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.”

Did Road Home treat all neighborhoods fairly?

It depends on how you look at it

Mortgage lender Carol Johnson has seen her clients and neighbors, mostly black middle-class folks, struggle to return to New Orleans from their post-Katrina exile, while the city's more affluent areas are buoyed by the sounds and sights of rebuilding.

Johnson believes the disparity has much to do with the way the Road Home relief program works. So she was angered but not surprised recently when she scanned a map produced by demographer Greg Rigamer, one showing how different parts of the city fared in the allocation of Road Home grants.

Reflecting about 40,000 Road Home grants in Orleans Parish through April 15, Rigamer's map shows the highest concentration of grants between $115,000 and the $150,000 limit went to residents of Lakeview, Lakewood and Eastover -- among the most expensive real estate in the city's heavily flooded neighborhoods. Eastern New Orleans, by contrast, has a high concentration of grants between $40,000 and $65,000.

The disparity can be traced, to a large degree, to a decision by the Louisiana Recovery Authority and federal housing officials to calculate grants based on a home's pre-storm value or an estimate of how much it should cost to rebuild it -- but mandating that the grant must be the lower of the two figures. In areas with modest-to-low property values before Katrina hit, the formula typically means a lower grant amount.

"This is discrimination based on the pre-storm value of a house," said Johnson, whose company serves mostly minority customers. "Someone in Pontchartrain Park can't rebuild, but you take the same property in Lakeview and you'd get a lot more money."

But the pattern that caught Johnson's eye doesn't tell the complete story. The assumption that the amount of Road Home grants should guarantee every homeowner the financial resources to rebuild is flawed, based on program rules. The federal government classifies Road Home as a compensation program, intended to combine grants with insurance proceeds to help homeowners recoup the pre-storm value of their home.

Federal officials were guarded about compensating homeowners well beyond that amount. If compensating homeowners for the pre-storm value leaves them in need of additional money to rebuild, the owners could try to cover the gap via a low-interest loan through the Small Business Administration. Road Home also allows an additional grant of up to $50,000 for residents in the lowest income brackets.

Looking solely at the average amount of Road Home grants by neighborhood also overlooks an important factor: The amount of money those homeowners originally paid to purchase homes in the city's more expensive locales. For example, it makes sense that a homeowner in Eastover would receive a larger compensation grant simply because that homeowner spent more money to buy a home in Eastover before the hurricanes. Moreover, the Eastover homeowner may still be in the hole because the grants are capped at $150,000.

Middle-income areas, including much of eastern New Orleans, were likely to receive the smallest Road Home grants because of the mix of modest property values and high rates of insurance coverage. And families in those neighborhoods typically found they made too much money to qualify for the low-income supplementary grants.

To determine how well the Road Home program has compensated homeowners for their losses, Rigamer's analysts at GCR & Associates Inc. analyzed average grants as a percentage of median pre-storm values in each neighborhood.

That data run showed that the program most fully compensated those in lower-income neighborhoods but fell short in covering homeowner losses in more affluent areas where losses typically exceeded the $150,000 grant limit.

The analysis shows:

-- Average Road Home grants were actually higher than the pre-storm values of homes in large swaths of poorer neighborhoods, places that served as the emotional touchstones of Katrina's wrath. The typical grant recipient in the Lower 9th Ward, St. Claude, St. Roch, the 7th Ward, Central City, Hollygrove and parts of Gentilly collected more than 115 percent of the neighborhood's median property value.

-- Residents in Lakewood, West End, Lakeview, Lakeshore and Lake Vista -- fully or partly flooded zones with high grant averages -- each received less than the citywide average of 68 percent of pre-storm value.

"It's the upper-priced homes that had the biggest gaps in protection," said Arthur Sterbcow, president of the Latter & Blum real estate firm and someone who has testified on Capitol Hill about New Orleans market challenges since the 2005 storms. "Lakeview, Eastover: These guys got the shortfall."

In Lakeview, many homes were enormously costly to repair, said GiGi Burke, a real estate agent who focuses on lakefront neighborhoods.

"It affected the very wealthy, too, and you don't hear too much about that," she said. "The bottom line is, they're losing a lot more money."

--- Less value, same costs ---

The Road Home grant figures don't provide a complete picture of who has enough to rebuild and who doesn't.

The unprecedented federally underwritten program was designed to work hand-in-hand with insurance payments and other government disaster aid to make homeowners whole, but the amount of insurance carried by homeowners varied widely. Without knowing insurance payouts, generalizations from grant data can be misleading.

But some trends are emerging as data become available from about 109,000 grants, valued at $6.4 billion. The impact of the program on rebuilding rates dates to Louisiana recovery officials' choice to use pre-storm values of properties as a key reference point.

While a home in Lakeview was worth substantially more before the storm than a home of comparable size in the Lower 9th Ward, owners of either destroyed home face similar costs, on a per-square-foot basis, in paying for materials, labor and other construction costs.

But when the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development classified the Road Home as a compensation effort instead of a rebuilding program, that drove how grants would be calculated. In a compromise designed in part to limit costs, federal and state officials agreed use the lower of a property's pre-storm value or a replacement cost of $130 a square foot for homes more than 51 percent damaged.

A 1,500-square-foot house totaled by storm waters in Lakeview, for example, might have been worth $250,000 before Katrina. In the Lower 9th Ward, a home of the same size may have been worth $70,000. But while the Lakeview owner's grant would be calculated on the basis of a $195,000 replacement cost, the 9th Ward owner's would be based on the much lower pre-storm property value.

If both homes had been covered by $40,000 in insurance, the Lakeview home would have qualified for the full $150,000 Road Home grant and the 9th Ward applicant would have been left with $30,000. The 9th Ward homeowner would have been fully compensated for the pre-storm value of the property, while the Lakeview resident would be short $60,000.

Both likely would need more money to rebuild, but the fully compensated 9th Ward homeowner would need more. Lower-income families can apply for loans to close the gap, but they typically face more difficulty qualifying.

The LRA recognized the potential problem and created an additional loan -- the state later made it a simple grant -- of up to $50,000 for those making less than 80 percent of the metro area's median household income. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development sets the 80 percent limit at $36,500 for a family of two and $45,600 for a four-person household.

With the additional grant, it's possible for a low-income homeowner to collect up to $50,000 more, although the total Road Home grant still cannot exceed $150,000.

If the theoretical 9th Ward homeowner qualified as low-income, he or she could have collected a total of $80,000 from Road Home, more than the home's $70,000 pre-storm value.

"It shows the Road Home program was progressive in a way," said John Lovett, a law professor at Loyola University who has criticized the Road Home's design. "Maybe it was more generous than we give it credit for."

--- Grants affect return rate ---

That doesn't mean the program is generous enough to spur rebuilding.
Through April 15, 1,242 Lower 9th Ward families had received Road Home checks. That's more than 40 percent of the 2,975 owner-occupied units identified by the federal government immediately after Katrina flooded virtually every property in the area.

Yet nonprofit groups estimate that only 10 percent to 15 percent of families have returned to the Lower 9th Ward. They believe a key reason is the reliance on pre-storm property values in the Road Home formula.

Residents who gathered for a Lower 9th Ward workshop last weekend were eager to learn how to appeal for more Road Home money. Most left disappointed, realizing they couldn't buck the grant formula.

Robert Richardson inherited his 1,283-square-foot home on Caffin Avenue when his father died. Road Home officials informed him it would cost more than $166,000 to rebuild the home, under the $130-a-square-foot formula, but its pre-storm value was just $71,000. Even with a $50,000 low-income grant, Richardson said the resulting $92,000 Road Home award wouldn't get him close enough to the full cost of rebuilding.

"Three generations of my family owned that house," he said. "The formula makes it seem like it's fair across the board when it isn't."

One way Richardson could rebuild the home is to apply the $92,000 toward the cost and seek a $74,000 mortgage to cover the balance. Although he would be left making payments on a home he owned outright before the flood, he would own a completely rebuilt home presumably meeting stronger building codes than the dwelling that existed before the flood.

The New Orleans Recovery Continues, Feds Welcome to Jump Aboard

This week, I got a tour of the Lower Ninth Ward. It was by no means my first visit to the area; virtually every time I return to New Orleans, I drive myself (and/or my visitors from out of town) around some of the vast flood-devastated real estate of the city, to see for myself how the grass-roots recovery is faring. Ever since last fall, when I drove through the Lower 9 with the producer of my Crescent City Stories series for MyDamnChannel.com, I've been amazed and inspired by the area's signs of life. But it took this week's tour, courtesy of the Preservation Resource Center, for me to realize just how false is the national media's depiction of the Lower 9 as dead, derelict and devastated. There are streets -- like the two blocks of Egania Street I happened onto last fall -- and neighborhoods -- like Holy Cross, where PRC is concentrating much of its restoration and rebuilding effort -- that astonish with rebuilt, re-landscaped and re-occupied little (and not so little) homes, mostly restored in the vernacular styles of the area. The Lower 9 shares with districts as undevastated as the French Quarter the curse of streets badly in need of repair (a major road-repair program in the city was announced just this week, nearly three years after the floodwaters were pumped out). And of course, there's the ever-present threat that the Army Corps of Engineers is still...the Army Corps. See this story on seepage at the 17th St. Canal for a real deja-uh-oh experience.

Yet the recovery by homeowners, assisted by dedicated organizations like the PRC, continues, blessed, as I tell my friends there, by the absence of the illusion of leadership. Speaking of which, Sen. Mary Landrieu has inserted in the new War Money Act (my name for it) some provisions for the Gulf Coast's recovery, including:

$6 billion for 100-year flood protection for the New Orleans area, with Louisiana's share reduced from $1.5 billion to $1.3 billion and the state given 30 years, instead of the usual three years, to make the payments.

-- $75 million to move public facilities from the Port of New Orleans to accelerate the closing of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet and language directing the Corps of Engineers to look at more expensive options for permanent pumping of storm water in the New Orleans metropolitan area.

-- $75 million for criminal justice needs along the Gulf Coast.

-- $157 million to help six New Orleans area hospitals deal with post-hurricane health care costs.

-- $70 million for 3,000 supportive housing vouchers to help low-income workers find housing in the New Orleans area.

On that latter point, $70 million won't go very far when the rents in the city have doubled and tripled, due to so many rental units being taken off the market due to flood damage. Yet, there's still no federal effort to help jumpstart the renovation and rebuilding of rental units, the only sure way to "help low-income workers find housing." Rep. Barney Frank is head of the relevant committee in the House. How does he stand on helping the working class of New Orleans come home?

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.