Surge in homeless hits New Orleans

Surge in homeless hits New Orleans
The city has double the homeless it had before hurricane Katrina – but far fewer emergency shelters.
By Bill Sasser | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

NEW ORLEANS - Up to 40 people were believed to be living in the Economy Motor Lodge on Tulane Avenue when a fire struck the long-abandoned property on the night of March 7. Located six blocks from the mayor's office and just down the street from the Superdome, the fire was the fourth at the boarded-up motel since hurricane Katrina. Rescue workers spent the next day searching the ashes for possible victims. None were found, though one man who had apparently slept though the blaze emerged from the building the next morning. The city has since ordered the property torn down.

Behind that four-alarm fire lies a disturbing trend: Hurricane-ravaged New Orleans faces a major crisis with homelessness. Already taxed to the breaking point on many fronts, the city has a homeless population that is now approximately double what existed before the storm – in a city half its previous size.

Facing a severe shortage of affordable housing, displaced residents returning to the city along with an influx of construction trade workers are being forced to sleep in everything from cars to flooded-out houses to long-abandoned motels, as Katrina relief workers from across the country still struggle to fill gaping holes in the city's social services.

"The vast majority of emergency shelters have not been reopened since Katrina," says Martha Kegel, executive director of UNITY, a regional collaborative of 60 agencies serving the homeless. "There's an enormous shortage of housing and people are desperate. Do we have the resources to deal with this problem? No."

While New Orleans has long struggled with poverty, the face of homelessness has changed since Katrina, Ms. Kegel and other advocates say. The population now includes the chronically homeless who never left the city or have returned; residents who lost their homes to the flood and have run out of federal assistance – or may have never received assistance – and cannot afford higher rents; and thousands of Latino workers who came to rebuild the city, many of whom brought their spouses and children and cannot find a place to live.

"I've been into some of these buildings myself and seen dozens of people living in them, including very young children," Kegel says. "One of the most shocking things we're seeing now are the very elderly who are living in abandoned buildings and on the street – people in their late 80s living this way, who never in their lives expected to be homeless."

Continued @ http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0328/p03s03-ussc.html?s=hns

NEW REPORT DOCUMENTS CORRELATION BETWEEN HISTORIC CUTS TO FEDERAL HOUSING PROGRAMS AND CONTEMPORARY MASS HOMELESSNESS

Communities call for the new Congress to take a new approach to addressing and ending the national crisis of homelessness

(Excerpt)

"Without Housing: Decades of Federal Housing Cutbacks, Massive Homelessness and Policy Failures,” documents the correlation between these trends and the emergence of a new and massive episode of homelessness in the 1980s which continues today. It particularly focuses on radical cuts to programs administered by the US Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the US Dept. of Agriculture (USDA), which administers funds for rural affordable housing. Available online in PDF format, the report also demonstrates why federal responses to this nationwide crisis have consistently failed.

Created in partnership with five other organizations, the report uses federal budget data and other sources to document that:

HUD’s budget has dropped 65% since 1978, from over $83 billion to $29 billion in 2006.

The Emergency Shelter phenomenon was born the same year that HUD funding was at a drastic low point. In 1983, HUD’s budget was only $18 billion, the same year that general public emergency shelters began opening in cities nationwide.

HUD has spent $0 on new public housing, while more than 100,000 public housing units have been lost to demolition, sale, or other removal in the last ten years.

Federal housing subsidies are going to the wealthy. In 2004, 61 percent of these subsidies went to households earning more than $54,788, while only 27 percent went to households earning under $34,398.

More than 600,000 identified homeless students went to public schools in the 2003-2004 school year, according to the US Department of Education.

Federal support helps homeowners instead of poor people. In 2005, federal homeowner subsidies totaled more than $122 billion, while HUD outlays were only $31 billion – a difference of more than $91 billion.

According to Paul Boden, executive director of WRAP, “The Administration’s current ‘Chronic Homeless Initiative’ is just the latest in a series of inadequate flavor-of-the-month distractions from the real problem. It does nothing to address the huge cuts to federal affordable housing funding that caused mass homelessness. Housing is a human right, which a democracy should advance, not restrict.

Those on the frontline of homelessness – homeless people and the providers who serve them – are drowning in a sea of blame. We have joined together to speak truth to power: until federal affordable housing programs are restored and expanded, homelessness will continue to grow.”


http://wraphome.org/wh_press_kit/press_release_wrap.html