Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
By ANITA KUMAR, Times Staff WriterExperts say the answer to post-Katrina housing problems was available but ignored.
BATON ROUGE, La. - As more than half a million Hurricane Katrina evacuees enter their seventh week in emergency shelters and hotels, hundreds of thousands of apartments sit empty throughout the South.
Housing experts on both sides of the political spectrum are furious that the federal government has ignored a cheap and obvious solution to the region's housing crisis - handing out cash or vouchers for rent.
Instead, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has stuck by unsuccessful plans to put evacuees in 125,000 manufactured homes and four cruise ships far from jobs and schools. To date, they are housing fewer than 8,000 evacuees.
It wasn't until the end of September, almost a month after Katrina hit, that FEMA created a program to provide three months' rent with the possibility to renew. And even then, housing experts and apartment complex owners say, it did little to market available apartments, work with local complexes or use a popular existing voucher program.
"It's a grossly mismanaged effort," said Ronald Utt, a housing expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation, usually in step with the Bush administration. "At some point, it goes beyond incompetence. It almost seems to be willful."
Things are moving so slowly that President Bush had already extended the deadline to move evacuees into interim housing from Oct. 1 to this Saturday. And now even that seems unlikely.
Beyond the 533,000 people still in shelters and hotels, an untold number of people are staying with friends and family or living in cars, tents and homes destroyed by fallen trees.
"I don't have a clue what FEMA is doing," said Ben Morris, mayor of Slidell, La., which lost 10,000 to 12,000 homes. "We're kind of the forgotten element in this."
From the start, housing experts - conservative and liberal alike - encouraged FEMA and the White House to issue emergency housing vouchers - the same way they did after the Northridge earthquake in California in 1994. FEMA was even offered blocks of apartments to rent for evacuees, but the government declined.
Before Katrina, the rental vacancy rate in the South was higher than usual - 12 percent - and about 1.1-million apartments costing less than $700 a month were estimated to be vacant in the region.
Even after Katrina, apartments were available. In Baton Rouge, where the population had more than doubled with storm evacuees, dozens of apartment listings appeared in the local Advocate. And 150 are still listed for Baton Rouge in an online database.
Nevertheless, obstacles abounded. Some people wanted short leases landlords wouldn't provide, or to live nearer their hometown. Others simply lacked money. Even when landlords were offering discounted rents and waiving application fees, potential renters weren't aware of the deals.
In Texas, the housing problem was obvious. The Dallas/Fort Worth area had 50,000 available apartments; Houston had 90,000. Many of those apartments remain empty, apartment association officials say, while 11,000 people live in shelters and 164,000 in hotels in the state.
Apartment officials said they were outraged that for weeks none of this information was mentioned on FEMA's Web site or in other places, such as the Recovery Times, a newsletter given to Louisiana victims that lists resources. A news release announcing an online rental database was issued Oct. 3.
"It's frustrating when you know there's a great solution there," said Jim Arbury, senior vice president of a joint program between the National Multi Housing Council and the National Apartment Association. "It would not take much to solve this housing thing right away. They are sitting there with apartments empty."
The few people who are moving into apartments are figuring it out for themselves.
In late September, Wendy Rochon, 32, chatted with a woman she befriended in an hourlong line at a Baton Rouge Wal-Mart, happily announcing she had found an apartment for her and her eight children, ages 4 to 16.
"Woo-wee," she said.
Rochon, who lost her house in New Orleans' 7th Ward, said she was able to afford the new three-bedroom apartment because she had Section 8 vouchers before Katrina and knew to go to the local Housing Authority to get them. That existing program, though, is not being advertised or expanded for evacuees.
Acting FEMA director R. David Paulison assured a congressional oversight committee Thursday that progress is being made.
"I think we're going to see things starting to move very quickly now as we get this ball rolling and get it moving along the way," Paulison said.
"And it's going to be slow, but we're going to do it methodically. We're going to make sure people are treated with respect and treated with dignity and put them in places that it's decent for them to live."
FEMA is spending about $23-billion on housing and individual assistance, more than a third of the $60-billion Congress gave the agency for Katrina disaster relief. About $3.6-billion has been set aside for manufactured homes, only 5,000 of which are occupied after FEMA failed to find land for them, and $236-million for unpopular cruise ships, which are less than half full and mostly house emergency workers.
"They so completely screwed up to start with so they immediately rushed to do something," said Edgar Olsen, an economics professor who studies housing at the University of Virginia. "In retrospect, it certainly was a mistake."
After weeks of criticism, Bush unveiled a new rental aid program in a speech in New Orleans in mid September. But days later, FEMA housing officials could not explain the program and said they needed time to develop it.
The program allows $2,358 in rental assistance or $786 a month for three months with the possibility of a 15-month extension. That maximum amount of $14,148 counts against a cap of $26,200 per family set for all FEMA assistance including emergency money, rent and home repairs.
Hundreds of thousands of families have signed up for housing assistance, but FEMA officials did not return repeated phone calls and e-mails to say how many have received the aid.
Susan Popkin, a housing researcher at the Urban Institute, said she is surprised the government did not expand its successful Section 8 voucher program used in the Northridge earthquake. Created in the 1970s, it provides vouchers to 2-million people.
"It's the best solution we have. It makes a lot more sense," she said. "Had they gone with the voucher program, and built on what they know, they could have gotten people into housing faster."
In California, the Northridge earthquake significantly damaged 55,000 homes and left 20,000 people homeless. Within a week, evacuees were moving into apartments with Section 8 vouchers.
There were signs that the government planned to do the same this time too.
After Katrina hit, the Senate approved a $3.5-billion proposal to provide one-year, $10,000 vouchers to more than 350,000 families. But the proposal stalled in the House.
"They've got a tough job to do," said Bob Stroh, director of the University of Florida's Shimberg Center for Affordable Housing. "Granted, maybe they've been slow, but they are doing the best they can with what they've got."
Times researcher Angie Drobnic Holan contributed to this report.
BY THE NUMBERSHurricane Katrina victims in temporary housing as of Friday *
Shelters open: 224
People in shelters: 23,970
Hotel rooms: 164,273
People in hotels: 509,246
* Only includes those being housed by the American Red Cross
Source: American Red Cross