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.

It's official: Hurricane Katrina chased out a huge chunk of N.O. voters, remaking the region's electoral landscape

A new study by a political scientist confirms what election-watchers have suspected since Hurricane Katrina: The number of voters in the New Orleans area has fallen sharply, with African-Americans and registered Democrats losing the most ground.

The political landscape has shifted, especially in New Orleans.

Though voter rolls have remained virtually untouched since the flood, the comparison of voter turnout in the 2003 and 2007 gubernatorial contests shows that about 100,000 fewer people cast ballots last year in New Orleans and seven surrounding parishes than in the 2003 race.

Losses weren't borne equally by racial and party-affiliated groups, according to the analysis by University of New Orleans political scientist Ed Chervenak. For instance, a disproportionate loss among black voters across the region helped drive up white voters' share of the electorate, from two-thirds in 2003 to nearly three-quarterslast year.

Democrats also lost ground, with their participation sliding from 58 percent of the electorate in 2003 to 51 percent in 2007, the report shows. Republicans, meanwhile, saw their share of the voting population jump from 28 percent to 33 percent during the period.

With the number of voters across the rest of the state staying about even during the four-year span, the drop in turnout in the New Orleans area suggests the region has lost political clout since the 2005 storm, Chervenak writes in the report.

"The city's political voice was weaker in the last gubernatorial contest as voters here comprised only 6 percent of the state's overall electorate," compared with an average of 10 percent in the previous six races for governor, according to the report.

The study also offers a far clearer picture of how the voting population has shifted within city limits.

Reflecting patterns of damage from Katrina, turnout across Gentilly, eastern New Orleans and the Lower 9th Ward dropped nearly 60 percent from 2003 to 2007, while turnout across the rest of the city dipped between 27 percent and 36 percent, depending on the neighborhood, the study concluded.

Reshuffling the deck

After reviewing the report, Silas Lee, a local pollster and political strategist, said that although it's impossible to know how New Orleans' repopulation will affect future elections, the UNO study portends new dynamics in regional and statewide races.

"Anytime you lose 100,000 voters, it impacts influence," Lee said. "New Orleans will still be significant. However, you have somewhat of a different political ideology than you had pre-Katrina -- different kinds of voters with respect to social and economic and demographic status and political affiliation."

Christine Day, chairwoman of UNO's political science department, said the report offers a glimpse into how the region's politics might change after the 2010 U.S. census.

"It has really important implications for the redrawing of districts -- congressional districts and all the way down," she said. "Presumably, when districts are redrawn, Orleans Parish could lose clout. That said, the suburban areas probably will gain some clout, especially Jefferson and St. Tammany."

Unlike previous analyses of voter turnout, which generally have relied on precinct estimates to gauge participation based on race and party affiliation, the UNO study uses hard numbers compiled by the secretary of state. Records of who showed up to vote are matched with information provided in voter registration documents; which candidate each voter chose remains a secret.

Chervenak reviewed voter turnout data from 2003 and 2007 for eight parishes in the New Orleans area: Jefferson, Orleans, Plaquemines, St. Bernard, St. Charles, St. John the Baptist, St. Tammany and Tangipahoa.

The decline of more than 100,000 voters between the two elections represented a 23 percent drop across the region.

Not surprisingly, change figures varied widely by parish.

Faring best was St. Tammany, where 3 percent more voters turned out last year than in 2003, a bump that likely owes to the migration of residents from more flood-ravaged parishes. All other parishes saw drops in voter participation, ranging from a 2 percent dip in St. Charles to a 53 percent plummet in St. Bernard.

'More racially balanced'

In hard numbers, Orleans Parish showed the largest decline, with 60,000 fewer voters heading to the polls. That loss, Chervenak writes, accounted for most of the region's decline.

Across the eight parishes, the number of black voters dropped 41 percent between the 2003 and 2007 gubernatorial races, while the number of white voters dropped just 15 percent, the report states.

The analysis suggests there has been a sharp change in the racial composition of the region, particularly in Orleans Parish. In City Council districts B and C, a black majority in the electorate slipped away, and the districts are now almost evenly divided by race.

The city now has a more racially balanced electorate," Chervenak writes. "The days when local candidates could appeal to Orleans' overwhelmingly black electorate and receive a handful of white votes to win office may be a thing of the past."

He acknowledges that the analysis excludes children and teenagers who are too young to vote. But the "precise nature of the data makes it a robust measure of the population decline," he writes.

However, Allison Plyer, deputy director of the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, cautioned against using the numbers to estimate population shifts across the region. With many variables affecting whether voters go to the polls, the measure can be wildly uncertain, she said.

"You can imagine that media spending and/or enthusiasm would differ greatly among certain populations," Plyer said. "It could be raining that day. Literally, weather on the day of the election could have an effect on turnout."

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.' "

Scandalized HUD Chief Got Royal Send Off

How do you say goodbye to a HUD chief who ineptly presided over the worst national housing crisis in recent memory, who made HUD a byword for cronyism, and who resigned under the cloud of a federal criminal investigation?

Last Wednesday, Alphonso Jackson got the send off he deserved, as you can see from the cover of the program for the event obtained by TPMmuckraker. The event, which was held in the main auditorium at HUD, included an overflow crowd of about 1,000 HUD employees, said HUD spokesman Jerry Brown. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was the special guest speaker at the event, Brown said.

Despite the regal appearance of the program, Brown said that the event mainly involved "a slide show and a person who sang the national anthem." It was "pretty much the standard fare when a secretary departs." You can bet that the slide show contained plenty of pictures of Jackson -- and maybe even a painting or two.

You can see the full program here.

As HUD Chief Quits, a Look at Close Ties

HILTON HEAD, S.C. — Most of the time, the prominent men hovered in different orbits and different cities. Yet for years now, their lives have converged here on this resort island of white beaches and rippling sea.

There was William Hairston, a local builder whose wife is active in Republican circles here. There was Michael R. Hollis, an Atlanta lawyer, entrepreneur and presidential history buff who vacations here.

And there was President Bush’s housing secretary, Alphonso R. Jackson, who golfed and socialized here and led the federal agency that gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in business to friends and acquaintances, including Mr. Hairston and Mr. Hollis.

One such friend, an Atlanta developer, received a $127 million contract last year as part of a joint venture to rebuild a New Orleans public housing project. That developer’s company has paid Mr. Jackson more than $250,000 in fees since Mr. Jackson joined the Bush administration in 2001, for work done before Mr. Jackson joined government, the developer’s lawyer said.

Mr. Jackson, who announced his resignation in March, leaves office on Friday as federal authorities continue to investigate whether he enriched himself and friends with lucrative contracts. The inquiry has also laid bare the connections between Mr. Jackson, who was determined to expand opportunities for minority contractors, and the ambitious men who benefited from those opportunities.

It is the story of a small circle of black businessmen linked by their financial interests in the revitalization of troubled public housing and, in most cases, a shared affinity for conservative politics, and how those connections may have helped force the housing secretary from public life.
In 2003, the year before Mr. Jackson was named secretary, 14 percent — or $134 million — of the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s contracts went to black-owned firms, officials say. By 2007, black-owned businesses were receiving 25 percent of the department’s contracts, or $195.6 million.

Mr. Jackson has proudly promoted such statistics, saying that “a good bottom line with small and minority businesses helps to build a stronger America.”

Indeed, some of Mr. Jackson’s supporters deride the scrutiny of his casual friendships as a racist effort to undermine a prominent black official and several respected black businessmen, noting that no one has been charged with a crime.

Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the No. 3 Democrat in the House, said he believed the investigation was fueled by officials determined to derail Mr. Jackson’s efforts to expand affirmative action.

“Is there something wrong with trying to make sure African-Americans participate in the contracting program with the American government?” asked Mr. Clyburn, who vacations here regularly and knows Mr. Jackson, Mr. Hairston and Mr. Hollis.

But over time, concerns have grown — first among some housing officials and later among federal investigators — as it became clear several men who interacted with and had business deals with Mr. Jackson became beneficiaries of his efforts to further integrate the contracting corps.

Mr. Hairston, who golfed with Mr. Jackson here, received at least $610,000 in contracts from the New Orleans housing authority, which HUD took over in 2002, for reconstruction work on public housing complexes that were battered by Hurricane Katrina, officials say. (Mr. Hairston did not shy from talking up his personal ties to Mr. Jackson, according to housing officials who worked with him. And Mr. Jackson rebuked department employees who challenged Mr. Hairston’s contracts and authority, the officials said.)

Mr. Hollis, an acquaintance of the housing secretary, owns a law firm that was paid at least $1 million by HUD for running the Virgin Islands housing authority, government contracting records show. (Maynard H. Jackson Jr., the former mayor of Atlanta who died in 2003, introduced Mr. Hollis to Alphonso Jackson more than a decade ago.)

The Atlanta developer, Noel Khalil, who occasionally dined with Mr. Jackson in Atlanta and in Washington, runs Columbia Residential, a development company that received the $127 million contract from the New Orleans housing authority last year as part of a joint venture hired to redevelop the St. Bernard housing project.

Mr. Khalil, who does not vacation on Hilton Head, hired Mr. Jackson as a partner in 1998 for development deals in Texas, before Mr. Jackson joined HUD as deputy secretary in 2001. (The two men met in 1994, also via an introduction from former Mayor Jackson, when Mr. Jackson was running the housing authority in Dallas.)

From 2001 to 2007, Columbia Residential paid Mr. Jackson over $250,000 in developer fees on three housing complexes for work that he completed before he entered government, said Mr. Khalil’s lawyer, Buddy Parker.

Mr. Jackson listed only one payment — of $35,000 — from Columbia Residential in the financial disclosure forms he filed for 2001 to 2006. Investigators have been looking into whether Mr. Jackson steered contracts to Mr. Khalil to ensure that Mr. Khalil could make those payments.
Mr. Jackson declined to comment on his ties to the three men, citing the ongoing investigation. Mr. Hairston did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Pressuring subordinates to award contracts to specific firms could be a crime, according to government officials briefed on the inquiry. The officials said investigators were also trying to determine if Mr. Jackson received payments in exchange for any help he gave friends. But the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said investigators had not found evidence of such an arrangement.

Mr. Hollis and Mr. Khalil denied that they asked for or were offered any special treatment because they were friendly with Mr. Jackson. They say they believe federal investigators know that their contracts were legitimate.

Mr. Parker said he had turned over documents and spoken with investigators. He said a Justice Department official told him that his client was considered a witness in the investigation.

“When you pay money that’s clearly traceable to a sitting secretary of the cabinet,” Mr. Parker said, “it’s not a shocking idea that you’re going to be investigated.”

“But the fact is that he has nothing to hide,” he said. “I feel comfortable in saying that they’ve checked our facts out.”

Mr. Hollis said federal investigators had not contacted him about his contracts to manage the Virgin Islands housing authority, which extended from February 2006 to May 2007. The authorities have subpoenaed records from Smith Real Estate Services, an Atlanta firm that retained him as a special adviser for a Virgin Islands contract with the department in 2004.
Pamela Smith, president of Smith Real Estate Services, declined to comment. Her lawyer, Ralph Caccia, said she cooperated fully with the authorities.

But Mr. Hollis said he had improved the troubled Virgin Islands housing authority, imposing financial accountability, rehabbing 300 public housing units, negotiating for efficient and cost-effective water service and removing hundreds of abandoned cars from the properties, among other steps.

Carmen Valenti, a HUD official who oversaw Mr. Hollis’s work, called him “dedicated, very conscientious and really hard-working.” Mr. Valenti said Mr. Hollis’s contract required several approvals and was extended several times by HUD officials.

“I’m very proud of what we did,” Mr. Hollis said. “We pulled together a team that improved the housing conditions for nearly 15 percent of the people who live in the Virgin Islands, as well as the working conditions of nearly 300 public housing employees.”

“When our engagement started, V.I.H.A. was a highly troubled agency,” he said, referring to the Virgin Islands agency. “When our engagement was over, V.I.H.A. was a much stronger agency and poised for economic recovery.”

Senior Democrats in Congress, who urged Mr. Jackson to resign, say the deals smell of cronyism. Mr. Parker said there was nothing nefarious in the fact that several of the businessmen were acquainted with each other.

“There are a substantial number of successful African-Americans who know each other through business and politics,” Mr. Parker said. “That’s how Noel Khalil knows Michael Hollis and Alphonso Jackson.”

Some African-Americans here bristle at the notion that Mr. Jackson’s casual friendships with the black professionals who flock to this resort town have become part of a federal investigation.

“You get an African-American in a position where he can help black folks, and people just don’t like it,” said Larry Holman, president of the Beaufort County Black Chamber of Commerce, who knows Mr. Jackson and Mr. Hairston.

“It’s unfortunate,” Mr. Holman said. “We have a lot of respect for Secretary Jackson here.”
Property records show that Mr. Jackson bought a house in an exclusive gated community here in 2004. Since then, local residents in this town of 33,000 people have watched his comings and goings with interest.

Mr. Jackson hobnobs with local businessmen, golfs, dines with friends and chats with neighbors who live alongside his vacation home, a cream-colored colonial with columns. He socialized with Mr. Hairston, who had been looking for work beyond South Carolina after his stucco business withered in the face of competition from Hispanic-owned companies here, according to people who know Mr. Hairston.

And he would occasionally bump into Mr. Hollis at parties or gatherings hosted by mutual friends.

Clifford Bush, a local lawyer, said Mr. Jackson made a point of mingling with black businessmen, even stopping by an event organized by the county’s black chamber of commerce.

As a prominent black conservative, Mr. Jackson certainly stood out. Mr. Hairston and Mr. Khalil also share an affinity for the Republican Party. Mr. Hairston’s wife, Starletta, is running for a seat in the South Carolina House, on the Republican ticket.

Mr. Hollis said he still admired Mr. Jackson, despite the housing secretary’s troubles, because he climbed out of poverty to become a lawyer and a member of President Bush’s cabinet. “He pulled himself up by his bootstraps,” he said.

Mr. Khalil said through his lawyer that he “regrets the circumstances that Alphonso Jackson finds himself in.”

As for Mr. Jackson, he is planning on “a few months of rest and relaxation” after stepping down from office, said a HUD spokesman, Stephen C. O’Halloran.

Mr. O’Halloran said Mr. Jackson planned to continue vacationing here in Hilton Head.