New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin announced that the city would begin citing residents who did not vacate the FEMA trailers in which they have been living.
Anyone caught living in a FEMA trailer in New Orleans after July 1 could be subject to a $500 fine plus daily fines after that, according to city zoning administrator Edward Horan.
“The point of this is to have the trailers removed, not to issue massive citations,” Horan toldUSA TODAY. “But there will those who will resist. They will be issued citations.”
A FEMA spokesman said the trailers were meant to be temporary and could pose a threat to residents during hurricane season, yet many still live in the trailers because of poverty or special needs. Residents of the hardest hit areas of New Orleans, Gentilly, the Lower 9th Ward and East New Orleans, will have an extra three months, until the end of September, to vacate their travel trailers.
As if that’s enough time. Most of the people in these trailers simply have nowhere else to go. They lost everything in the flood, or never had anything to begin with. And for them a $500 fine — or more — would be harsh.
And while FEMA says it will relocate travel trailer residents to hotels or apartments, actually getting the bureaucrats to do this often proves just this side of impossible, which is why there are still nearly 4,000 people in travel trailers in New Orleans alone.
Meanwhile a $74.5 million program announced in December 2006 to build cottages for Katrina survivors in Louisiana to replace the travel trailers hasn’t produced a single cottage. The program has been mired in red tape and a bureaucratic game of hot potato as the program got passed from one state agency to another, the Associated Press reported.
So you’re poor and have nowhere else to go and little money, the housing market has imploded, and The Big Easy wants you gone. And if you don’t leave, they’ll just take all your money until you have absolutely nothing left but life on the streets. This is how governments treat the poor and disabled. We can do better.
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Ray
Jul 19, 2008
On the other hand, if you are still living in a trailer maybe there is an issue of if you will ever get out of it. Frankly if you can’t arrange to live in normal housing in New Orleans, maybe you should go somewhere else. 4000 people divided across the other 47 states, or lets leave out the gulf coast and say 40 states. That is 100 people per state. Maybe what we need is get each of these states to agree to come get and house 100 of these people. You get a randomly drawn state.
Those who really need the help will actually get the help they need. Those who should be getting off their duff and doing something will probably do so and I think each of these states would end up with less than 50 people. Certainly something doable.
If is time we considered abandoning the parts of New Orleans which are below sea level anyway. This could be a start.
Rob
Jul 19, 2008
Why are the trailers a threat to residents this season, if they’ve been living in them for the past three years?
Ruth
Jul 19, 2008
What many outsiders seem to overlook is that many people in New Orleans “… never had anything to begin with.” I spent 20 years living on the NorthShore, annually preparing for hurricanes. I watched some folks who had lived there all their lives, live a dependency lifestyle, disregarding the possibility of a storm. Whether it was working for cash while on disability, selling WIC items for cash, or not paying bills, living a hardworking honest life was simply not part of the culture. Most of these folks, although not a majority of the pre-Katrina population, couldn’t prepare for a job interview, never mind a major disaster.
They showed up at the Superdome, having been instructed to bring food, bedding and supplies for 3-5 days, with a bag of chips, a bottle of Coke, and a pillow. In decades of living in New Orleans, they had failed to plan for the inevitable. The scenario that occurred after Katrina was virtually identical to the computer simulation by the Corps of Engineers in 2003. It was published in the Times Picayune for all to read. I guess I was the only one who read it and acted by buying aluminum shutters for my house, a generator, stockpiling food and water, and making plans for a major storm.
It is tragic, but the FEMA trailers are often better, newer and larger than what they had before the hurricane, which is why they returned and still live in them.
It is also tragic that many older folks simply do not have the funds or resources to either relocate or rebuild. I met an elderly couple in June of this year who are just now getting their house worked on. They are too old to do the work themselves, and have had to save for years to accumulate funds for rebuilding. Road Home is a bad joke, a payoff for the mortgage companies and banks. The options for many older residents are few and getting fewer.
I agree, people should not be allowed to rebuild in areas below sea level. But they also should not be dispossessed of their property without some compensation or arrangement to allow them to live. The situation is complex, made more difficult by the inherent poverty that existed pre-K. While the Federal government was quite willing to build “projects” for the poor in pre-K New Orleans, why are they unwilling to build low cost housing for those still unable to rebuild? Perhaps because there is no profit to be made, and Louisiana is not a “key state” in the national elections.
I was able to relocate to Texas and rebuild my life. But I was not originally from Louisiana, and had education and financial resources many there lack. I wish there were simple solutions, but the problems are not simple. In the end, there is still suffering, three years after.
Kevin Fields
Jul 20, 2008
Thank you, Michael, and I agree – we can do better. Any suggestions on what we, the mere citizens, can do to help those who do still need help finding affordable housing?
Glengary
Jul 21, 2008
Rename New Orleans Baghdad or Kabul and watch the Federal funds flow in from Washington like crazy.
Bob
Jul 23, 2008
Today,. . . . I don’t care about the poor in New Orleans. Let them eat cake. Or Twinkies and Coke.
They can figure out how to get their own crap together. I’ve got my own butt to worry about.
It’s not my problemo.
That felt good.
Ray
Jul 23, 2008
Baghdad is at least a possibility. The problem with New Orleans is that regardless of how much money we spend it is a disaster waiting to happen. We would spend the entire federal budget and the budgets of every state in the union on this area and it will still be below sea level and next to the sea. We talk about Katerina hitting New Orleans. It didn’t. Katerina by and large missed.
The simple fact is that had Katerina hit New Orleans full force, anyone there including everyone in the dome would have died. Katerina also washed away a great deal of the coast which was protecting New Orleans. The coast is continually being washed away. Right now an f3 hurricane would do the same damage that an f4 would prekaterina That is a direct hit from an F3 would basically kill everyone there. And yet we are spending money to get people to move back there and allowing them to continue to live there.
Smarter than Ray
Jul 30, 2008
Ray,
It was Katrina, not Katerina… there’s no E…
Ray
Jul 30, 2008
Interesting my spell checker insists on it being the other way. Oh well the dictionary probably was compiled before that was an important word.
The spelling aside the facts are the same. The simple fact is that had KATRINA hit New Orleans full force, anyone there including everyone in the dome would have died.
This fact makes the efforts we are going to in order to rebuild New Orleans very questionable.
Puddy_tat
Jul 30, 2008
Hi All,
I agree with Ruth and suspect that allot – not all mind you but many of these people who are in these trailers now have a roof over their heads and it’s rent free so why not suck off the government tit till she dry’s out?
I also agree with Ray this place is a disaster waiting to happen! The levy system they replaced it with is a deadly joke and it’s just a matter of time before the next hurricane hits this place.
I say Relocate EVERYONE out until we take this serously and build something along the lines of the japanese have done with many of their coastal communitys you know with proper flood controls and levy systems along with pump’s that could drain a lake in under 2-minutes! We could save money by using prison labor move all the prisoners from CA, TX, NV hell lets just move them all there to work and within 2-years you could hit this place with a 1000ft tall tidal wave and it would take it and smile right back at ya!
Then we could start on our power infastructure use these prisoneers to help build our new power plants Nucular – Hydro – Wind. Hey they could even paint them over with all the graffiti they wanted this would keep them from from getting heart desease. Plus we need to keep them in shape for the new gladitor channel we would use for those that are just incuragable.
And Bob it’s coolaid and fast food baby!!!
Bob
Jul 30, 2008
Maybe, Puddytat, when we’re all done exploiting our convicts for free labor, we could put them each in a tub of goo hooked up to a huge matrix system and drain off their electrical energy too. Put our technology to good use.
I like the way you think. Of course though, innocent until proven guilty-we must remember that.
miche
Aug 12, 2008
NOLA did just fine for hundreds of years of hurricanes. There’s no need to relocate the city and lord knows my family wouldn’t leave without a fight. I said at the time of Katrina that this would be a land grab and that the poor would be forced out in favor of corporate interests. I stand by that today.
And, FWIW, my daughter and son-in-law pay a fortune in rent in NOLA. There is a housing shortage and those apartments that have been redone have landlords participating in government subsidy programs. My daughter refused the application process for one such rental because she didn’t want to contract for random inspections and welfare. FEMA trailers look like home with that sort of thing happening.
Ray
Aug 13, 2008
Miche:
New Orleans used to also be a WHOLE LOT farther from the ocean than it is now. From all of the studies I have seen in about 85 years it will literally be Ocean Front property. If you have lived there for so long you should also be very familiar with the fact that the vast majority of New Orleans is below sea level. None of it is very far above sea level. We call ocean front property that is below sea level sea floor.
It might be possible with GREAT EXPENSE to engineer a system that would protect New Orleans from being totally destroyed by a cat 4 or 5 storm for a decade or two. But about 20 years out there is no system in the world that would protect the people there and certainly not the property.
As I said before Katrina actually missed. It was a cat 4 storm. There are cat 5 storms. Had it actually hit there would have been nothing that the current system could have done to have prevented everyone in New Orleans from having died. That included the people at the Dome. That was then. The situation is even worse today.
Remember New Orleans also almost survived the hit, but there was a dike failure. Today even of all of the systems in place worked at their optimum the same hit would have an even greater effect. At the time a direct hit from a cat 4 storm would have simply erased the city. Today a direct hit from a cat 3 storm would have the same effect. A cat 3 storm with the similar path as Katrina would create the same damage and loss of life as this incident without any failures. By twenty years from now a cat 2 storm would have the same effects as a cat 3 storm today.
So given all of this what do you think we should do?
Margaret Currey
Apr 03, 2009
New Orleans is a great city the people are friendly and polite and it is a shame there is no answer for honest poor people. I guess the greedy rich are this countrys answer but I would hate to be alive forty years from now.
That is if there is a country called the United States forty years from now.
Of course Louisiana was a country before the United States happened.