When I see “Katrina,” “housing” and “FEMA” in the same headline, I get angry. I no longer read far enough into an article to find the stupidity being described; my experience has conditioned me to expect that it will be there, and respond accordingly.
Some days there’s a little good news. FEMA will continue paying for all Katrina evacuees’ hotel rooms, rather than starting to cut off people who have been approved or disapproved for other housing aid on January 7 (a deadline announced as part of U.S. District Judge Stanford Duval’s ruling in December). Of course they’re not doing it because it’s the right thing to do, but because there’s a lawsuit involved. HUD announced Friday the extension of the signup date for its housing assistance program to March 11. Did a lawsuit – actual or threatened – cause that extension?
Even when there is good news, it seems there’s still more bad to go around. Apparently, the city wants to bulldoze Lower Ninth Ward homes without the residents’ permission:
The city of New Orleans is attempting to destroy the homes of residents in the Lower 9th Ward. This is in spite of a temporary moratorium won by social justice groups against the city which blocks attempts to bulldoze the homes of Lower 9th Ward residents. The moratorium, which ends on January 6th, 2006, is being circumvented by the city through the unconstitutional use of eminent domain.
And, in a city that badly needs its people to return, some New Orleans residents are resisting the location of FEMA trailers in their neighborhoods:
In one of the post-Katrina era’s ironic role reversals, the same local officials and residents who once screamed at FEMA to get trailers to New Orleans quickly are now fending off the 17,777 trailers that FEMA has on hand in Louisiana and says it can deliver immediately.
I think that FEMA spent too much on the trailers, and that, in areas outside of New Orleans where there is available permanent housing stock, they should be putting evacuees into that housing, not building trailer parks for them. However, New Orleans needs temporary housing, and needs it quickly. Trailers can provide that, and we’ve already paid for them. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised by this sort of NIMBY-ism. I know that not all people respond to disaster and tragedy heroically, or even with a modicum of grace. Still, I am dismayed.
Step away from the wall; no head-banging until I’m finished.
For a more philosophical perspective, there’s Witold Rybczynski’s piece on the difficulty of rebuilding, absent the presence of good leadership and a healthy economy:
It is normal in emergencies for the state to suspend or curtail municipal powers. That has not happened in New Orleans, leading to wrangling between the mayor and local neighborhoods about where—and especially where not—to locate FEMA trailer housing. A city that is unable to decide where to temporarily house its own refugees is unlikely to grapple successfully with the more complex question of exactly how to rebuild.
And Ari Kelman has an article about one of the central fallacies surrounding rebuilding:
For now, water in the city seems under control again, back where people want it: in showers stripping away lingering grime, in strong coffee and confined behind the levees. Still, there’s danger. Facing the challenge of rebuilding, New Orleans seems stuck in the mud–not just mired in the muck caking the city but also trapped by centuries of policy mistakes, especially the fantasy that it can be separated from its surroundings. This notion has been as destructive as the worst flood, and as difficult to avoid.
OK, I’m done for today.
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Well. About “the unconstitutional use of eminent domain.” – didn’t the Ginsberg liberals on the Supreme Court just rule this to be constitutional in New England? Where a town wants to let a private developer build on property owned by other private citizens? It seems that that horse has already been let out of the barn.
About the local and state government of Louisiana, it has been blatantly corrupt for years. To add to all the other stories is the one about the governor going ahead with renovations to her office space at the expense of the taxpayers when she is asking for money from my pocket… frankly, I don’t want to pay for expensive marble for her office.
I get pretty darned tired of that “centuries of mistakes” line. Over the past 50 years upstream channelization has aimed the Mississippi like a firehose at New Orleans, and the destruction of wetlands downstream has stripped the city of protection against stormtides.
If there was anything “natural” about the destruction of New Orleans, it certainly would have happened in the first 200 years of the city’s existence- but didn’t.
Mistakes have been made- most of them outside the city.
So now, near the north end of the river, we have Detroit in ruins, and at the south end, New Orleans. Two once-great American cities, now destroyed and abandoned by the white suburban culture.
I’m a little more concerned about the destruction of a city than I am about the cost of remodeling an office.
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