Contractor faces new fraud claims

A Slidell contractor is behind bars for the second time in six months on allegations he defrauded and stole from Hurricane Katrina victims, Slidell police said Tuesday.

James J. Moore, 47, 175 Meadowmoss Drive, was arrested Monday while he was working on another house. He was booked on two warrants alleging theft over $500, police spokesman Capt. Kevin Foltz said.

The latest arrest came after an Arrowhead Drive resident whose home was damaged by Katrina told police Moore took two payments totaling $15,000 in October to remove the home and its foundation from the property, Foltz said. The homeowner was unable to contact Moore after he removed the home but left the foundation, Foltz said.

Police arrested Moore, who was out on bond after being booked on three counts of theft over $500 in December, after one of the homeowners noticed him working on another home in Slidell, Foltz said.

Moore first came to the attention of authorities in November, after a homeowner in the Palms Springs neighborhood told police Moore had taken about $1,000 in roofing materials the homeowner had purchased, Foltz said. The homeowner had hired Moore to fix the roof of the house, Foltz said.

A few weeks after the first complaint, Moore contacted the owner of Water Tight Roofing and asked that the company purchase $1,800 worth of materials for the Palm Springs job, Foltz said. Moore reimbursed the company with a check but put a "stop payment" on it after the materials were delivered, he said.

In December, the Palm Springs homeowner told police that although Moore had been paid $15,000 for the repairs, he had only completed about $6,000 of the work, Foltz said.

Moore was booked Dec. 18 on three counts of theft over $500 and released on a $2,500 bond, Foltz said.

Slidell police also are investigating another complaint from a fourth person who alleged Moore defrauded him on $250,000 worth of work, Foltz said.

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

FEMA trailer occupant killed after police standoff

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- Eric Minshew struggled with mental illness for many years and seemed to get much worse after Hurricane Katrina, according to his brother. Finally, when FEMA workers showed up to inspect his government-issue trailer, he snapped. Police shot and killed Minshew early Wednesday after a nearly 10-hour standoff in one of the neighborhoods hit hardest by the August 2005 hurricane.

Authorities said the 49-year-old Minshew had threatened the FEMA inspectors with a gun, then fired several shots at police after they arrived. He was killed after pointing a gun at officers, police said.

Minshew had been living alone in the FEMA trailer outside his parents' house, which had to be gutted because of damage from Katrina. He felt let down by the government, had grown frustrated over the damage and the wait for rebuilding aid, and feared his hopes of inheriting the house were slipping away, said his brother, Homer M. Minshew III.

"I think that the storm took away his hope, and all of the issues involved in it sort of fed the fire," he said. He added: "A lot of people who didn't struggle before were struggling after the storm."

The Federal Emergency Management Agency inspection was a first step toward taking the trailer away. FEMA has been pushing to get residents out of trailers, in part because of dangerous levels of formaldehyde fumes in many of them.

New Orleans' mental health system was thrown into disarray by Katrina and suffers a severe shortage of psychiatric beds. Earlier this year, a police officer was killed by a homeless man who was said to have been diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic.

But Homer Minshew suggested the turmoil in the mental health system was not really a factor in his brother's death. He said he and his family had begged his brother to get help, but he wouldn't listen.

James Arey, commander of the police crisis intervention team, said the case "doesn't have anything to do with Katrina."

"I'd love to rant and rave about lack of treatment (facilities) and all of that, but that doesn't relate to this case," he said.

Homer Minshew said his brother had moved in with his parents about eight years ago, with no money and no job. He had worked as a security guard, which is how he came to own a gun, Minshew said.

The house had been put up for sale by the sheriff a year ago, but Homer Minshew had held off foreclosure and was negotiating with the bank. He said the family had been awaiting aid from the state-run hurricane relief program so they could either pay off the mortgage or fix up the house and sell it.

Minshew was shot and killed after retreating to the house and barricading himself there.

He suffered from delusions and often couldn't be reasoned with, according to his brother.

"He had a lot of serious mental issues and would all of a sudden go off on a rant about the government, the local, state government, the feds and everything else," his brother said. "He has some issues. He just snapped. Thank God nobody else got hurt."

Rosemarie Brocato, who lives about a block away from the house, said Minshew seemed lonely, often stopping her to talk for a half-hour at a time when she passed his house. "He just needed someone to talk to, I guess. I felt sorry for him," she said.

The shooting took place in Lakeview, one of the city's more prosperous neighborhoods. It was swamped with as much as 11 feet of water after a levee broke.

The whole block on which the trailer sat appeared abandoned, with an empty, overgrown lot next door and houses unrepaired since the storm, their windows broken. Minshew's trailer was the only one visible for blocks along the street, dotted with derelict properties, for-sale signs and beautifully rebuilt homes.

Taped to the front window of Minshew's house were a newspaper article headlined "Do you have a legal right to own a gun?" and a no-trespassing sign. A car in the driveway had two flat tires.

FEMA spokesman James McIntyre said that he couldn't release specifics about Minshew's case but that the FEMA workers "were operating within prescribed procedures to perform a move-out inspection when the applicant exited his housing unit wearing a firearm."

The officers involved have been reassigned to administrative duties during the investigation, which is standard procedure, police said.

Minshew said he didn't fault FEMA or the police, who he said gave his brother "every opportunity" to end the standoff peacefully. But he said he believes his brother "just kind of fell through the cracks."

Mayor Ray Nagin has set Aug. 29, the storm's three-year anniversary, as his goal for getting rid of the last of the trailers in the city. As of Tuesday, nearly 4,930 remained.

Holdouts Test Aid’s Limitations as FEMA Shuts a Trailer Park

BAKER, La. — Theresa August spent the official closing day of the Renaissance Village trailer park singing, muttering to herself and dancing on a picnic table. Finally, wearing an infant’s flowered onesie on her head like a kerchief, she began to pack up.

Ms. August, 39, giggled on the steps of her overflowing trailer last Saturday as Sister Judith Brun asked when she might be able to leave the trailer park that, at its peak, housed almost 600 families displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Sunday? No response. Monday? A smile.

But by Monday, Sister Judith, a nun who has been an almost constant presence during the park’s waning weeks, had learned that Ms. August’s destination was not, as the situation seemed to demand, a placement supervised by a professional caregiver, but an apartment in New Orleans found by a friend. Because it was clear to Sister Judith that Ms. August was not capable of riding a bus and moving into the apartment on her own, as FEMA had planned, Sister Judith decided to postpone the trip a day until she herself could take Ms. August, who has been known to wander off.

The closing of Renaissance Village, near Baton Rouge, and the other remaining FEMA parks represents the final chapter in one of the largest and most tumultuous efforts by the federal government to provide emergency housing to a displaced population. Over the course of two years and nine months, the Federal Emergency Management Agency put up 9,000 families in trailer parks scattered around the Gulf area, where residents endured cramped, inadequate and often poisonous conditions.

Many Louisiana residents shared a similar reaction to the announcement that the parks would close at the end of May: It’s about time. After all, more than 800 families had passed through Renaissance Village’s gates and managed to move on with their lives in their own homes. Why not the rest?

As residents like Ms. August make clear, that question has no simple answer. Those remaining are the hardest to help, posing the toughest test of the oft-repeated promise that the recovery from Hurricane Katrina would at least offer the opportunity to rectify the social ills the storm exposed.

Reason holds little sway over the residents of this microcosm. Some of those most in need have proved to be, out of pride or paranoia, the least likely to accept help. Those who under normal circumstances have little leverage have become the most demanding holdouts. Those ill-equipped for real-world survival cling with surprising tenacity to the place they have come to think of as home.

As the last day came and went, many of those left in the park (38 trailers full, by FEMA’s count) were exemplars of New Orleans’s most persistent problems before the storm: old, unhealthy, delusional, mentally challenged, addicted, illiterate, senile. They have bad credit, criminal records, exasperated relatives. They are often unreliable narrators of their own stories.

Though the government has failed these residents in many ways and for many years, in the final weeks ample assistance has been available — from gas money and food vouchers to utility deposits and hotel rooms, even for those technically ineligible for FEMA assistance. Catholic Charities has helped with furniture and deposits; the Capitol Area Alliance for the Homeless has offered rent subsidies for those who are ineligible. Sister Judith has delivered groceries and arranged rides, sympathized and scolded, strategically dispensed small wads of cash to plug the gaps in the system.

Yet for all that, to follow the last residents as they are dragged toward self-sufficiency is to witness a clanging, screeching streetcar of human and bureaucratic limitations that seems to lurch backward as often as forward. On Tuesday, Sister Judith and Ms. August arrived in New Orleans in a hired van, only to learn that there was no electricity, no mattress and no one to let them into the apartment.

They returned to Renaissance Village.

“The question I keep coming back to,” Sister Judith said, “is why is there still so much need?”

Facing Life on Their Own

Alton Love, 41, rode his bicycle, back tire sagging, down a hot Baton Rouge street with his 9-year-old daughter on his handlebars, looking for the man to whom he had given his car two months before on a promise it would be fixed. He has not seen the car since.

LaTonya London, 24, was at home with four of her five children but no money, no car and no diapers.

Laura Hilton, 45, was clutching a lease for a four-bedroom home in New Orleans for $1,650 a month. Her income, in the form of government disability payments, is $1,600 a month.

These are scenes from the multiple stages of moving out and moving on. As the deadline loomed, the approximately 450 families still in the parks responded in different ways. Some finally opened the door when the FEMA workers knocked, or boarded a van hired by Sister Judith to hunt for apartments. Others broke down in tears, became entangled in delusional schemes or did nothing, passively waiting for one level of government to hand them off to another. FEMA officials said they would not forcibly remove those who remained.

FEMA, which ultimately is a disaster-response agency, not a social service department, endured years of blistering criticism for its failure to understand that many New Orleans residents needed more than just a roof over their heads after the hurricane. The agency now is quick to admit that other agencies are better equipped to handle persistent social ills. Its job in cases like that of Ms. August, FEMA officials say, is limited to getting her housed.

Still, in its awkward fashion, the agency designed a gradual transition for residents from the parks and government care, offering an intermediate step of a 30-day hotel stay. After residents spend the first month in an apartment, the Disaster Housing Assistance Program, administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, would kick in, paying the full rent until March 1, 2009.

But each phase presents an opportunity for failure as well as success. What happens to those in hotels who still have not found housing at the end of 30 days? What happens to those who, come March, are in apartments too expensive to afford on their own? What about those who, for various reasons, are already ineligible for rental assistance?

At least 30 families or individuals living in Renaissance Village in its final weeks fell into the last category: Mr. Love because he could not account for the $800 FEMA gave him for rental assistance right after the storm; Ms. London because she opted to leave after her boyfriend, whose criminal record includes arrests for burglary and drug possession with intent to distribute, was banned from the park; Ms. Hilton, who can barely read, because FEMA was unable to verify her pre-storm address.

Concerns About Future

Ms. London, who eventually moved to a $900-a-month house subsidized by the Homeless Alliance, acknowledged how easy it would have been to stay in the trailer park and remain dependent.

“Being in that trailer, having all that stuff, it was like we became crippled,” she said. “You had free rent; you didn’t have to worry about light bills.”

Before the storm, she said, “I was being independent. Now I feel like I’m leaning — I’m leaning.”

Ms. Hilton wanted to move her sons, George, 17, and Roy, 10, back to New Orleans because her daughter and grandchildren live there. Through the Capital Area Alliance for the Homeless, a rent subsidy could be arranged, but Sister Judith, who has focused her efforts on keeping the ineligibles off the streets, is concerned about what will happen when the subsidies expire.

“O.K., you can’t sign this lease,” she told Ms. Hilton, who stared at the ground, which was littered with beer cans. “You can’t afford this, you’re going to wind up getting evicted, then you’re going to be homeless.”

Ms. Hilton wailed, “I’m already homeless!”

Sister Judith said, “You’re going to move to a place that costs more than you get a month, does that make any sense?”

Ms. Hilton had no good answer. When Sister Judith walked away, Ms. Hilton gave a sigh. “Makes you want to drink,” she said.

Hoping for Kindness

There are some families that have been literally riven in the course of the park’s closing. Right after the storm, Joseph Griffin and his girlfriend, Sherryl Harris, lived in a trailer with Mr. Griffin’s sons, Jamal and Jermaine. The boys worked with the art therapists who came periodically to the park, and Jermaine was selected for a scholarship to Idyllwild Arts summer camp in California.

Now Jermaine, 16, has left home and school, and is staying with another family in Kenner, outside New Orleans, where he has a job at a Dairy Queen. Jamal, 13, is staying with his grandmother in Baton Rouge. Ms. Harris is getting her own place.

Mr. Griffin hopes that his boys will come back. As soon as he finds a home.

Not every case seems as difficult, however. Gloria Martin, 51, was prescribed psychiatric medication after the storm for, she said, “hearing voices.” When the medication was stolen, she began to get arrested — once for standing in the middle of the road at night, another time for getting into a fight at the food stamp office. She lost her FEMA eligibility when she went to prison.

But Sister Judith’s team found her a place at Connections for Life, a yearlong program in Baton Rouge for female ex-offenders. On move-in day, Ms. Martin moved like a person in shock. One week later, she was radiant, cheerfully working at the Connections for Life thrift store, where she helped a one-eyed man find window shades.

“I had never had nothing like this happen to me before,” she said. “A free apartment and a job, free clothes and shoes, and eating good. And sleeping good.”

Family felt like 'lab rats' in FEMA trailer

Medical care runs to 4,000 pages, $10,000

It was when the sight of a bloody child became routine that Lindsay Huckabee broke down and cried. She and her husband, Steve, had spent months dealing with "two, three, four nosebleeds a week," in their FEMA mobile home, she said. When it wasn't a nosebleed, one child or another had burning eyes, coughing, congestion and "colds" that wouldn't go away.

The Huckabee children - Vicki, now 13, Caitlin, 9, Lelah, 6, Steven, 4, and Michael, 2 - were regulars at the emergency room from early 2006 onward. Lelah and Michael had surgeries related to chronic breathing problems. Every week, it seemed, at least one child went to the doctor.

"The receptionist knew me by my first name, and I swear she probably knew my voice, too," Huckabee said.

The Huckabees have become icons for a Sierra Club movement that believes formaldehyde fumes in FEMA trailers have caused widespread poisoning of hurricane victims. The organization tested the formaldehyde levels of 69 FEMA trailers. Based on an industrial standard, most tested high, as did the Huckabees'. The Sierra Club is now campaigning for stringent standards on formaldehyde levels in building products, where it is used in glues, resins, particle board and sometimes insulation.

There is no one standard for an acceptable level of formaldehyde exposure. The Occupational Health and Safety Administration has one set of standards. The Department of Housing and Urban Development has another. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, through its Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, has another set of standards far below the others. The Huckabees' mobile home tested just above one of OSHA's standards, just below HUD's standard and well above ATSDR's standard.

Several agencies list formaldehyde as a likely carcinogen.

Lindsay has become an erstwhile spokeswoman for the movement, having testified before Congress twice about her family's health issues while living in FEMA trailers, once for House Oversight Committee and again for the Committee for Science and Technology.

The Huckabees' Pass Christian apartment was flooded to the ceiling by Katrina. They received a travel trailer in October 2005, then a mobile home in December 2005. Lindsay went into early labor. Michael was born four weeks prematurely, and within a few days he was congested. For the first two years of his life, she said, he stayed that way. Before FEMA housing, the Huckabees said most illnesses were treated with Tylenol; they didn't chase their children around with anti-bacterial gel or call the doctor for every sniffle.

"I asked my doctor what I was doing wrong. Why couldn't I get my kids healthy and keep them that way?" Lindsay said.

The CDC wrote in its March 2008 FEMA trailer and mobile home assessment "there is no specific level of formaldehyde that separates "safe" from "dangerous." It found although levels of formaldehyde varied from unit to unit of a particular brand, nearly all brands of FEMA housing tested had units with high levels of formaldehyde. Though it did not declare high levels of formaldehyde unsafe, CDC "supported the need to move quickly," and get people out of FEMA housing before summer, as heat can increase formaldehyde fumes.

FEMA set a target date of June 1 to close its travel trailer parks. This phase is done, said spokesperson Eugene Brezany. Eight mobile home parks are still open, and they will be closed by the end of the year. Most of the 6,400 families still in FEMA trailers are on private land.

The hearings at which Lindsay testified were convened after internal e-mails suggested FEMA and the CDC knew the trailers could be contaminated, yet delayed testing and tried to quash the results. This is the most damning thing to the Huckabees - spending extra weeks and months in a trailer the government knew was unsafe.

They have 4,000 pages of medical records. They've spent at least $10,000 out of pocket for what health insurance won't cover. Steve is a surveillance technician at Hollywood Casino in Bay St. Louis. They believe if the cause of their health problems was not formaldehyde alone, it certainly made things worse.

"I feel like after it was first known that the formaldehyde was a problem, we were lab rats subjected to the toxin, but no one wanted to record the results," Lindsay said.

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 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.''

Leaky New Orleans levee alarms experts

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- Despite more than $22 million in repairs, a levee that broke with catastrophic effect during Hurricane Katrina is leaking again because of the mushy ground on which New Orleans was built, raising serious questions about the reliability of the city's flood defenses.

Outside engineering experts who have studied the project told The Associated Press that the type of seepage spotted at the 17th Street Canal in the Lakeview neighborhood afflicts other New Orleans levees, too, and could cause some of them to collapse during a storm.

The Army Corps of Engineers has spent about $4 billion so far of the $14 billion set aside by Congress to repair and upgrade the metropolitan area's hundreds of miles of levees by 2011. Some outside experts said the leak could mean that billions more will be needed and that some of the work already completed may need to be redone.

"It is all based on a 30-year-old defunct model of thinking, and it means that when they wake up to this one -- really -- our cost is going to increase significantly," said Bob Bea, a civil engineer at the University of California at Berkeley.

The Army Corps of Engineers disputed the experts' dire assessment. The agency said it is taking the risk of seepage into account and rebuilding the levees with an adequate margin of safety.

"It's always a potential, so it is a design component for every feature," said Walter Baumy, the chief corps engineer in New Orleans.

The 17th Street Canal floodwall collapsed on the day Katrina surged over New Orleans in August 2005, and the failure severely damaged Lakeview. It was one of the biggest of about 50 levee breaches that contributed to the deaths of about 1,300 people.

Fixing the 17th Street Canal has been one of the most expensive and laborious repair jobs since the storm and has served as something of a test case for scientists and engineers, who plan to apply the lessons learned there to the city's other levees.

Among other things, they repaired the wall by driving interlocking sheets of steel 60 feet into the ground, compared with about 17 feet before the storm. The sheet metal is supposed to prevent canal water from seeping under the levee through the wet, toothpaste-like soil that lies beneath the city, which was built on reclaimed swamp and filled-in marsh.

Over the past few months, however, the corps found evidence that canal water is seeping through the joints in the sheet metal and then rising to the surface on the other side of the levee, forming puddles and other wet spots.

Engineers said the boggy ground is a more serious problem than the corps realizes. Bea said there is a roughly 40 percent chance of the 17th Street Canal levee collapsing if water rises higher than 6 feet above sea level. During Katrina, the water reached 7 feet in the canal.

John Schmertmann, a retired University of Florida professor and a consultant on foundations, agreed with Bea that the corps "may still be embedding some of these not-properly-considered factors, so the new walls may not do what the corps expects."

Reducing such seepage might require the driving of sheet metal far deeper into the ground than is done now, or some other solution, said Bea, who was part of a team of experts sent by the National Science Foundation to do an independent study of the levee failures during Katrina.

Donald Jolissaint, chief of the corps' technical support branch in New Orleans, denied the problem at the 17th Street Canal is serious.

"I personally do not at all believe that this little wet spot is anything that is going to cause a breach or a failure of any kind," he said. A newly installed floodgate could be used to cut off the flow of water into the canal and reduce pressure on the levee, he said.

Nevertheless, the corps is concerned enough that for weeks, workers have been analyzing the wet spots and digging a 160-foot-long, 10-foot-deep trench to zero in on the source. "We're doing everything we can to chase this down," Jolissaint said.

The corps is also spending about $100 million by taking more than 2,000 soil borings to find out what is under the ground and determine the best design.

Timothy Kusky, a geologist with Saint Louis University and an expert on the Mississippi River, said engineering a safe levee system in New Orleans will be very difficult because of the soil.

"You've got old riverbeds and floodplain deposits all interlayered and distributed laterally in a very complex way, and then you build a levee across them," Kusky said.

As a result, a levee sinks at different rates, and the sinking creates "little cracks in them that promote seepage, and also the old river channels and floodplain deposits have different potentials for underseepage," he said.

He said the corps understands a lot of the problems, but it takes a huge amount of data to map every weakness, and the agency does not have the manpower to see that every contractor is doing the job right.

Seepage was reported at the 17th Street Canal before Katrina. The corps denies that caused the collapse. Instead, the corps contends the floodwall flexed and finally cracked under the force of water piled against it by the storm.

Ex-Army Corps consultant indicted in bribery case

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- A former Army Corps of Engineers consultant and a dirt subcontractor were indicted Thursday on bribery charges stemming from an investigation into levee work after Hurricane Katrina.

Durwanda Elizabeth Morgan Heinrich, a dirt, sand and gravel subcontractor, was accused of conspiring with two former corps workers to get confidential bid information for a $16.8 million levee project southwest of New Orleans in September 2006.

In exchange, the indictment said, Heinrich promised to give the workers, Kern Carver Bernard Wilson and Raul Miranda, 25 cents for every cubic yard of material used to build levees near Lake Cataouatche.

The arrangement would have funneled $299,375 each to Wilson and Miranda, the Justice Department said.

Heinrich was charged by a federal grand jury in New Orleans with one count of conspiring to commit bribery and two counts of offering a bribe to a public official.

Wilson, who was working for the corps as a consultant on the levee enlargement project, was charged with one count of conspiring to commit bribery and one count of demanding and agreeing to accept a bribe as a public official.

Each faces a maximum of five years in prison and fines if convicted on the conspiracy charge and a maximum of 15 years in prison and fines on each bribery charge.

The Justice Department did not return calls seeking information on lawyers for those indicted, and phone listings could not be found for the accused.

Maj. Timothy Kurgan, a corps spokesman in New Orleans, declined to comment Thursday but said his agency had turned over information about alleged wrongdoing to the Army's criminal investigation division.

Miranda, who pleaded guilty in September to bribery, was a construction manager for Integrated Logistical Support Inc., a New Orleans civil engineering firm hired to help the corps manage some of its projects.

Miranda, 50, of Spring, Texas, faces up to 15 years in prison and heavy fines at sentencing in October.

The investigation surrounding the Lake Cataouatche project has been the only case of criminal wrongdoing in levee work so far prosecuted by the Justice Department.

After Katrina hit the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts, flooded 80 percent of New Orleans and killed more than 1,600 people, Congress gave the corps billions of dollars to repair damaged levees and upgrade others.

The Lake Cataouatche levees protect an area of suburbs and small towns on the western side of the Mississippi River.

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.' "

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 the