Subsidy offered to get residents out of trailers

Scores of St. Tammany Parish residents still living in FEMA trailers were told by federal officials this week that a pilot rent subsidy program is available for them to move into homes and apartments.

But those residents, at meetings in Slidell and Folsom, were also told that they may have to move out of the area due to a local shortage of rental housing units.

"You have to make some real hard decisions," said Carl Jurison, a senior adviser for the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Those hard decisions have to be made as an Aug. 29 parish deadline approaches that will require the more than 1,200 parish residents in FEMA trailers to find another place to live.

Parish President Kevin Davis has announced that on Aug. 30, the parish will resume enforcing zoning and other codes that prohibit travel trailers as homes on private property. Those still in trailers on private property will face citations for code violations and fines up to $500 per day, parish officials have warned.

At Aldersgate United Methodist Church in Slidell Wednesday night, about 150 visibly distraught and nervous residents listened to FEMA and HUD officials explain the pilot program.

"Where is Kevin Davis?" asked Winnie Ordone of Lacombe. "How come he's not here to see what's going on? . . . Come Aug. 29, what am I supposed to do? Start paying fines or move to New York? I don't know."

Ordone, who works for the School Board's Head Start program in Lacombe, said she and her 12-year-old son have lived in a FEMA trailer since Hurricane Katrina destroyed her home in Lacombe in 2005. Ordone said the trailer is on "higher ground" property she bought after the storm. She said she has been trying to save money to buy a mobile home that meets parish codes to put on her property.

"It's not like I've been sitting around for three years doing nothing," Ordone said.

A neighbor on Pontchartrain Drive in Lacombe, Larrisa Young, said the prospect of having to move out of the area is disturbing. "My kids ask me every day, 'Where are we going to go?' " said Young, a custodian at Fontainebleau High School

Young said her rental home was destroyed by Katrina. She now lives in a small FEMA trailer with her three children and a 7-month-old grandchild. The trailer is on family property where she hopes to eventually build or put a home, she said.

"We want to stay here," Young said. "I don't want to uproot my kids and family."

Ordone, Young and others at the meetings in Slidell and Folsom filled out paperwork and huddled individually with FEMA and HUD counselors to sign up for the Disaster Housing Assistance Program.

Under the HUD program, FEMA counselors work with residents to find a rental home or apartment and sign a lease with the landlord. HUD then pays the rent for the Katrina victim.

Jurison said a person only has to be qualified for FEMA assistance to qualify for the subsidy program. The program pays up to the fair market value of the rental property through February 2009, Jurison said. Subsidies for people over 62 or who are disabled can continue under the program, he said.

In March 2009, those who are younger than 62, not disabled and meet low-income requirements will be shifted into regular HUD housing or rent voucher programs, Jurison said. The subsidies will end in March for those who don't qualify for HUD programs.

"So, think beyond March 2009," FEMA adviser Gail Tate told the residents. "Get something you can afford" for when the subsidies are no longer available.

The parish deadline to move out of FEMA trailers does not apply to trailers in mobile home parks. But Tate said by March 2009, FEMA will require all trailer residents to move

Trailers in N.O. must go by July 1

New Orleans officials will begin cracking down on residents still living in travel trailers as of July 1, requiring property owners to request an extension from the city if they need to continue living in temporary quarters.

Starting in July, city zoning ordinances that prohibit people from living in trailers on private property - unless in a designated trailer park - will go back into effect, according to a news release issued Thursday by Mayor Ray Nagin's office. Those ordinances were waived after Hurricane Katrina, when thousands of residents needed to live in the tiny metal boxes because their homes flooded.

Over the weekend, workers with the Federal Emergency Management Agency blanketed the 4,684 FEMA trailers currently occupied in New Orleans with notices about the deadline, said Andrew Thomas, an agency spokesman.

Trailer occupants should first contact FEMA to get the trailer removed. Then they need to file an affidavit with the city, included with the flier posted by FEMA, that certifies they asked the federal agency to remove the trailer. This affidavit also grants the city of New Orleans permission to contact the agency to request trailer removal. Filing the affidavit protects the resident if the trailer has not been taken away by July 1.

While FEMA notified trailer occupants about the return to the old city ordinance, the regulations also will apply to people who bought their own trailers after the storm, said James Ross, a Nagin spokesman.

If residents are not done rebuilding their flooded homes, they can ask the city Department of Safety & Permits for permission to continue living in the trailer. However, residents will have to show that they meet specific criteria to obtain an extension and provide the city with records that show they intend to rebuild a flooded house, according to the application. The request for an extension must be filed by July 1.

These criteria include documentation that there is ongoing litigation between a resident and insurance company or documentation that the resident applied for Road Home grants but has not received the money. Other records that may be required include loan papers or data that show repairs are ongoing and telling the city the anticipated completion date.

"While we understand that we must make exceptions in some cases, the elimination of trailers for housing is a priority as we move toward the full recovery of our community," Recovery Director Ed Blakely is quoted as saying in the city news release.

The 30-day notice to vacate their trailers has left a lot of people wondering what to do, said Davida Finger, an attorney handling housing cases for the Loyola Law Clinic.

"It has left people shellshocked," Finger said, noting that most of the people receiving the notices are those who have struggled the most to rebuild their damaged properties. The 30-day timeframe is simply too short, she said.

Many of the dozens of people who have called the Loyola clinic since the weekend are still wrangling with the Road Home program to receive grants to rebuild and aren't prepared to find new places to live, she said.

Finger said the city needs to give homeowners more specific information about the the extension process, such as when they can expect to hear back from the city and who will be deciding whether to grant the extensions.

City Councilwoman Stacy Head heralded the decision to implement a deadline, saying the city is trying to provide people with information about their options as July 1 approaches.

Many areas of New Orleans, particularly those that were not heavily flooded, are very ready to move past the temporary domiciles, she said.

"Moving more and more FEMA trailers, particularly from these neighborhoods, will give people confidence that we are moving back to a state of normalcy," Head said. "And especially with the beginning of hurricane season, it's good to remind people that FEMA trailers are dangerous places - trailers in general are dangerous places to live - and more permanent housing is a much better long-term solution."

People with no place to go once the trailers are removed can ask for FEMA assistance to obtain new housing, which can include rental assistance, Thomas said.

Zoning officials have received about 200 extension requests so far, Blakely said.


Residents who don't receive approval to remain in the trailer after July 1 can be cited by the safety and permits department, Ross said. This process can include a hearing before an administrative officer and fines, as well as eviction.

The New Orleans process could mirror the one implemented in Jefferson Parish, where officials have filed lawsuits against property owners with trailers on their lots, Head said. In a press release issued Thursday, Jefferson Parish officials indicated that 159 lawsuits have been filed against residents who haven't gotten rid of trailers.

Affidavits and extension requests can be delivered to the Mayor's Office of Public Advocacy at City Hall or mailed to the Department of Safety and Permits, Zoning Administration Division, 1300 Perdido St., Room 7E05, New Orleans LA 70112.

Residents with questions about the requirements can contact the city's information line at 311 or (504) 658-2299.

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.

Trailers still on list of FEMA options

WASHINGTON -- The Federal Emergency Management Agency may again use travel trailers to house disaster victims, although only as a last resort and for no longer than six months, according to a draft disaster housing report.

James McIntyre, a FEMA spokesman, said the draft is now being reviewed by Secretary Michael Chertoff of the Department of Homeland Security. He expressed hope that members of Congress, who complain that they were promised a report in time for the June 1 start of the hurricane season, will be briefed about the report in the next few days.

Although FEMA Director David Paulison has said that he didn't want to use trailers again after complaints of health problems linked to high formaldehyde levels in some trailers, the agency says it might not have any choice.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Deputy FEMA Administrator Harvey Johnson said that for a disaster approaching the size of Hurricane Katrina, the agency would probably have to use all options, including trailers.

According to the contents of a draft report, first reported by The Associated Press and confirmed by a FEMA official, the agency has determined:

-- Trailers can be used, but only if authorized by the FEMA director and only after the units have been tested for formaldehyde and are within the low acceptable levels established by the agency.

-- FEMA will consider use of alternatives, such as cottages being tested in Mississippi and Louisiana.

-- Unlike after Hurricane Katrina, occupancy will be limited to no more than six months. More than 120,000 families displaced by Hurricane Katrina used trailers, with more than 80,000 using them nearly two years after the disaster. FEMA says about 500 families remain in trailers today.

-- FEMA will rely more on input from states and local governments on what kind of emergency housing to use.

-- Efforts will be made to coordinate with community groups to find alternative rental units in future disasters. FEMA will provide rent subsidies.

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., expressed disappointment that Congress, which asked for a disaster housing report more than a year ago, still hasn't received one. She said that Paulison had promised her a copy by Sunday's start of the hurricane season.

"The agency has refused repeated inquiries for the plan's status from the Senate Homeland Security Committee's Disaster Recovery Subcommittee, yet it has found time to share draft elements with the media," Landrieu said. "Once again, it appears FEMA has opted to put spin ahead of accountability.

FEMA closing trailer parks on eve of hurricane season

BAKER, La. (AP) -- The federal government has plenty of reasons to move hundreds of families out of trailers they have occupied since Hurricane Katrina: the start of a new hurricane season, concerns about toxic fumes and the need for residents to find permanent homes.

But some worry they'll have nowhere to go once they lose their subsidized housing.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency wants to close its last six trailer parks by Sunday, the first day of hurricane season. Those parks, all in Louisiana, are all that remain of the 111 the agency built and operated in the state after the August 2005 hurricane.

It's not clear, however, whether the agency will meet its goal.

While most storm victims are eager to move out of cramped travel trailers and mobile homes, others worry about where they'll end up because they are only being promised one extra month of government-subsidized shelter. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita depleted the supply of affordable housing in the Gulf Coast, and rents are soaring.

''We have hundreds of people who have the potential for being homeless because they don't have the means for sustainable housing,'' said Sister Judith Brun.

The Roman Catholic nun has been helping to find new homes for residents of the Renaissance Village trailer park in this small town just north of Baton Rouge.

Although FEMA is pushing hard to reach its Sunday deadline, it says it won't evict anyone who isn't out of the parks by then.

A FEMA news release Wednesday said 436 households were still occupying trailers at the six Louisiana group sites, including 85 at Renaissance Village, and estimated that 383 of them will still be in place on Sunday.

Despite that estimate, FEMA spokesman Andrew Thomas in New Orleans insisted Wednesday: ''Our goal remains the same.''

''We're trying to get them out as quickly as we can,'' Thomas said.

The agency said in addition to the families in the six FEMA sites, several thousand other families are still in trailers on private sites. The last FEMA-managed trailer park in Mississippi closed this month, but eight group sites that the agency doesn't run remain open in that state.

Though the new hurricane season looms, much of the urgency for moving the familes stems from worries about toxicity.

Tests by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found potentially hazardous levels of formaldehyde in hundreds of FEMA trailers and mobile homes. The preservative, commonly found in construction materials, can cause breathing problems and is classified as a carcinogen.

Steven and Lindsay Huckabee were grateful when FEMA moved their family into a motel in Diamondhead, Miss., in March. They blamed formaldehyde for a rash of illnesses that their five children developed while living in a FEMA trailer for more than two years.

The children's ailments seemed to ease after the move, but the motel didn't solve the family's housing problems.

Before Katrina struck on Aug. 29, 2005, the Huckabees rented a three-bedroom apartment in Pass Christian for $600 monthly. Since then, rents have doubled or tripled to amounts far greater than they can afford. They're waiting for the state to give them a ''cottage,'' billed as a roomier alternative to trailers.

''I don't like living off of FEMA. I would much rather have my own house,'' said Steve Huckabee, a casino employee.

Alton Love has shared a trailer at Renaissance Village with his 9-year-old daughter since January 2007. He lost his job as a truck driver several months ago, and finding new employment isn't easy because his only means of transportation are a bicycle and a bus that only comes by every few hours.

FEMA found an apartment in Baton Rouge for Love and his daughter, who lived at a New Orleans housing project before Katrina. But after the government pays for the first month, Love has to pay the rent.

Most families moving out are eligible for federally subsidized housing assistance until March 2009. Love is one of those who are eligible for only one more month because they can't prove where they were living when Katrina and Rita slammed into the coast.

''I'm carless, jobless and soon to be homeless,'' he said. ''Things are going to work out, though.''

Jim Stark, FEMA's acting Gulf recovery director, said the agency is trying to place people in apartments they can afford once subsidies end.

''It's a little beyond what FEMA would normally do,'' he said. ''Our mission is for emergency housing. Unfortunately, the emergency housing period for New Orleans and southeast Louisiana stretched a lot longer than anyone expected.''

Closing trailer parks like Renaissance Village ''needs to happen,'' said Mario Sammartino, disaster response supervisor for Catholic Charities in Baton Rouge. He oversees 16 case managers helping trailer occupants find affordable housing.

''People need to move on,'' Sammartino said. ''I also know that not everyone is going to reach that normality, and that's what we're concerned about.''

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.”

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.

Lawsuits surprise some trailer users

42 are sued as parish launches 1st wave of cases

If Thursday was moving day, no one told Craig Furden.

He has been living in a FEMA travel trailer at 713 Causeway Blvd. in the Shrewsbury community since Hurricane Katrina. Despite monthly visits from a federal inspector, he said he had no idea his address appeared in one of 42 fresh lawsuits against owners of property that still harbor the mobile box dwellings.

"Mine's on the list?" Furden said. "They didn't tell me nothing."

Jefferson Parish filed the suits Thursday to start the final push to rid unincorporated areas of what some officials have dubbed persistent eyesores. Though all the properties identified in the initial round of suits are located in East Jefferson, code enforcement officers have targeted as many as 600 trailers parishwide, including 421 in West Jefferson. More suits are planned.

The parish has long banned trailers in many of its zoning districts. But after Katrina-related flooding damaged thousands of houses in August 2005, the Parish Council suspended the law.

In March 2007, the ban was reinstated, and Parish President Aaron Broussard's administration began pressuring residents to leave the trailers and move into houses. The deadline was March 1.

Though some trailers remain, authorities have excised almost 17,000 of them since the summer of 2006. Andrew Thomas, a spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said it removes more than 50 trailers each week from Jefferson Parish and its six municipalities.

Eliminating the final trailers could prove a Byzantine process. Code enforcers must find them, some of which are hidden behind high backyard fences. Property owners must be located through title searches. FEMA administrators must be consulted. Then legal action can kick in.

Residents do have options, Deputy Chief Administrative Officer Bert Smith said. With the help of FEMA administrators, parish attorneys will weed out property owners who have applied for home repair money -- but are still waiting for it -- from FEMA or the National Flood Insurance Program, he said. For instance, Assistant Parish Attorney Matthew Friedman cut eight potential lawsuits from Thursday's batch after conferring with federal authorities, Smith said.

Trailer residents with questions are encouraged to contact FEMA or the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Smith warned that once a lawsuit is filed, court costs will begin to accrue. It will be a judge's decision whether to charge a defendant with the fees.

The suit filings could become a weekly habit for Friedman, Smith said. "How many he'll file next, and when that will be, depends on how complicated the lawsuits will be."

Complicated could define Furden's situation
His trailer has a cozy look that transcends a temporary shelter. Potted flowers in full bloom hang in baskets from an attached awning. A glass terrarium is on display by the front stairs. Padded chairs invite visitors to sit a while.

When Katrina evicted Furden and his then-wife from a house they rented in Metairie, they moved into the trailer on Causeway. Their landlords, David and Angela Celentano, rented Furden the lot, which houses a large warehouse that once doubled as a flea market.

Furden and his wife divorced a year ago, and he kept the trailer. As a renter, however, he was unsure what effect the new lawsuit would have on him.

"They really shouldn't be bothering me," he said.

A call to a New Orleans address listed for the Celentanos went unanswered Thursday.

Louis Kabel's family also could find themselves immersed in a head-scratcher of a situation. His brother-in-law, John Sternberger, owns the property at 3801 Bauvais St. in Metairie, the target of another parish trailer suit. The Kabels live in the house.

A FEMA inspector examined the abandoned trailer in the front yard Monday, Kabel said, but no one has come to cart it away. Nonetheless, Kabel said he understood the Broussard administration's abhorrence toward the trailers.

"It's been plenty of time," Kabel said. "People should be settled in now."

Parish to start FEMA trailer lawsuits

After 16 months of administrative cajoling, Jefferson Parish officials said Tuesday that they will begin filing lawsuits this week against any persistent denizens of FEMA trailers.

Inspectors found 600 illegal trailers lingering in unincorporated areas during the weekend: 421 in West Jefferson and 179 in East Jefferson. That's down from a peak of more than 17,000 in the summer of 2006.

Parish attorneys will go to court Thursday with the first 30 lawsuits against property owners with FEMA-issued trailers on their land, Parish President Aaron Broussard's administration said. The process will continue until all trailers have been targeted.
The threat of lawsuits is the latest and most aggressive effort to date in the public campaign to return Jefferson's neighborhoods to their appearances before Hurricane Katrina.

"It's been long enough," said Kennith Lassalle, president of the Civic League of East Jefferson. "There may be a few people with extenuating circumstances, but not as many as there are trailers."

Soon after the Aug. 29, 2005, hurricane, the Parish Council suspended the law banning travel trailers in single-family zoning districts. By January 2007, parish officials were pressing to remove them, and code-enforcement inspectors started combing neighborhoods to post warning signs on trailer doors. As residents continued to rebuild their storm-damaged houses, the Broussard administration granted several extensions for the trailers' removal, then drew a line in the sand: March 1 was the deadline for the parish to begin considering lawsuits.

Kenner has taken a similar approach, with a deadline of May 31. After that, property owners could be subject to lawsuits, city officials say. According to the latest estimates, about 400 trailers remain in Kenner, down from a post-Katrina high of about 4,000.

Gretna this month counted 40 trailers, all but eight deactivated and awaiting FEMA pickup. Though its deadline for removing trailers was Jan. 1, residents could secure an extension if they could prove they were still repairing their houses. At last week's City Council meeting, Gretna officials said they will start issuing citations for remaining trailers in upcoming weeks.

Westwego has only a handful of trailers, and officials are pressing FEMA to remove them. The city has not renewed permits for residents with trailers.

A single trailer awaiting FEMA collection remains in Harahan, a city once home to about 200, Mayor Paul Johnston said.
In unincorporated areas, parish officials said any property owner who has asked FEMA to remove a trailer, but is still waiting for it to be hauled away, may avoid a lawsuit by submitting a signed and notarized affidavit to the parish attorney's office. Information about the process is available on the parish's Web site: www.jeffparish.net.

Lassalle, the Civic League president, said FEMA is partly to blame for trailers still in Jefferson Parish.

"At two of the trailers in my neighborhood, there's been no one living in them for eight or nine months, but FEMA just hasn't picked them up," said Lassalle, who lives in the Suburban Terrace neighborhood in Old Jefferson.
Parish officials said FEMA is trying to provide rental assistance and other help for trailer residents. FEMA's rental-resources phone number is (888) 294-2822. Its Web site is www.fema.gov.

Help also is available from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development at www.hud.gov and (866) 373-9509.

What would you do with 3 Trillion dollars?

This has everything to do with New Orleans and Kanye West was correct, W doesn't give a fuck about black people.

Agency Is Under Pressure to Develop Disaster Housing

GULFPORT, Miss. — After the federal government announced in February that it would no longer use travel trailers to house the victims of future disasters, there was an initial sense of relief along the hurricane-scarred Gulf Coast.

The flimsy little white boxes are unpleasant to live in and tainted with toxic formaldehyde fumes. And they cost the federal government billions of dollars.

But that relief quickly turned to exasperation when it became clear that the government did not have an immediate backup plan. Without the trailers, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has no reliable way to rush immediate shelter to thousands of victims of an earthquake, or a wildfire, or another catastrophic hurricane.

Though FEMA is considering several new ideas, including a so-called panelized home partially built at a factory, the agency’s effort to develop a trailer replacement has not impressed many housing experts.

“FEMA seems like a babe in the woods on this stuff,” said John Henneberger, co-director of the Texas Low-Income Housing Information Service, which is working on trailer alternatives. “They seem to be clueless.”

The view in Washington is not much different. “It just sounds like they still don’t know what they’re talking about, to be frank,” said Ronald D. Utt, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “To say, O.K., we didn’t get it right with trailers so we’ll move on to something more exotic like prefab housing is a bizarre suggestion.”

There are several proposals that FEMA may try in future disasters, including houses made of shipping containers and one that can be shipped flat and unfolded upon delivery. Here in Gulfport, the state has designed and built what are known as the Mississippi Cottages — skinny but sturdy little houses that can be seen lined up by the hundreds in a staging area here.

But while the cottages are the only alternative that has been fully tested and appear popular with those who live in them, they have proved hard to place because of local government resistance. And they were produced through an effort that FEMA may have a hard time replicating.

FEMA is under increasing pressure from Congress to develop disaster housing. Senator Mary L. Landrieu, the Louisiana Democrat who leads a subcommittee on disaster recovery, has begun an investigation into the agency’s policies, and, at a hearing this month, castigated agency officials for failing to develop a strategic plan. Congress had set a deadline for the plan of July 1, 2007; the agency now says it hopes to have one by June 1.

Her goal, Ms. Landrieu said in an e-mail message, is to “make sure the next time a disaster strikes, housing — a basic human need — will be safe for all our families.”

FEMA officials say they are pushing hard to move the last 30,000 families out of temporary housing, most of which is made up of trailers. (There were almost 119,000 trailers in use at the peak.) As the trailers are emptied, they will probably be sold for scrap, said David Garratt, acting assistant administrator for disaster assistance at FEMA.

As for the pace of the hunt for a replacement, “we recognize, to some extent, this is an urgent need,” Mr. Garratt said. “But we don’t want to treat disaster victims as guinea pigs.”

In the meantime, FEMA is planning to order formaldehyde-free mobile homes and a little-used mini-mobile home, called a “park model,” to house disaster victims. But it is far harder to find sites for the bigger units; last fall, for example, the agency had more than 57,000 trailers in use along the Gulf Coast, but fewer than 7,000 mobile homes, and only 1,600 park units.

After the California wildfires last fall, FEMA was able to install only 50 mobile homes; it found them hard to transport on winding roads and hard to install on steep sites, said Jack Schuback, who runs the agency’s joint housing solutions group.

Many experts have long urged FEMA to work closely with federal housing officials to find existing apartments for disaster victims, rather than focus on trailers. The agency insists that it does so whenever possible, although its efforts along those lines in New Orleans and Mississippi have been roundly criticized. But after a disaster like Hurricane Katrina, there was no existing housing nearby.

Relocating families might mean sending them far from their jobs and the houses they hope to rebuild.

One of FEMA’s criteria in evaluating trailer alternatives is that they have a smaller footprint than mobile homes, Mr. Schuback said.

The agency is also looking for housing that can accommodate families and people with disabilities, that can be delivered quickly, that can be installed in different environments, and that will not be too costly. The travel trailers cost as little as $11,000 apiece, but installing and maintaining them averaged $30,000, and sometimes far more, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Using a lengthy checklist, FEMA has evaluated about 66 proposals, Mr. Schuback said, and visited 37 sites. But only half a dozen have been deemed promising enough to try during a disaster.

“I want to emphasize that we have not yet found the golden unit that will solve all disaster housing,” he said. “The process has ruled out far more units than it has yielded.”

The agency is being cagey about which proposals made the cut, but it did say that it is evaluating two that are being tried by states under a $400 million pilot project that Congress required FEMA to undertake in June 2006.

Texas is supposed to try the panelized home. It has signed a contract with an international company called Heston, but none of the houses have been built.

The only units FEMA says it is planning to test are the Mississippi Cottages, which have tin roofs, small porches and are colored like Easter eggs — rose-hip pink, malted mint, cloudless blue. The cottages are on wheels, but the larger models can be put on permanent foundations. All are equipped with appliances, beds, a table and chairs, ceiling fans, even pots and pans, and cost an average of $32,000 apiece to build.

With its built-in closets and spacious kitchen cupboards, their cottage feels like a mansion, said Vicki Ladner Meshell and her husband, Rickey, whose apartment in Long Beach was washed away by Hurricane Katrina’s storm surge.

“We love it — except when all four of us are trying to get ready at once,” Ms. Meshell said of the little aqua-colored cottage, which her family eventually hopes to buy. The cottage is rent-free, although they pay $210 a month for the trailer site, plus utilities.

The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency has installed more than 2,000 of them throughout southern Mississippi, and plans to put in 3,500.

But local governments in Mississippi have resisted the cottages. They fear people who get cottages will simply live in them and not rebuild their houses, said Mike Womack, executive director of the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency.

“They’re too nice,” he said. “I’ve heard this over and over again.”

Losing Our Will

wonder what the answers would be if each American asked himself or herself the question: “How is the war in Iraq helping me?”

While the U.S. government continues to pour precious human treasure and vast financial resources into this ugly war without end, it is all but ignoring deeply entrenched problems that are weakening the country here at home.

On the same day that President Bush was announcing an indefinite suspension of troop withdrawals from Iraq, the New York Times columnist David Leonhardt was telling us a sad story about how the middle class has fared during the Bush years.

The economic boom so highly touted by the president and his supporters “was, for most Americans,” said Mr. Leonhardt, “nothing of the sort.” Despite the sustained expansion of the past few years, the middle class — for the first time on record — failed to grow with the economy.

And now, of course, we’re sinking into a nasty recession.

The U.S., once the greatest can-do country on the planet, now can’t seem to do anything right. The great middle class has maxed out its credit cards and drained dangerous amounts of equity from family homes. No one can seem to figure out how to generate the growth in good-paying jobs that is the only legitimate way of putting strapped families back on their feet.

The nation’s infrastructure is aging and in many places decrepit. Rebuilding it would be an important source of job creation, but nothing on the scale that is needed is in sight. To get a sense of how important an issue this is, consider New Orleans.

The historian Douglas Brinkley, who lives in New Orleans, has written: “What people didn’t yet fully comprehend was that the overall disaster, the sinking of New Orleans, was a man-made debacle, resulting from poorly designed levees and floodwalls.”

We could have saved the victims of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe, but we didn’t. And now, more than 2 ½ years after the tragedy, we are still unable to lift the stricken city off its knees.

Other nations can provide health care for everyone. The United States cannot. In an era in which a college degree is becoming a prerequisite for a middle-class quality of life, we are having big trouble getting our kids through high school. And despite being the wealthiest of all nations, nearly 10 percent of Americans are resorting to food stamps to maintain an adequate diet, and 4 in every 10 American children are growing up in families that are poor or near-poor.

The U.S. seems almost paralyzed, mesmerized by Iraq and unable to generate the energy or the will to handle the myriad problems festering at home. The war will eventually cost a staggering $3 trillion or more, according to the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. When he was asked on “Democracy Now!” about who is profiting from the war, he said the two big gainers were the oil companies and the defense contractors.

This is the pathetic state of affairs in the U.S. as we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century. Whatever happened to the dynamic country that flexed its muscles after World War II and gave us the G.I. Bill, the Marshall Plan, the United Nations (in a quest for peace, not war), the interstate highway system, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the finest higher education system the world has known, and a standard of living that was the envy of all?

America’s commanding general in Iraq, David Petraeus, and our ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, went up to Capitol Hill this week but were unable to give any real answers as to when the U.S. might be able to disengage, or when a corner might be turned, or when a faint, flickering hopeful light might be glimpsed at the end of the long, horrific Iraqi tunnel.

A country that used to act like Babe Ruth now swings like a minor-leaguer. The all-American can-do philosophy has been smothered by the hapless can’t-do performances of the people who have been in charge for the past several years. It’s both tragic and embarrassing.

The war in Iraq stands like a boulder in the road, blocking progress on so many other important issues that are crucial to our viability as a society. We’ve seen this before. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which included the war on poverty, was crippled by the war in Vietnam.

On the evening of April 4, 1967, one year to the day before he was assassinated, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. went into Riverside Church in Manhattan and said of the war in Vietnam: “This madness must cease.”

Forty-one years later, we can still hear the echo of Dr. King’s call. The only sane response is: “Amen.”

FEMA to close Renaissance Village trailer site May 31

BAKER -- Margaret Chopin is quick to share her photograph of an East Baton Rouge Parish garden home, highlighting its well-kept lawn, ample garage and generous space for her husband, son and granddaughter.


But the New Orleans native and former Gentilly resident won't call it home any time soon.

Because a possible lease on the property fell through, Chopin shows it off only to illustrate the frustration and longing that come with living in a Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer in Renaissance Village, which opened in October 2005 in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

For Chopin and her neighbors, most of them from the New Orleans area and most having lived in Renaissance Village since it opened, the angst magnifies daily with the approach of FEMA's May 31 deadline to close all its remaining group trailer sites.

At one time the largest concentration of the travel trailers along the Gulf Coast, Renaissance's fences now envelop fewer than 190 trailers. This is down from the 580 that once filled the expansive gravel lot, which is just a short drive from the Louisiana Capitol. Residents have no monthly rent but do pay for propane.

Those who are left essentially have two choices: Find permanent housing or move to a hotel for 30 days on the federal government's dime while continuing their hunt.

Most would qualify for subsidized rent under a program financed by FEMA and run by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Residents would have to contribute $50 rent the first month, with their share increasing by $50 each month thereafter. The subsidy would end when the beneficiary covers the full rent amount or in March 2009, whichever comes first.

"I think some people think FEMA is going to come down out of the sky and give a lump sum to the people still here," said resident Bonnie Vernon, originally from Metairie, as she folded clothing in the communal laundry facility before hauling it back to her trailer in a red wagon with only three wheels. "I don't see how anybody who's lived through the last two years could believe that."

Manuel Broussard, spokesman for FEMA's Gulf Coast Recovery Office, described the situation as an opportunity for flood victims to couple self-reliance with the aid of FEMA case workers and the financial boost from the HUD-FEMA Disaster Housing Assistance Program to resume their lives.

'There's no way'

Statewide, group sites account for about 900 of the 20,146 FEMA trailers that were occupied as of April 4. More than 80 percent of those still in group sites were renters before the storms.

All residents are assigned a FEMA case worker to provide rental listings and put them in touch with potential landlords, but residents must secure the leases.

Broussard expressed concerns about meeting the closure deadline for parks in places such as Plaquemines Parish and southwest Louisiana, where he said trailer occupants outnumber viable rental units. But, he said, "we believe we're going to be in pretty good shape" getting the last 185-plus households out of Renaissance.

A more pessimistic view pervades among Renaissance residents, employees and Catholic Charities case managers who work in the park alongside FEMA's case workers. Citing a web of aggravating factors, they said the transition from a trailer is easier to talk about than to accomplish.

Wilbert Ross, displaced from the Lower 9th Ward, said "there's no way" FEMA will meet its deadline at Renaissance. Ross already has left the park once, but could not keep up with his rent.

Sam Sammartino, disaster response director for the Diocese of Baton Rouge, noted that FEMA has failed to meet previous deadlines for other Baton Rouge-area parks -- Mount Olive, Granberry, Sugar Hill -- typically by several months. He said Catholic Charities even attempts to slow down some residents who might be signing a lease they won't be able to afford once the subsidy runs out.

"It's easy to sit there and say, 'These people ought to get a job, get it together and move out,'" said Sammartino, who supervises more than a dozen recovery case workers for more than 900 client households in 12 parishes. "We would want everyone to consider that each case is complex, each case different."

The peak population for Renaissance was estimated in excess of 1,600 -- with more than 3,000 people residing there at some point since its opening. Sammartino said the current number of residents likely is at least double the 188 trailers. Most of the remaining households have children or senior citizens, or both.

Broussard said FEMA does not keep statistics on whether evacuees return to their original home parishes or neighborhoods. He said a majority have settled around Baton Rouge. New Orleanians who want to return mostly can do so, he said, provided they do not insist on returning to their previous neighborhood.

High local rents

The chief complaint about housing for those still looking is the rising rents of post-storm East Baton Rouge Parish, which was growing before the 2005 hurricanes and has absorbed a net gain of at least 25,000 people since.

Chopin, who works three part-time jobs inside the park, said her search for a home in East Baton Rouge Parish had been mostly discouraging. "If you can afford it, you don't want to live there," she said.

The disaster housing assistance will pay as much as 125 percent of the average fair market value for a residence in a given parish. Carol Spruell, spokeswoman for Catholic Charities, estimated that in East Baton Rouge, this is $800 to $900 for a two-bedroom apartment, more for a house. Both figures are considerably higher in Orleans Parish, she said.

Spruell said her organization estimates it would take at least a $17-an-hour, full-time job to make that rent in Baton Rouge with two dependents.

Transportation troubles

Residents say the lack of transportation also hampers their housing search.

Chopin said she and her husband have one car, but he uses it to get to his job on the support staff at a local school. That makes it difficult, she said, to balance her typical 11- to 12-hour work days with trips to find housing. "A case worker might take you or might not," she said.

A bus route, paid for by FEMA, runs about every hour from the park to the local Wal-Mart, Baker Library and central public bus terminal in Baton Rouge. But the last bus typically returns to the park at 9 to 10 p.m., residents said, limiting late-shift employment options.

For Renaissance residents who can find a place, additional barriers come in the form of utility and lease deposits, transporting trailer belongings to an apartment and buying appliances that none of them has now.

FEMA pays some deposits, and Catholic Charities fills some additional needs not covered by FEMA. But help with furniture and appliances falls entirely on private organizations.

One of the most frustrating gaps in service, Sammartino said, is transportation for moving. FEMA has a relocation assistance program, but the Renaissance residents who hail from the New Orleans area but settle around Baton Rouge do not qualify because they are not returning close enough to home.

"I've asked FEMA just to send trucks up here," he said. "I've gotten no response."

Mood of 'despair'

In some respects, FEMA officials said, Renaissance Village represents success stories. Empty trailer spots, marked by water pipes and other infrastructure rising from the gravel, dwarf the number of temporary residences still set up.

In the rear of the park are a playground and classroom buildings housing early childhood learning centers. The project was financed by actress-comic Rosie O'Donnell's foundation. Arcenia Crayton, a resident of the park from its opening until October 2007, staffs another building that serves as a community center in the morning before shifting to an after-school program.

But Chopin said the overriding mood still is "depression, ... despair." Sammartino said he daily fights "fear of the unknown" and "paralysis even among people who know what they need to do." And "FEMA" remains a four-letter word in most conversations.

Sammartino and others, meanwhile, said they worry FEMA will begin urging residents into hotels come June.

"Their job is not necessarily to get people into the right situation," said Crayton, who before the storm lived in Marrero with her husband and three sons. "Their job," she said, "is to get people out of that trailer."

Nearly 40,000 Katrina families still in mobile homes

ORLANDO, Florida (Reuters) - Almost three years after Hurricane Katrina, nearly 40,000 families still are living in vulnerable mobile homes and trailers across the U.S. Gulf Coast with another hurricane season just two months away, the top U.S. disaster official said on Wednesday.

The number is down from about 100,000 families, or some 300,000 people, in April 2006. At one point following the devastating 2005 hurricane season, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency was housing 143,000 families in mobile homes and trailers.

FEMA Administrator David Paulison said the agency, which was heavily criticized for its hapless response when Katrina swamped New Orleans, is moving about 800 families a week into hotels, motels or apartments.

The families are either living at group sites or in trailers in the driveways of their homes as they rebuild.

The six-month Atlantic hurricane season begins on June 1. Forecasters are expecting above-average storm activity.

"As far as rebuilding, I did expect it to take this long," Paulison told a small group of reporters at the National Hurricane Conference in Orlando. "But as far as housing people, I did not foresee that they would be there almost three years later."

Katrina killed 1,500 people and caused $80 billion in damage when it swept ashore in late August 2005 near New Orleans, shattering the levees protecting the low-lying city and swamping entire neighborhoods.

The three worst storms of 2005 -- Katrina, Rita and Wilma -- together caused about $110 billion in damages. The record-shattering season produced 28 tropical storms.

The presence of so many people in the flimsy temporary housing complicates preparations for the hurricane season because those families must be evacuated in the event of a threatening storm.

Paulison said the agency was on target to move everyone from the group sites by June 1 but was having "a lot of trouble" getting some of those displaced by Katrina to move again, even from cramped mobile homes that are often reduced to rubble in big storms.

"People simply don't want to move," he said. "It hasn't been as easy a task to get people out as we thought it might be."

FEMA allows report deadline to pass

WASHINGTON -- FEMA on Tuesday missed a second deadline for producing its plan, in the works since the 2005 hurricanes, for housing displaced victims of the next major American disaster.

The congressionally mandated report was supposed to be finished last June. Criticized for the delay, a top FEMA official promised at a hearing last month that it would be ready by April 1. It is now unclear when it will be done.

The overdue housing report is the latest in a string of busted deadlines that had been imposed by Congress in landmark disaster legislation passed in 2006. The law was designed to remake the nation's disaster response and prevent a repeat of the mistakes exposed by Hurricane Katrina.

This has ramifications much greater than south Louisiana or Mississippi or the Gulf Coast," Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said. "This dragging the feet, incompetence and lack of focus has serious consequences for future disasters where people think they are safe and are not."

'New FEMA'

FEMA officials acknowledge they have fallen behind in complying with some congressional mandates since Katrina -- more than 250 by their estimate -- that sought to rebuild the agency. They estimate 70 percent of the tasks have been completed and 15 percent await regulatory approval.

But they also say that focusing on missed report deadlines obscures real progress the agency has made in improving on-the-ground response capabilities since its much-maligned performance in Katrina.

Drawing on White House, congressional and other governmental reviews, "New FEMA," as they call it, is better prepared to respond to a disaster than at any time in the agency's 29-year history, they say.

"There is a tremendous amount of stuff in place," said Marko Bourne, FEMA's director of policy and program analysis. "By the time we hit summer, the only thing that should be outstanding are the things that need regulatory action."

Frustration mounts

Still, the slow pace has irritated lawmakers, particularly those along the Gulf Coast.

Last April, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, complained to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff about the department's "failure to meet numerous reporting deadlines" contained in the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act, which President Bush signed Oct. 4, 2006.

He listed a dozen overdue reports in a letter to Chertoff. At the time, Thompson said the committee had sent "numerous letters" to the Homeland Security Department, which oversees FEMA, but "has yet to get an adequate response."

Chertoff sympathized, saying, "I understand your frustration." He assured Thompson that all of the late reports were "in varying stages of internal review," but seemed to chafe at the number of the congressional assignments -- 393 required by the Department of Homeland Security in 2007.

"The very high volume of congressional reports all must be approved by the Department's appropriate leadership team and must all receive further administration coordination," Chertoff wrote.

FEMA's Bourne said the agency has picked up the pace of complying with congressional mandates since it has hired new people. FEMA had about 1,800 employees in 2006. The workforce is now more than 3,100 and headed toward 4,300.

"As we gain capability, we are getting more of the harder things accomplished," Bourne said.

Landrieu, who is chairwoman of a disaster subcommittee and a member of the Appropriations Committee, said that if the Homeland Security Department or FEMA needs additional resources to comply with congressional mandates, it should ask.

"We would be happy to give it," she said.

'Few simple answers'

Few overdue plans are seen as critical as housing. The federal and state governments were overwhelmed when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita caused major or severe damage to 204,500 homes in Louisiana. Some storm victims were housed in apartments or hotels. Others took up residence in FEMA-provided travel trailers.

Deadlines for hotel and apartment stays were repeatedly extended to contend with the large number of displaced residents. Some trailer residents began complaining about respiratory problems and unusually high levels of formaldehyde, a possible carcinogen, were detected.

At a hearing March 4 before Landrieu's disaster subcommittee, FEMA's acting deputy administrator, Harvey Johnson, said the delay in developing a housing strategy for future disasters was caused by disagreement within the administration about what to do about the formaldehyde in trailers.

There are few simple answers," Johnson said at the hearing and promised the housing strategy by April 1.

As of Tuesday, FEMA has also failed to report on a congressionally mandated "surge capacity force" of disaster specialists who would be dispatched to the scene of a calamity quickly to assess the damage and map out the initial needs on the ground.

Also past due is a report on FEMA's strategy for helping communities recover after a disaster. The damage caused by Katrina and Rita was so widespread that the region is still struggling to regain a normal semblance of life.

FEMA's Bourne called the "National Recovery Strategy" a "big animal" that must plan for incidents large and small. He said the agency has been working on it, but that the recovery plan can't be completed before the unfinished housing strategy is in place.

"We needed housing strategy done," he said. "We couldn't get cart before the horse."