina Cortez, a spokeswoman for the agency, said case workers can help people locate apartments and qualify for rental aid in a program that has been operated jointly by FEMA and the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development since December.

That program is also slated to phase out. Beginning in March, people receiving disaster rental help will have to pay $50 toward the cost of their rent, a number that will rise by $50 each month until residents are covering their entire housing bills or the assistance program ends entirely in March 2009.

The program, however, also refers people to social services and job training, Cortez said. "What we want is to work with them step by step to help them get back on their feet," she said.
Cortez said FEMA is cooperating with Jefferson to move residents from trailers and into the rental assistance program.

Partly under pressure from the parish, the agency has closed all but one of the 13 trailer enclaves that it once operated in Jefferson for storm victims who did not have another place to put a trailer. The remaining site, near Louis Armstrong International Airport, is scheduled to close in April.

Savoye said a handful of trailers remain installed outside businesses, but they occupy a low priority in the parish's trailer removal push because officials have not received any complaints about trailers in commercial areas.

The Jefferson trailer drawdown is a piece of a broader, post-Katrina code enforcement campaign in Jefferson that has also targeted rental storage units, blighted buildings, overgrown lots and abandoned swimming pools.

City Hall sitting on aid money, critics say

As an assortment of do-gooders, church ladies and nonprofit agencies provide the city's homeless with meals, services and furniture, City Hall is sitting on federal money desperately needed by social service providers.

Just before Christmas, UNITY, a consortium of agencies serving the homeless, whisked the last squatter from Duncan Plaza, across from City Hall. Since Nov. 20, UNITY and its partners have spent nearly $650,000 on hotel rooms, casework and services for Duncan Plaza's former residents. Half of them have been placed into apartments.

UNITY's involvement is based on a public and private partnership: UNITY provides the expertise and the caseworkers to help find permanent housing for the homeless -- saving the government from having to set up a bureaucracy to do the work -- while taxpayers help financially.

UNITY is living up to its end of the deal, but its cash coffers are nearly empty. That's partly because of delays by the city, which has not delivered $264,000 it promised for UNITY's efforts.

On Thursday, Mayor Ray Nagin said the city will make good on its obligation.

"All UNITY has to do is submit the invoices and they will get their reimbursement," he said.

According to mayoral spokeswoman Ceeon Quiett, UNITY had submitted all of the necessary paperwork as of Wednesday. The mayor said he wasn't aware of that, and that he has instructed his staff to expedite the process.

The city's $264,000 portion is slotted to come from federal Community Development Block Grant money, said mayoral spokesman James Ross.

That money is already in the city's line of credit, $15.5 million in 2007 alone, said Brian Sullivan, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees the block grant program. Moreover, Sullivan said that once the city and UNITY have finished the required paperwork, City Hall can draw down on the money simply by punching account numbers into HUD's secure phone line, he said.

A severe cash crunch

At this point, UNITY has such a severe cash shortage that its director is going without a salary, its bookkeepers are paying only essential bills, and it has had to borrow money to pay for hotel rooms and make payroll.

"It's a nail-biting exercise every day to figure out how we're going to do this," UNITY director Martha Kegel said.

The agency hoped to secure a bridge loan that could give them some breathing room, she said.

Sullivan said HUD hopes to convene a meeting as early as this week with the city, UNITY, the city's recovery office and HUD.

In the past, UNITY has occasionally bailed out its member agencies, most of them small nonprofit groups, by giving no-interest bridge loans when a small nonprofit group runs into a cash-flow crisis.

"But now we're feeling the pinch ourselves," Kegel said.

The homeless people UNITY helps, many of them mentally ill, are aware of the situation, and they fear they'll get kicked out of temporary lodging provided by the agency, Kegel said.

"Their stress has been unbelievable. They're not sleeping at night, and so it's difficult for them to focus on getting apartments and jobs," she said.

Former Duncan Plaza residents have asked Kegel to assure them that they won't end up back on the streets.

"What I told them is that we would do everything in our power to make sure that didn't happen. But I can't guarantee anything," she said.
The biggest problem, Kegel said, is that nearly all the government money used for this project is reimbursement-based, so UNITY must front the cash, then submit receipts for its work. While not an unusual practice in hurricane recovery financing, it can create hardship for the city's financially lean social service agencies, Kegel said.

"We've seen that nonprofits are key to this recovery," she said. "But there's a limit to how much they can do, particularly in this city, where nonprofits are so often inadequately financed."

In this project alone, one of the subcontractors pulled out because it was financially squeezed, she said
The concerns may sound familiar to city officials, who also fretted about having enough capital for all of the city's infrastructure repairs. This summer, the Legislature created a revolving fund, financed by state bonds, that provides the city and the Sewerage & Water Board with a total of $300 million in upfront money to repair storm-damaged city buildings, streets and other infrastructure while the city waits for FEMA reimbursement.

Others waiting too

UNITY isn't the only agency waiting while the city sits on money.

"I'm sympathetic, but UNITY has only been waiting two months," said Don Everard, who heads up Hope House, a social service agency. Everard has a letter from the city awarding Hope House's transitional-housing program $40,000 in federal homeless-assistance money for 2007. To date, Hope House hasn't been paid or been given a signed contract, which it needs to bill the city.

"We know the money is there," Everard said.

It was part of a federal McKinney-Vento Emergency Shelters Grant given to the city every year by HUD. In 2007, the city received $667,000 specifically for that purpose, said Sullivan, the HUD spokesman.

Everard wrote several letters to the mayor without response, he said. He now despairs of ever getting the money. "We go into these contracts with the city, saying, 'If you supply the money, we'll supply the work.' But we can't do the work if they don't give us the money," he said.

For its work at Duncan Plaza, UNITY and its agencies have been reimbursed for roughly $61,000 of expenses, all of it from the state Department of Social Services.

Last week, the City Council asked for testimony from Kegel and other homeless-service providers about homelessness in the city and the growing colony camped under the interstate overpass near Claiborne Avenue and Canal Street.

But expanding UNITY's housing efforts to those on Claiborne Avenue apparently is too much to ask at this point. In recent weeks, as the cash got tighter, UNITY began paying only the most urgent bills. It currently is paying rent for its offices only, staff salaries and hotel bills for Duncan Plaza clients.

Everard and other emergency-shelter providers are also unable to expand their work with the homeless because of lagging payments. "The city is going to lose its partners because people just can't wait forever," he said.

Plaza empty, but troubles are not over for homeless

Chris Turnbow wears a gray Civil War-style beard and arms tattooed with the Grim Reaper and skeletons. Tall and gangly, he stands out in any crowd.

Still, Shamus Rohn, a caseworker for homeless-service consortium UNITY of Greater New Orleans, has lost Turnbow, 52, for as long as two months. For nearly a year, Rohn could eventually find Turnbow in the same spot: a piece of cardboard across the street from City Hall.

In late December, Duncan Plaza was emptied so that the state of Louisiana could prepare to demolish two buildings bordering the park. Now, the mayor's office at City Hall no longer overlooks the tents and trash of a homeless colony.

In some ways, the crisis has ended. But work has just begun for 44 caseworkers trying to house about 250 former plaza denizens, many of them with severe health problems and mental illnesses.

As of Monday, the caseworkers had found apartments for 47 people. The other 200 or so remain in low-rent hotel rooms while caseworkers scramble to find housing in a market where, they say, affordable one-bedrooms and efficiencies remain scarce.

But on Friday, UNITY faces a steep hurdle. The financing for hotel rooms will run out. In November, the city allotted $264,000 for that purpose but hasn't decided whether to add anything to that, said mayor's office spokesman James Ross.

Unless additional money materializes, UNITY plans to borrow money to pay those bills, Kegel said. Keeping 150 people in hotel rooms for a week runs about $60,000, she said, but it's worth the investment.

"We're not going to put vulnerable people back on the street," she said.

UNITY's hotel-financing crisis put homelessness at the top of today's City Council agenda. Council President Arnie Fielkow has requested testimony about Duncan Plaza and the city's increased homeless population from UNITY officials, homeless-service providers, the New Orleans Police Department's Homelessness Assistance Collaborative and the state Department of Social Services.

Typically, homeless clients need at least four weeks in hotels before they're moved to apartments. During that time, UNITY caseworkers try to connect them with social services, employers, landlords and apartments near jobs, usually downtown.

Researchers studying poverty agree that most people who become homeless regain self-sufficiency fairly quickly, often within a month's time, with little or no help. Within Orleans and Jefferson parishes alone, UNITY estimates that, at any given time, 12,000 people are homeless, but it's a constantly revolving group. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which finances homeless services, estimates that 10 percent of those people are likely to be chronic, long-term homeless people suffering from physical illnesses or problems with alcohol, drugs and mental health.

For the chronically homeless, caseworkers celebrate any sign of progress. Caseworker Renida Johnson rejoiced at one client who began talking, taking baths, combing her hair and laughing.

Others may simply require job-search assistance and temporary help with rent. UNITY caseworker Laniker Hunter walked into an employment agency earlier this week and asked for seven jobs, which she received.

"All seven of my guys are working," she said.  Mental health a battle

The hole in Chris Turnbow's gut trumps even the mental illness he has wrestled with for years. A construction worker who grew up on a farm in Arkansas and moved to New Orleans in 2002, Turnbow had lived at Duncan Plaza with a colostomy bag since October, when doctors removed part of his diseased intestine.

Despite daily doses of Seroquil, a common antipsychotic, and Paxil, an antidepressant, Turnbow suffers from bad nerves. One morning, as Rohn prepared to move him into an apartment, Turnbow emerged from his hotel room sleep-deprived.

"How will I feed myself?" he had worried all night.

Later that day, Turnbow wandered away.

The next week, he apologized for his disappearance. He had called home to let his children know that he was getting an apartment, he said.

"And I found out that my grandchild, who's 7, got hit by a car," he said. "I guess I've always been a loner and so I just went away -- just rambling."
As he continued, some details didn't quite match. Before long, it became clear that his story about the call and the grandchild may have reflected a desire to connect with his family. But not a bit of it was true.

Late last month, Turnbow's mother and son drove to New Orleans from Arkansas after hearing him talk with a National Public Radio reporter about Duncan Plaza. During a tearful reunion, they told Rohn that they thought he'd probably died during Hurricane Katrina.

Homeless Pride moves on


Jesse Arbuthnot, 45, was the first of what he calls "the Homeless Pride Originals" to move into the Prieur Street apartment complex. Several others followed him. All get rental assistance from UNITY.

In July, this group of men and women started calling themselves Homeless Pride. As the tent city grew around them, they took a certain satisfaction in living in plain view of the mayor.

A native of the Irish Channel, Arbuthnot does odd-job carpentry and works sporadically for a nearby temp agency that cleans the New Orleans Arena and the Superdome. He is an affable man, a natural diplomat, who became Duncan Plaza's self-appointed law-enforcement officer. At night, Arbuthnot walked around, ironing out tensions. When problems arose, people came to him for help.

But, in the end, he was relieved to leave his post.

The day after his move, Arbuthnot returned to Duncan Plaza, visibly changed by one night's sleep in his own apartment. He was showered, happy and well-rested.

"Looks like 50 pounds of pressure was just lifted off me," he said, smiling. "I'm away from the chaos."

That is not unusual, said Angela Patterson, UNITY's head of outreach.

"The people we're meeting in the hotels today are not the same people we brought from Duncan Plaza," she said.

In mid-December, Arbuthnot ran into one of the other Originals, Tyrone Collins, 38. Before the hurricane, he lived in his family's Lower 9th Ward house, which floated away, Collins said. He hasn't been able to rebuild.

He could, however, get help from UNITY. He had been placed in an apartment about a week earlier.

Arbuthnot walked up to him with a grimace. "Why are you still here?" he asked.

Collins pointed to a key hooked on a belt loop of his pants. It was for his new place on Philip Street, he said, but he hadn't even tried the key yet.

"I'm not going to sleep there until I get a refrigerator and some furniture," he said.

'This is over with'

Many UNITY clients end up in apartments with little or no furniture, since the agency has no budget for that. But it's also not unusual for homeless people to feel uncomfortable alone in a quiet apartment, after months spent in loud, makeshift homeless communities, caseworkers said.

Arbuthnot wasn't in the mood for excuses. He put one hand on Collins' shoulder and made a sweeping gesture with the other hand at the rows of tents surrounding them.

"This is over with," he said sternly. "And all of us are happy it's over with."

Later that afternoon, Collins did go to Philip Street. The key worked, he said. But he spent the night, once again, in his tent across from City Hall. He didn't begin sleeping in his apartment until a few weeks after UNITY placed him there.

Collins himself doesn't know why he felt this way.

"A lot of people are cracking up out here," he said, as he sat in a lawn chair overlooking Duncan Plaza. "Homelessness does mess with your mind."