Housing aid for hurricane victims extended to March 2009
NEW ORLEANS -- In an acknowledgment that the hurricane-shattered Gulf Coast is in a housing crisis and strained by a slow recovery, the Bush administration Thursday said it intends to house hurricane victims into 2009.
Some 33,000 poor households still rely on federal housing subsidies in cities like Houston and Atlanta. In addition, about 87,000 households in Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Alabama are living in travel trailers and mobile homes.
Federal housing aid for evacuees from hurricanes Katrina and Rita had been scheduled to end Aug. 31. The extension to March 2009 will enable many struggling residents to afford the escalating costs of rent and utilities; on the flip side, it may entice the displaced to delay returning to the bruised Gulf Coast.
Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005, devastating a large swath of the Mississippi and southeastern Louisiana coasts, flooding 80 percent of New Orleans. Rita hit southwestern Louisiana and southeastern Texas almost a month later.
Thursday's announcement was a relief for many hurricane victims who've lived with uncertainty.
"You never know. You just wait until you hear the magic words: 'No, you will not become homeless, no you will not have to live in a shelter,'" said Gilda Burbank, who has been living in Houston since she was rescued from a public housing development in New Orleans.
"That is a blessing," said Debbie Holmes, who works with homeless people.
Holmes is herself the beneficiary of aid: The government is paying her rent on a "shotgun" style home in New Orleans. The monthly rent is high for New Orleans _ $1,128 _ despite it's location in a crime-ridden neighborhood. She said inflated rents like hers were unthinkable before Katrina.
"Lord, I just had a group of 15 people, women with children, trying to find affordable housing," Holmes said. "Utility bills are unbelievable. One lady said the utility bill is $700. We've found there are more homeless people than before. People are trying to find affordable housing, but it's hard."
Yet, some housing advocates said the government's goodwill doesn't go far enough because anyone deemed capable of paying rent will be asked to do so starting next March. Rent would start at $50 a month and increase by $50 each month thereafter, officials said. Those unable to pay, such as the elderly, mentally ill and physically disabled, will get a waiver, officials said.
"Here's the reality: The people left in the rental assistance program are extremely poor," said Sheila Crowley, the president of the Washington, D.C.-based National Low Income Housing Coalition. "It's simply designed to push people out of the program."
"We are doing everything we can to stabilize the lives of people affected by Hurricane Katrina," Alphonso Jackson, the secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, said. "We want everybody who wants to come back home to come back home."
"We're not trying to kick people out, we're just trying to get people back to self-sufficiency," said David Paulison, the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
"This announcement will give peace of mind to the more than 25,000 Mississippi families still living in FEMA trailers," Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said in response to news of the extension.
"Early in 2009 we will ask FEMA to reassess the availability of permanent housing, and it is possible another extension will be required. However, we expect the vast majority of families currently in FEMA trailers to be in permanent housing by that time," Barbour added.
Paulison said one reason HUD is taking over some of the aid effort from FEMA is that the recovery from Rita and Katrina is taking a long time _ much longer than south Florida's recovery from Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
Donald Vallere, chairman of Housing Choice Voucher Landlords Association in New Orleans and a longtime banker and real estate developer, said prolonging housing aid will stymie the recovery.
"Unless you start cutting things off," Vallere said, "you're never going to get people recovering and moving on with their lives."
But Crowley, the low-income housing advocate, said the housing crisis is not the fault of the displaced.
"What is preventing them from coming back is that nobody is rebuilding the affordable housing stock," she said.
Donald Powell, President Bush's Gulf Coast recovery director, said extending housing aid will give residents and communities more time to build back the housing stock.
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