Two weeks after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, President Bush stood in Jackson Square in New Orleans and declared, “Throughout the area hit by the hurricane, we will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes, to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives.”
This was a lie. Today, just 15 months later, the U.S. government is waging a court battle to eliminate housing aid for
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On Nov. 29, U.S. district judge Richard J. Leon ordered the Federal Emergency Management Agency to immediately resume payments for rental assistance to thousands of families displaced by Katrina. FEMA has said it will appeal the ruling.
More than 1.5 million people were displaced by the storm. Many lost all their possessions or suffered severe damage to their homes.
In Houston, where more than 150,000 Katrina evacuees now live, 59 percent of displaced workers are jobless and 41 percent live in households with incomes of less than $500 a month. Household incomes for displaced families in Houston average just $19,000, half the city’s average household income.
Housing crisis
Housing for Gulf Coast residents has been an acute crisis. Tens of thousands of rental units were damaged beyond repair by Hurricane Katrina. Since then, rents of undamaged units have shot up by as much as 300 percent.
After the hurricane, FEMA began a program of rent and utility assistance. But by February 2006—less than six months after the storm—FEMA increased eligibility rules and switched many families into a different housing program with a complicated application process requiring written proof of rental history and changes in income level.
Thousands of households saw their assistance cut or eliminated. More than 700,000 households have received some rental assistance, but less than 34,000 remain currently eligible.
Many of those displaced by the hurricane have said that FEMA has resisted giving details about aid programs and thrown up complicated obstacles to aid in order to decrease the number of overall aid recipients. All post-disaster aid is scheduled to be cut off in March 2007.
In the recent federal ruling, Judge Leon wrote that FEMA’s computer-generated rejection letters were “vague and uninformative” and often included “only a cryptic code and a phrase such as ‘Ineligible-Other’” to explain why benefits were denied.
Numerous applicants testified that they called FEMA to question aid denials, but were given contradictory and confusing answers. According to the court ruling, FEMA also hindered the applicants’ right to fix application errors or appeal government mistakes.
FEMA was ordered to immediately resume rental aid and make three months of retroactive payments to more than 11,000 families. Assuming a cost of $800 per month for a two-bedroom apartment, every family could be covered for a total of $26 million. In comparison, the Iraq war costs approximately $12.5 million each hour.
The ruling also condemned FEMA’s treatment of the families: “It is unfortunate, if not incredible, that FEMA and its counsel could not devise a sufficient notice system to spare these beleaguered evacuees the added burden of federal litigation to vindicate their constitutional rights.”
Public outrage and organization applied pressure which was decisive in the court ruling against FEMA. Judge Leon has ordered FEMA into court on Dec. 13 to discuss how funding will be restored.
“If FEMA worked half as hard helping survivors get back on their feet as they do at dodging their responsibilities, thousands of families could be back home by now,” said Maude Hurd, an activist who has worked on behalf of the affected families.
Intolerable conditions
The situation is equally precarious for more than 100,000 families living in FEMA-provided trailers and mobile homes. Residents report frequent bureaucratic errors, leading to situations in which residents return from short errands to find their belongings, or in some cases their entire trailer, gone.
One resident, Wynaen Walker, returned from church to find the locks changed and her trailer occupied by someone
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Two FEMA trailer parks near Baton Rouge are scheduled to close in April, but the residents have not been told where they will be moved. Many evacuees have said that stress over their unpredictable situations has aggravated existing physical ailments.
Two-thirds of Katrina survivors continue to experience anxiety and one-third current express acutely negative emotions. Nearly 40 percent report serious difficulty sleeping and depression. (Gallup.com, Oct. 17)
Racist gentrification and neglect
At the same time as hundreds of thousands of displaced people struggle for housing, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced last week that it will demolish more than 4,500 low-income apartments in New Orleans. These apartments received little storm-related damage and could be repaired at a low cost.
Instead, HUD is working with private real estate developers to build a smaller number of high-priced units. Current plans to rebuild New Orleans clearly benefit the capitalist class at the expense of city’s working class, the majority of which is African American. Elimination of low-cost public housing would mean removal of working-class African Americans.
Plans for the racist gentrification of New Orleans have been met with resistance from the displaced residents.
Despite the recent court victory against FEMA, the people of New Orleans know that real justice will come through a concerted struggle, not from the pro-rich court system. A recent meeting of the Housing Authority of New Orleans, the agency that oversees public housing in the city, was disrupted by residents chanting “People first” and “No demolitions!”
On Nov. 17, the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund and other groups organized a “We want our money” rally in Baton Rouge. Hundreds of displaced people came from as far as Houston and Atlanta to attend.
The rally’s demands included disbanding the current recovery agency in favor of a representative body, no demolitions and immediate reopening of all public housing in New Orleans, an end to rent gouging, and immediate aid for all renters and home owners whose homes were damaged.
Following the rally, Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco was forced to question publicly the glacial pace of housing recovery as the private companies receiving billion-dollar rebuilding contracts report surging profits.
While the devastation of Katrina laid bare the racist and ruthless capitalist system, the refusal of the government to assist those affected by the storm emphasizes capitalism’s priorities. Billions are spent each week on the illegal occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, while working-class victims of a natural disaster in the United States are deprived housing, one of the most basic human needs.
Click here to read more from PSL about capitalism and Hurricane Katrina.
