Three Years After Hurricane Katrina, Homelessness Looms

[marmar]

Published on Friday, August 29, 2008 by Mother Jones
Three Years After Hurricane Katrina, Homelessness Looms
Where are Katrina evacuee families supposed to go once FEMA kicks them out? A trailer park tale continues.

by Deepa Fernandes

"That's President Bush hugging me. See how tightly he's hugging me?" It was the chilly end of 2006 in Baker, Louisiana, when Lena Beard asked me this, proudly waving a newspaper clipping my direction as we talked in her still-temporary home. The fading photo, taken the same day the mother of two took refuge on a mattress in a church after Hurricane Katrina, had served as proof after the levees burst that she was going to be okay. "I'm a veteran who has served my country and put my life on the line. I believed my country would take care of me and my family," she said.

But three years after natural disaster stripped Beard and her sons of their house in New Orleans, she is still not okay. Unable to find a place she can afford after being evicted this summer from Renaissance Village, the largest FEMA trailer park in the country, the Beard family is contemplating a move next month into a homeless shelter.

I first met Beard a year and a half ago, while she was living in one of the 75,000 toxic trailers issued to Katrina evacuees. Ninety miles from New Orleans, she had grown discouraged and depressed after struggling with a three-hour commute each way trying to find work in her home city. She and her family had occupied the "temporary" shelter since October 2005. The day we met was the first day she had come out of it in a month. "I'm not proud that my children see me staying in bed all day, but I don't know what to do. I just don't," she told her neighbors in December 2006, at a residents' meeting of Renaissance Village. "I feel you honey, I feel you," came the sympathetic response. Cold winter winds whipped past the flaps of the big white tent where Beard and the other residents were gathered.

Like others in the room, also evacuees from a poor and heavily African American neighborhood in New Orleans, Lena had received a trailer for herself and her two sons. The trailer was approximately 8 foot by 32 foot, with two sectioned-off ends that served as bedrooms. Even if she was watching TV in her room with the flimsy door shut, everyone in the trailer could hear what the other was doing. "My children used to have their own rooms," Beard told me of the home she used to own. "And they both had computers." No one wants to be a homeowner again more than she does.

From February 2007 through the summer months, Beard actively pursued various options to move her family back to New Orleans. She commuted in on weekends to work a bar job on Canal Street, which didn't last long due to health issues that made it hard for her to stand for eight consecutive hours. In July 2007, just one month shy of her two-year displacement anniversary, a final housing option fell through. With no job, and having spent down the last of her savings in the years since the storm, she was unable to come up with the money to cover a security deposit and the first and last months' rent. She was devastated. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/08/29-1

[Bluebear]

1. kick/rec