I am sending you this message to make you aware of an impending crisis. I am hoping you will pass it on and that sooner or later some good will come of it. In a matter of weeks, thousands of people who survived Hurricane Katrina and, in some cases, the formaldehyde-contaminated FEMA trailers, are about to be evicted from their housing and made homeless all over again. Worse yet, these are primarily elderly and disabled people as well as single parent families with young children. Still worse, if that's even possible, this low intensity crime against humanity isn't being perpetrated by cruel landlords but by government on all levels. I will give you the background.
Everything you need to know about the Federal post-Katrina relief effort
along the Gulf Coast can be summed up in the three answers I received to
this question: "What has Phil Mangano's role been?" Mangano, often
referred to as Bush's "Homelessness Czar," is the director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. If anyone should have been helping
the people of the Gulf Coast, it's him. The storm sure made enough people homeless.
I interviewed Mangano once on the air. He said, "I often don't feel
like a czar, I often feel like a mendicant beggar going around the country
and in Washington to ensure that homeless people have what they need." "What we're attempting to do," he further explained, "is to create the political will so that no American is without a home." Of course, no one man can end homelessness alone, but it's good to know that someone who's a cross between Joan of Arc and St. Francis of Assisi is heading up the Bush Administration effort.
The Interagency Council's big push is to get communities to adopt
10-year-plans to end chronic homelessness. The plans have surely done
some good for those on the receiving end of the dough, but Katrina mocks
the pretension that they are paths to ending homelessness. How can anyone
tell how many homeless there will be in 10 years, when one storm can make hundreds of thousands of people homeless overnight?" In fact, there's not
a projected end even to existing homelessness under the ten-year plans, not in ten years, not ever. So what would Phil Mangano do when confronted with a sudden, screaming need for housing that contradicts his own preachments, and a need that arises innocently at that? If getting clopped by the worst natural disaster in American history doesn't make you deserving, what does?
I went down to the Gulf Coast to do advance work for the Homelessness
Marathon, an annual 14-hour overnight live national radio broadcast (now tv too), focusing on homelessness and poverty in America. We originate
from a different city each year. Next February 23rd, for our 12th
broadcast, we're going to originate from Pass Christian, Mississippi.
That's right next door to Waveland, which the Army Corps of Engineers has officially designated the "Ground Zero" where Katrina came ashore. We'll be describing our broadcast as coming from the "other" Ground Zero, the one that didn't get so much attention.
People down there will tell you that New Orleans made it through the
storm, and that the catastrophic failure of the levees was largely a
man-made disaster, whereas the devastation on the rest of the Gulf Coast was done directly by Katrina. Pass Christian was less affected than Waveland. It lost a reported 100% of its public buildings and 100% of its businesses but only 80% of its homes.
The Marathon's producer, Abby Harmon, and I expected to hear from the
survivors a long-term tale of too-little-help. We did hear that, but
we heard about some bright spots, too, like the volunteers who, everyone agrees, have been responsible for most of the recovery effort, proving both a right-wing and a left-wing point. As the right wing says, if the
government does little, the people will do amazing things. But as the
left wing says, without the help of their own government, the people can't do nearly enough. A common estimate is that the Mississippi Gulf Coast is only about 20% rebuilt, maybe a little more.
What we didn't expect to find was a short-term crisis. In the coming
five months, advocates expect to see a new wave of post-Katrina
homelessness. You may be sure the people of the Gulf Coast want to be
saved by the stroke of a pen more than they want to be evicted at the
stroke of midnight. You may be sure that they will want the Obama Administration to change the Bush Administration policies that are
putting them out of their homes.
These are the simple facts:
- Thousands of people in Mississippi remain in temporary housing.
Starting in January, the leases will start to expire on MEMA cottages (MEMA is Mississippi's FEMA). According to MEMA spokesperson Jeff Rent, there are 2810 of these in the "lower six," Mississippi counties that were blasted by Katrina. Most have multiple bedrooms and, presumably, hold multiple dwellers, though no one seems to have done a census of them. MEMA actually wants these temporary domiciles to stay put, but local governments want them removed. In some cases this may be in order to keep promises written into the covenants of wealthy neighborhoods. In some cases, it may be to protect the tax base so as not to have the burden of too many poor, as one local county official explicitly stated (undoubtedly, some kind of Federal guarantee would solve this problem).
Some residents may find a way to stay in their cottages by moving them to new locations or by permanentizing them with concrete foundations or whatever. MEMA says it is working to help all of the cottage dwellers, but a low-end expectation would be that only around seven percent will be able to keep their cottages. The icing on the cake is that on March 1st, the "Special Use Circumstances" permits that allowed for the placement of FEMA trailers will expire. There are an additional 3211 of those.
- Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour diverted $600 million slated
for housing to repairing and expanding the port at Gulfport, which received only an estimated $50 million in damage, and that was covered by insurance. An editorial in the New York Times called this diversion "the shame of Mississippi." Twelve members of the House, including Maxine Waters and Barney Frank, tried and failed to insert language into an appropriations bill to bar the diversion. They noted that Mississippi has "only devoted 55% of its [Community Block Development Grant] funds for direct housing recovery," and that "the State has frequently sought and received waivers of the low- and moderate-income requirement." Nonetheless, the Bush Administration's regime at HUD approved the diversion.
- There is not nearly enough existing affordable housing to house the
vast majority of the still-displaced survivors. For example, Hancock
County, where Waveland is located, has more than 450 remaining trailers
alone but only an estimated 312 rental units. Of those, only 60 are
classified as "affordable" because they can be obtained for a rent of $800/month, but most of the people facing eviction from trailers and cottages have incomes in the $400-$600/month range, often from social security.
- Some new housing is being built but the reconstruction is going
very slowly for many reasons, including new building codes (especially
in the "Velocity Zone"), higher insurance premiums, a shortage of
capital and outstanding law suits with commercial insurers who refused to pay Katrina-related claims.
The bottom line is that there is not a chance in the world that enough affordable housing can be built in time to replace more than a fraction
of the temporary housing that is about to be withdrawn, and the math is devastating. If, of the roughly 6000 temporary units, as many as one-third stay in use or are replaced by permanent housing, and, on average, the remaining 4000 units house only two people, that still makes for 8000 mostly children, elderly, disabled, and frantic mothers being tossed out like garbage. The actual number will probably be much greater.
Fortunately, Phil Mangano's Interagency Council on Homelessness -- which includes, among others, such Washington lightweights as the secretaries of Defense, Energy, HUD, Transportation and Interior -- is tasked with seeing
that Americans are housed. If anyone should help the Katrina survivors by czaring it up and getting in the faces of the big boys on his council, it should be Phil. If anyone should be going around like a mendicant beggar, seeking funds for the poor Katrina folks, it should be Phil. So it's only right to wonder what Phil Mangano, the Bush Administration's mouthpiece on homelessness, has been doing to meet the needs of the Katrina Survivors
in the lower six.
This is who I asked:
- Kathleen Johnson. Kathleen is a native Australian who has been in this
country for more than thirty years. She has worked on Katrina relief
since the storm, supervising a team of case managers who are currently
working under a FEMA grant but many of whom worked for free before it came through. She has her fingers in more pies than one of Sweeney Todd's
victims, doing everything she knows to push the recovery process along, and she does it, she says, without pay. She sleeps in primitive conditions she doesn't want discussed because they're "luxurious" compared to the makeshift shelters where many Katrina survivors remain (some of them never had temporary housing to get evicted from). She
insists, "I haven't wanted for anything," but in truth, she recently was unable to go back to Australia for her mother's death and funeral. She looks tired too much of the time.
- Keith Burton. Keith is a long-time journalist. His on-line
newspaper, the Gulf Coast News (http://www.gulfcoastnews.com), has
become a widely-read chronicle of the recovery effort. He describes
himself as a Conservative Republican, but he condemns what we're living under now as "Corporate Feudalism." In 1969, he says, after Hurricane Camille, the military came right in and cleaned up, but that after Katrina, because of the way government services have been privatized, it was all a matter of negotiating contracts that would be implemented at a snail's pace without accountability.
- Al Showers. Al is a good example of why we have to retool the format
we have used for eleven years on our broadcast, because there will be no
way to divide our guests between those whose testimony is subjective and objective. As the Hancock County reporter for WLOX-TV, a profitable ABC
affiliate in Biloxi, Al is a great source of objective information, but he is also someone who has had his share of subjective experiences.
Among them was a long night as the only TV reporter to stay in the local Emergency Operations Center when Katrina hit. Things got so dicey that they made a list and magic markered numbers on their hands in case
they drowned, so their bodies could be identified. Al was number 34.
Why ask these three people about Phil Mangano? I am sure that they'll
tell you that in the big scheme of things they're not important, but I think they are. They are as knowledgeable and committed as they could be and, beyond that, they each exemplify the limitless humanity Katrina unleashed even while it swept away human lives. Unfortunately, something too often happens to that humanity as soon as it gets a government position. When I asked these three people about Phil Mangano's role, they all said the same thing: "Who's Phil Mangano?" Heckuva job, Phil.
What has happened to the Katrina survivors poses many questions that have
no small bearing on the future of our country. Is this how we will treat
the victims of future natural disasters? Is this how we will treat the
victims of the current foreclosure crisis? How come guilty people on Wall Street were allowed to drive away with buckets of cash while innocent Katrina survivors are going to be thrown on the streets with next to nothing? Should the new administration take a new approach (yes) and, if so, what should it be?
Those questions are for another time, and we'll sure be asking them on
our broadcast. What is imperative now is that there are just weeks to
get the evictions stopped.
Sincerely,
Jeremy Weir Alderson
Director, Homelessness Marathon
