History > 2006 > USA > Louisiana > Mississippi

Rebuilding (V-VI)

In New Orleans,

Ex-Tenants Fight for Projects

December 26, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, Dec. 25 — The heritage of suspicion and misery separating this city’s poorest residents from its comfortable classes is playing out in a fierce battle over the future of the public housing projects here, a fight in which the shelter of as many as 20,000 people is at stake.

It has raged ever since the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development announced plans last June to demolish four of the largest projects in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and no amount of assurances that the agency wants to replace the crime-haunted, aging brick structures with something better has calmed the anger of former tenants.

This month, under pressure, HUD restated that it might allow some tenants to return while proceeding with redevelopment; a face-off in Federal District Court here Friday between tenant advocates and department lawyers could be decisive.

The struggle over housing in New Orleans raises the larger issue of how to reintegrate the most vulnerable residents after the hurricane, the ones most disrupted by the storm and still displaced 16 months later.

And it has brought sharply into focus how much the New Orleans housing projects were places apart, vast islands of poverty in an already impoverished city. HUD has already chosen two nonprofit developers to replace the Lafitte project, a forbidding complex of 1940s reddish brick dormitories near Interstate 10, with a mix of houses and apartments, some subsidized and some not. The new housing will “dramatically improve living conditions” for the former tenants, a legal brief by the department says.

The agency’s plans and the resistance of the tenants has become a cause célèbre for advocates of many stripes. They shouted down hapless housing officials at a tumultuous public meeting here last month; they demonstrated angrily outside Mayor C. Ray Nagin’s home two weekends ago; and the courtroom vituperation, in the lawsuit against HUD, has been unusually bitter.

Still, the advocates’ talk of ethnic cleansing, social engineering and HUD’s purported “violation” of international law has partly obscured the reality of what the projects were and what even some who question the planned demolition fear they could become again if the redevelopment project falls through.

“I think the romanticism that goes with the ‘good old days of public housing’ belies the harsh realities of crime and social malaise that had been created as a result of a concentration of low, low income folks,” said Michael P. Kelly, who directed the troubled Housing Authority of New Orleans from 1995 to 2000 and now runs its counterpart in Washington, D.C. “Women that would put their babies in bathtubs at the sound of gunfire, that was a reality; coming home from your job and having to walk through young people participating in drug trades.”

Working women trying to raise children, many of whom staff the low-wage tourist hotels here, often made that walk, as they do in public housing in other cities. But here the journey had a particularly tough edge, in keeping with the often violent city surrounding the projects.

The toughness was underscored in striking fashion at last month’s public meeting, notably by one of the many enraged former tenants who rose to criticize the federal housing department and the city housing authority.

“I’m a young man who grew up in the projects,” said that critic, Alvin Richardson. “I grew up in the Iberville project, the Desire, the Calliope, the St. Thomas, St. Bernard, and I survived them all. You can’t do nothing to me because I survived the ghetto.”

The peculiar physical environment of the projects, a confluence of their isolation, their dilapidation and the large numbers of vacant apartments, combined to create difficulties, some veteran police officers say. It was not the tenants who created problems, but nonresidents taking advantage of the dense clustering of small, low-ceilinged apartments.

“The way they were constructed, it’s not law-enforcement friendly,” said Lt. Bruce Adams, a veteran police officer who grew up in the Desire project. “All those entrances and exists. The fact that it’s so condensed is causing the problem.”

Don Everard, director of a social service agency that worked for years in one of the projects, said that with all the vacancies, “you didn’t know what was up the stairwell.”

“You didn’t know who was using an abandoned apartment,” Mr. Everard said.

Since August there have been at least five killings in the old Iberville project, abutting the French Quarter, even though the complex is only about one-quarter occupied. In the latest, a young man was found shot in the head, propping up the door of an abandoned apartment with a bag of crack cocaine at his feet.

At the St. Thomas project, the violent crime rate was more than seven times as high as the city’s as a whole, according to a paper done at the London School of Economics; only 2 percent of its residents were employed full-time.

At the C. J. Peete project, which is on the department’s demolition list, Lawrence Powell, a Tulane University historian, recalled a flourishing open-air drug market across the street.

Bernell Stewart, a nearby resident standing across from the empty Lafitte project, said, “Every time you looked around, somebody was getting killed on this corner.”

Even those critical of the housing department acknowledge that the projects, with all their troubles, had effectively cut off their inhabitants, an isolation reinforced by generations of living in them. Mr. Powell, who ran a social services agency at C. J. Peete in the 1990s, said he tried to “help people move out where they would become homeowners, to move back to the original goal where it was a way station, not warehouses.”

That alienation was starkly in evidence at the public meeting last month. “For once, I would like for us to live in y’all’s houses and let y’all live in ours,” Josey Willis, a displaced Lafitte resident, told the officials. “Let us change places and see what we feeling; then you can feel what we feeling.”

Other cities have seen similar resistance from public housing tenants fearful of change. But here the tenants’ extreme poverty and a legacy of mistrust fueled by years of official neglect has given the fight an edge. Misspent money caused the federal department to keep a close watch over the local housing authority in the mid-1990s, and the department finally took it over in 2002. The projects here were in such poor shape that “a lot of us said it shouldn’t even be considered affordable housing,” said Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution, who served as chief of staff for former Housing Secretary Henry G. Cisneros.

This city’s politicians have been notably silent on the issue but have occasionally suggested that they, too, are wary of a return to the old days. “We don’t need soap-opera watchers right now,” President Oliver Thomas of the City Council said last February, commenting on the lives of displaced public housing residents.

The department’s goal is to deconcentrate the poor, in concert with the philosophy that developed during the early 1990s calling for redeveloping public housing as “mixed income” communities. The best-known example here, the redevelopment of St. Thomas after its demolition in 2000, is still a subject of fierce controversy, a mix of successes and shortcomings that has fueled suspicions.

The pleasant streets of pastel-colored houses that replaced the grim St. Thomas buildings have put life back into a Lower Garden District neighborhood that for years was fearful and moribund.

On the other hand, the new development has accommodated less than one in five of the old St. Thomas families, though the developer says expansion will add more. And those that are there feel threatened by tenant rules designed to make the neighborhood’s market-rate inhabitants comfortable, including occupancy restrictions, Mr. Everard said.

“Folks got cheated out of their dream,” Mr. Everard said. “The whole concept of the mixed-income community ended up dislocating the vast majority of poor people.”

Yet a return to the old days is an outcome that even some former tenants do not embrace.

“If they’re talking about redevelopment, I’m for it,” Natasha Dixon said at the meeting last month. “But why can’t y’all do it in phases? Why can’t that happen now, to get the people home?”

    In New Orleans, Ex-Tenants Fight for Projects, NYT, 26.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/26/us/nationalspecial/26housing.html

Judge Chastises FEMA

as Botching Katrina Housing Program

December 14, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON, Dec. 13 (AP) — A federal judge on Wednesday called the Bush administration’s handling of a Hurricane Katrina housing program “a legal disaster” and ordered officials to explain a computer system that cannot count evacuees with precision or explain why they were denied aid.

The judge, Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court, ruled last month that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had violated evacuees’ constitutional rights by eliminating their housing payments without notice. On Wednesday, he admonished the government for not moving fast enough to restart the program for 3,600 to 5,500 storm victims.

“Let me make this clear,” Judge Leon told Michael Sitcov, a lawyer for the government. “Tell FEMA that I’m expecting them to get going on this. Like, immediately.”

Judge Leon ruled that the agency last spring and summer had mishandled the transition from a short-term housing program to a longer-term program. Instead of explaining why financing was being cut, the agency provided only computer-generated and sometimes conflicting program codes, Judge Leon said.

He ordered agency officials to explain those decisions so that thousands of evacuees could understand the reasoning and decide whether to appeal.

“I’m not looking for a doctoral dissertation,” Judge Leon said. “I’m looking for a couple of paragraphs in plain English.”

Mr. Sitcov said that FEMA’s computer system could not do what the judge wanted. The eight-year-old system is set up only to produce program codes, he said. Mr. Sitcov also said the program was unable to determine for certain how many evacuees in Texas were covered by Judge Leon’s order or how many people had appealed the denial of their aid.

“It’s not as adept at doing these kinds of machinations,” said Mr. Sitcov, who said the best estimate of evacuees covered by the order was 5,479.

Judge Leon appeared bewildered, and ordered agency officials to testify Monday about the program. He said 10 employees, working overtime and on weekends, could translate program codes into 5,000 understandable letters in two weeks, nearly the amount of time that has passed since his initial ruling.

“This is a legal disaster,” Judge Leon said. “People’s rights are being denied. I don’t want us to get so mired in the minutiae and the law while, in the meantime, people who need help are not getting help.”

The agency has appealed Judge Leon’s initial order and is hoping a higher court will block its enforcement until the appeal plays out. That ruling will probably not come before next week, and Judge Leon said he wanted the agency to start working on the problem immediately.

“Two weeks have been lost, and I don’t want another day to be lost,” he said. “We’ve got to get moving.”

Mr. Sitcov said the agency could not comply with the order to restart the housing program because the agreements to reimburse Texas cities for rental payments had expired. Judge Leon said he was sure local governments would be willing to make those same agreements again and said he might order Texas officials to testify Monday.

Judge Leon also scheduled a telephone conference for Friday between FEMA and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which brought the lawsuit on behalf of hurricane victims.

    Judge Chastises FEMA as Botching Katrina Housing Program, NYT, 14.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/14/washington/14fema.html

Embattled Louisiana Legislator Prevails

December 10, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, Dec. 9 — Brushing past months of unflattering headlines about a federal corruption investigation, Representative William J. Jefferson was elected to a ninth term on Saturday, with a decisive runoff victory that again emphasized this city’s sharp racial divisions.

Mr. Jefferson, a Democrat, was heavily favored in black precincts, and Saturday’s result suggested that his loyal constituents ignored the accusations of an F.B.I. investigation and rallied around him, as they had in the past and as the congressman had pleaded with them to do. He has not been charged with anything, and vigorously maintains his innocence.

A dominant figure in Louisiana politics for more than 20 years, Mr. Jefferson, 59, is at the center of a political organization that is influential at several levels of elected office in this city.

With slightly more than a third of the precincts reporting, Mr. Jefferson led his Democratic challenger, Karen Carter, 37, a lawyer and Louisiana state representative, with just more than 60 percent of the vote late Saturday. Mr. Jefferson ran especially strong in suburban Jefferson Parish, about a third of the district, where the sheriff had come out against Ms. Carter. She conceded around 10:15 p.m. Central time.

The election did not affect the Democrats’ new majority in Congress but was nonetheless being followed in Washington, where there was concern about the potential pall a Jefferson victory could cast on the party’s new emphasis on ethics. Democratic leaders kicked Mr. Jefferson off the House Ways and Means Committee last summer in response to the Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiry into his financial dealings. The state party refused to endorse him.

Likewise, opponents of Mr. Jefferson here expressed concern about the message his re-election would send to the rest of the country, particularly given this state’s reputation for corruption.

Analysts were surprised at Mr. Jefferson’s victory. “It’s not good for the city, and it’s not good for the state,” said Susan Howell, a political scientist at the University of New Orleans. “We’ve re-elected the least effective congressman, at odds with the speaker of the House. He’s going to be totally preoccupied with legal troubles as opposed to representing the people of the Second District.”

Saturday’s incomplete tally appeared to split along racial lines, based on results in the November primary and interviews with voters. In the midterm election, Ms. Carter, who is also black, was the clear choice of white voters by more than seven to one, while blacks voted for Mr. Jefferson by about five to one.

Though Hurricane Katrina changed the city’s population, reducing the 70-percent black majority and making the two races more nearly equal, blacks still have a population edge and can dominate elections.

In the last month of the campaign, Ms. Carter assiduously reminded voters of the accusations against Mr. Jefferson that began to make headlines shortly before Hurricane Katrina in August 2005: the $90,000 in marked bills that the F.B.I. said it found in his freezer that the agency said was bribe money destined to be paid to an African politician on behalf of a businessman whom the congressman was trying to help; and Mr. Jefferson’s efforts to extract cash from the businessman in return for help in securing deals.

But some black voters looked past the accusations. In interviews, several bristled at the suggestion made by some whites that sending Mr. Jefferson back to Washington would cast the city in unflattering light.

“He’s worked it hard down there over the years, and they haven’t proven anything yet,” said Freddie Robinson, a retired bus mechanic, after casting his ballot for Mr. Jefferson. “He’s done so much for us.”

    Embattled Louisiana Legislator Prevails, NYT, 10.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/us/10orleans.html

After a Rush,

Pace of Levee Work Downshifts

December 4, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

NEW ORLEANS — For months, the Army Corps of Engineers raced through the city, frantically patching broken levees and building floodgates to prepare for a hurricane season, now ended, that produced no hurricanes here.

That repair work is essentially complete and the corps has moved on to the task of strengthening flood protection in New Orleans beyond its pre-Hurricane Katrina level, hoping to entice residents back. But lately the bulldozers have been idle, and the trucks motionless. The pace has slowed, those in the region say, with little trace of the round-the-clock frenzy of the first phase.

“We don’t see that anymore,” said Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the hurricane center at Louisiana State University.

Contractors are waiting impatiently for the chance to bid on jobs. “By now, I would have expected there to be many more jobs bid and under way,” said Robert Boh, the head of Boh Brothers, a major local contractor. “We’re going to dance as soon as anyone asks us.”

The change of pace is obvious to nonexperts as well. Willis Reed, 64, who was fishing at Lake Pontchartrain along a levee that is to grow higher by several feet, said the contrast between the first phase and the second phase was striking. These days, Mr. Reed said, it seems that “Everybody’s dragging a leg.” Even some within the corps say things should have been well under way by now. An engineer who left the corps, and was granted anonymity because he continues to work with the agency, said, “We should have been turning dirt months ago.”

The new, $6 billion phase involves raising the levees above their new levels, armoring the most vulnerable against erosion and creating pump stations to block the surge from Lake Pontchartrain in future storms.

Instead of the placid bank of earthen levee behind the spot where Mr. Reed was fishing, bulldozers could be shaping the terrain to add height and width to the levee. Dump trucks could be bringing their heavy loads of clay-rich earth drawn from borrow pits in the area. But for now there is no noise to disturb Mr. Reed.

Corps officials say the early work was done in the spirit of addressing a crisis, when they had broad latitude to get the job done. Officials on the ground, who call the current lull a “strategic pause,” say the new work has to be planned with great care. And they say it is a greater challenge to design and build new flood protection — the bulk of the second-phase work — than it is to patch breaches.

“The laws of physics have not been repealed,” said Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, commander and chief of engineers for the corps. “It takes time to think through what needs to be done. It takes time to make things happen. You don’t move 5.5 million cubic yards of earth overnight.”

All the new projects are still being designed and their contracts drawn up, but already the corps has postponed a two-day industry forum that was scheduled for last week to familiarize contractors with work that had been expected to be awarded within the next three or four months.

Since levees that are built higher must also become much wider, land has to be acquired. And these days, state and local governments, neighborhood groups, historical societies and others must be consulted before the corps can push forward.

Some trees have grown too close to the toes of levees, which has been identified by experts as one possible cause of some of the breaches that led to the city’s flooding. Some homeowners have fought the corps’ plans to remove the trees. At community meetings, corps officials have been criticized by residents who argue that the city’s sheltering trees give it much of its character. They also said the loss of trees would lower their property values.

It is all very different from the first phase, when the corps group known as Task Force Guardian worked in a city so deeply devastated that virtually no one questioned its plans.

“Guardian kicked down the door,” said Walter O. Baumy Jr., chief of the engineering division for the corps’ New Orleans District, who worked with the group. “We didn’t stop for pretty much anything,” Mr. Baumy said, and “we were able to get a lot of cooperation from everybody.”

Now, Task Force Guardian has been replaced by the Hurricane Protection Office, which works alongside the district. “We still have that same sense of urgency,” Mr. Baumy said, but with so many local organizations back on their feet since the storm, “we’re not making decisions alone at this point.”

Col. Jeff Bedey, who heads the Hurricane Protection Office, said that what appeared to be a slowdown was just an absence of obvious work like digging and piling dirt; Colonel Bedey said that the planning and contract work was proceeding rapidly. The corps, he added, does not want to build another “system in name only,” as its own report referred to the pre-Katrina patchwork of components that failed.

“We’ve got one opportunity here,” he said, “and we’ve got to do this right.”

The challenges are enormous. Congress has ordered the Army Corps to upgrade the city’s hurricane protection system to standards first authorized in 1965 — goals that were not reached because of a series of compromises and mistakes, the corps has admitted.

After those standards are reached, the corps must upgrade the system further, to resist a storm that has a 1 in 100 chance of occurring in any given year.

It is also becoming increasingly clear that the billions of dollars in appropriations will not cover the New Orleans area projects Congress has ordered the corps to take on. The situation, in the short run, could require the corps to go back to lawmakers for the authority to move some appropriated money around. Eventually, corps officials say, more money from Congress may be necessary.

To save money, the corps will skip interim steps on some projects and go straight for the higher, 100-year level of protection. But that will leave the city at risk until 2010 at least, say those who oppose the move. The corps has also scaled back plans to armor the levees against being scoured away when water flows over the top. An editorial in The New Orleans Times-Picayune described that cost-saving consideration as “a horrifying argument from an agency whose lack of foresight and competence caused a deadly and costly catastrophe.”

But Colonel Bedey said the corps would probably be criticized no matter what it did.

The agency still has not finished its first-phase work on the floodgates for the city’s drainage canals. At the $85 million 17th Street Canal project, which has presented the most challenges, the corps has had to do extra work to firm up the mushy soil at the site, and new pumps have had technical problems. There are also not enough pumps at the site to push the enormous amounts of water that would drain into the canals during a hurricane.

Whether the corps is working deliberately and responsibly or “dragging a leg” and falling into old bureaucratic ways is difficult to determine at this early stage, said G. Wayne Clough, president of the Georgia Institute of Technology and chairman of the National Research Council committee that reviewed the corps’ post-Katrina investigation. Still, Mr. Clough added, “If they don’t get started soon, they will lose momentum, and that’s a concern.”

What is essential, he said, is oversight from an outside, neutral group — the main recommendation of his committee.

For their part, New Orleans residents say that they want to see more progress from the corps, but that they are cheered by the progress in neighborhoods like Lakeview and Broadmoor, where homeowners are doggedly rebuilding.

Emile Bruneau, a longtime state representative whose renovations on his home in Lakeview are coming along, said, “I’m disappointed by the slowness” of the corps, and added, “If I was the corps, given the colossal failure that their engineering caused here, I would be making every effort to assure as expeditiously as possible that this would never happen again.”

Still, Mr. Bruneau said, “Lakeview is going to be fine.”

He said the vacant lots where ruined houses had been cleared away reminded him of the 1960s, when the development was first filling up.

Some residents are building for the future without waiting for the corps. One home in the Lakeview neighborhood is being raised on jacks by about 10 feet. Another Hurricane Katrina might not even dampen its carpets.

Whatever the corps does to protect this vulnerable city, homeowners know that the rules of real estate have changed forever.

Instead of “location, location, location,” now it’s “elevation, elevation, elevation.”

    After a Rush, Pace of Levee Work Downshifts, NYT, 4.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/04/us/04corps.html?hp&ex=1165294800&en=4d29f301e4fd0874&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Editorial

Kafka and Katrina

December 2, 2006
The New York Times

One of the many victims of Hurricane Katrina may turn out to be the hospitality that American cities, particularly Houston, showed to people fleeing the storm. Thanks largely to the Bush administration’s catastrophic handling of the relocation crisis, Houston endured much more civic strain than it should have in caring for the tens of thousands of Louisianans who landed on its doorstep.

The administration’s mishandling of the crisis has often looked like a calculated attempt to discourage displaced people from seeking housing aid, even if it means leaving them vulnerable to homelessness. A federal district court judge implied as much this week, when he found that the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s aid application process was so convoluted and confusing as to be unconstitutional — and likened it to something out of a horror story by Kafka.

Judge Richard Leon ruled that FEMA had unconstitutionally denied housing aid to thousands of residents who were displaced by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. He ordered the government to resume payments immediately, pointing to blind alleys and contradictory information that often led vulnerable families to lose aid without understanding why or having reasonable recourse to appeal.

In Houston, people are at least being housed now in apartments rather than remote trailer camps where other displaced Louisianans have now been trapped for more than a year . But throughout this saga, FEMA has whipsawed the survivors and their host communities with unpredictable policy changes that have hindered the resettlement process and kept everyone on edge. Despite those obstacles, many have managed to get on their feet.

But Houston must still worry about impoverished and hard-to-employ refugees who represent an enormous burden in health care, law enforcement and education costs. City officials also say that the federal government has been unpredictably late and tightfisted with badly needed aid.

The administration made its most disastrous misstep when it failed to enlist the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which was created to deal with just these kinds of situations. If the administration had provided Section 8 housing vouchers through HUD, families could have been directed to affordable housing all over the country. No one city would have been asked to absorb tens of thousands of people.

Congress needs to make sure that its housing application process is rendered intelligible. But it needs to go much further. It has to make sure that the survivors who qualify are given aid through programs like Section 8 that allow them to pick up their lives quickly, and that there will be no more Houstons in the American history of disaster response.

    Kafka and Katrina, NYT, 2.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/02/opinion/02sat1.html

10,000 Get Grant Letters on Rebuilding in Louisiana

December 1, 2006
The New York Times
By LESLIE EATON

In a sign of painstaking progress for Louisiana’s biggest rebuilding program, the state has sent letters to more than 10,000 families stating how much money they can receive to rebuild their homes under the $7.5-billion housing program Congress financed this year, state officials said yesterday.

But fewer than 50 families had actually collected the money as of Tuesday, prompting renewed concern among homeowners and some government officials about the pace of the program, which is called the Road Home and is widely considered the most important factor in rebuilding areas damaged by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

The spate of “award calculations,” as the program calls them, represents a big increase from early last month, when fewer than 2,000 families — out of almost 79,000 applicants at the time — had been told how much they were eligible to receive.

On Nov. 6, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco ordered the private contractor managing the program for the state to reach the 10,000 mark by the end of November. Yesterday, the governor said she would require the contractor, ICF International, to send out 15,000 more award letters before the end of the year.

“The Road Home program is making progress, but I will not rest until 100 percent of our homeowners receive the money that we have made available to them,” Ms. Blanco said in a statement.

The awards, which are based on the value of a house before the storm and are capped at $150,000, are reduced by the amount of money homeowners receive under their insurance policies. ICF says it has been slowed by the difficulty of getting information from insurance companies and is now sending out award letters without waiting for insurers’ verification. This decision has speeded up the process but may mean that the size of the awards will be adjusted before homeowners receive them.

The number of homeowners who have actually received Road Home grants has increased by just 26 in the last month, to a total of 48. Those homeowners received an average grant of $50,715, according to the most recent statistics from the program.

Some program officials said they thought the delays in closing on the grants stemmed not from bottlenecks in the system, but from homeowners’ uncertainty about rebuilding.

“I, for one, haven’t decided what to do with my house,” said Walter Leger, a member of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which devised the program. Before Hurricane Katrina hit, Mr. Leger lived in St. Bernard Parish, the county just outside New Orleans where almost every building was badly damaged by water or an oil spill or both.

When they apply for the program, most people say that they intend to rebuild, said Carol Hector-Harris, a spokeswoman for the program. But when they learn how much they are eligible to receive, “that’s when the reality strikes,” she said. “What will it cost to insure my car? Are the schools back? Do I have a job? Is my grocery store back?”

Ms. Hector-Harris cited a recent study by the University of New Orleans that found that many residents of the city and nearby Jefferson Parish, perhaps as many as one-third, say they may leave in the next two years.

The study, which was based on interviews with 400 people now in the area, found that people were frustrated with the difficulty of making home repairs, especially in New Orleans, said Carrye Jane Shaw, a graduate assistant who worked on the study. More than 50,000 applicants have not yet had their first meeting with program counselors. Others, who have been to their appointments and had their property inspected, say they still do not know how much money they are eligible for.

“We may have gotten a letter, but our mailman doesn’t deliver every day,” said Alyson J. Elder, who lived near the north edge of Tulane University in New Orleans and now rents a house in the city.

“I’ve been out of my house for 400 nights now,” Ms. Elder said. “I just want to go home.”

No Hurricanes Hit U.S. in 2006

MIAMI, Nov. 30 (AP) — The 2006 Atlantic hurricane season closed uneventfully Thursday.

No hurricanes hit the United States this year, in stark contrast with a record-breaking 2005 season. Nine named storms and five hurricanes, two of them major, formed this season.

    10,000 Get Grant Letters on Rebuilding in Louisiana, NYT, 1.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/01/us/01louisiana.html

New Orleans population still cut by more than half

Wed Nov 29, 2006 5:35 PM ET
Reuters
By Jeffrey Jones

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - New Orleans' population is still only 41 percent of its size before Hurricane Katrina devastated the city 15 months ago, according to a state survey that casts doubts on rosier predictions by the mayor.

In the most extensive population study since the deadly storm, the Louisiana Public Health Institute estimated 200,665 people live in Orleans Parish, which comprises the city proper, compared with a 2000 U.S. Census number of 484,674.

The metropolitan area, which also includes Jefferson and hard-hit St. Bernard parishes, has a population of 666,122, three-quarters of the pre-storm number, the survey estimates.

The institute conducted the work between June and October on behalf of the Louisiana Recovery Authority and Louisiana Dept. of Health and Hospitals.

Surveys, being released for numerous parishes this week, have wide margins of error, ranging from 9.8 percent to 14.4 percent, but the data is still the most reliable to date, Louisiana Recovery Authority spokeswoman Natalie Wyeth said.

"We are facing some unique challenges as far as surveying goes -- being able to reach people when they are home and that kind of thing," Wyeth said.

Results will be used by officials to determine where clinics, hospitals and other public services will be needed as south Louisiana recovers from America's costliest natural disaster.

Hurricane Katrina slammed the U.S. Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, triggering levee failures that caused flooding in 80 percent of the city famous for jazz music and fine cuisine.

Contrasts among neighborhoods are stark. Rebuilding is well under way in some, while huge swathes of the city remain nearly deserted with homes gutted and thick weeds choking lawns.

SLOWER PROGRESS THAN EXPECTED

In September, Mayor Ray Nagin and an official charged with bringing evacuees home predicted the city would have 300,000 residents by the end of the year as rebuilding grants began to flow to homeowners and public housing units were renovated.

But progress has been slower than expected, and frustration is building many residents and community activists.

Officials from Nagin's office were not immediately available for comment.

In a separate study of attitudes that may bode ill for population growth, the University of New Orleans (UNO) found almost one-third of New Orleanians surveyed said they were very likely or somewhat likely to move from the city within the next two years.

The top concerns among the small sample of people surveyed are rising crime rates and the slow pace of government help.

"The message of our survey is that there's a window of time where you have a chance to keep people in the city ... to convince them, to give them the confidence to stay," UNO political science professor Susan Howell said.

Among other parishes, according to the state data, Jefferson staged the largest population recovery with 439,968 people, 97 percent of the pre-Katrina number.

An estimated 25,489 people live in St. Bernard parish, just east of New Orleans where virtually every structure sustained damage, or 38 percent of the 2000 census.

The state survey, which had input from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and U.S. Census Bureau, also confirmed New Orleans' changed racial makeup since the storm.

In 2000, blacks made up 67 percent of the population and whites accounted for 28 percent. The split is now 47 percent black and 43 percent white.

    New Orleans population still cut by more than half, R, 29.11.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-11-29T223435Z_01_N29357330_RTRUKOC_0_US-NEWORLEANS-POPULATION.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-domesticNews-3

200, 000 Returned to N.O. by August

November 29, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:11 p.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- About 200,000 people were living in New Orleans a year after Hurricane Katrina, an increase of 10,000 from preliminary estimates released last month, according to a door-to-door survey.

The final results of the survey taken over the summer put the three-parish metro area -- the hardest hit -- at 666,000 people, or two-thirds of the 1 million counted in the 2000 U.S. census, the Louisiana Recovery Authority said.

In New Orleans, about 40 percent of residents have returned since the Aug. 29, 2005, storm, according to the survey.

Mayor Ray Nagin, who once predicted as many as 300,000 people back by the end of this year, has challenged the estimates as far too low. Spokeswoman Ceeon Quiett said the city still believes the survey is unreliable because of its high margin of error, which edged down from 11.5 percent to 9.8 percent.

''It's one of the things we'll use to determine where those critical pieces of infrastructure go, like clinics, schools and other public infrastructure,'' said Natalie Wyeth, spokeswoman for the recovery agency. ''But I don't think it's the only determination. Again, these are estimates. These are the best data we have so far.''

The survey was conducted for the authority and the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals by the Louisiana Public Health Institute.

    200, 000 Returned to N.O. by August, NYT, 29.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Katrina-Population.html

Judge Upholds Policyholders’ Katrina Claims

November 29, 2006
The New York Times
By JOSEPH B. TREASTER

A federal judge offered a glimmer of hope to the tens of thousands of people whose homes and businesses in New Orleans were flooded in Hurricane Katrina, ruling that insurance companies should pay for the widespread water damage.

If upheld, the ruling late Monday by Judge Stanwood R. Duval Jr. of Federal District Court in New Orleans could cost the insurers billions of dollars more than the $41 billion they have already paid to storm victims. But the insurers insist that their policies do not cover flooding, and they said yesterday that they expected an appeals court to reverse the decision. A final ruling could take months, if not years.

Judge Duval’s decision centered on the distinction between flooding caused by high winds and heavy rains and flooding caused by human error. Much of the destruction in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 was a result of levee failures.

He said the language in the insurance policies on flood coverage was ambiguous because it did not “clearly exclude man-made” flood disasters. Since the insurers provided the wording for the policies, he said he felt “constrained to interpret it against the insurers.”

He made an exception for State Farm and the Hartford Insurance Company, whose policies do not provide coverage for flooding “regardless of cause.”

Lawyers for more than a dozen homeowners and Xavier University, which had business insurance, hailed Judge Duval’s decision as a victory.

“This is a major breakthrough,” said John N. Ellison, a member of the team of lawyers representing storm victims and a partner at Anderson Kill & Olick in New York. “Our hope is that this ruling may help get the redevelopment of the houses and the city going so the city can come back to life.”

The ruling was the first by a court in Louisiana on damage from Hurricane Katrina. It ran counter to rulings by a federal judge in Mississippi that supported the industry’s contention that most property insurance policies do not provide coverage for flooding.

But the judge in Mississippi, L. T. Senter of Federal District Court, disagreed with the insurers’ contention that any damage due to flooding nullified the coverage. He cleared the way for trials early next year to determine how much damage to flooded homes and businesses resulted from high winds.

The rulings differ, in part, because the nature of the flooding was different. In Mississippi, the storm drove water from the Gulf of Mexico ashore and wiped out tens of thousands of homes unprotected by artificial barriers. In New Orleans, flood waters breached some levees and poured into the city as the storm was moving away. The water lingered in parts of the city for weeks.

Mr. Ellison, the lawyer for the homeowners, said he believed that the New Orleans case would go to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit “on an expedited basis” and that deliberations could begin in the spring.

More than 200,000 homes and thousands of businesses were damaged or destroyed by the flooding in New Orleans. The insurers have refused to pay claims for water damage and the relatively small amounts that homeowners and businesses received for wind damage have been far from enough for most people to rebuild. The federal government has stepped in with promises of several billion dollars in assistance, but little of the money has reached the people who need it.

The insurers said that Judge Duval’s decision was contrary to decades of case law and state insurance regulation and would turn out to be a short-lived loss for their side.

“The judge reached the wrong conclusion,” said Robert P. Hartwig, the chief economist at the Insurance Information Institute, a trade group in New York. “The policies clearly exclude flood-related damage under any and all circumstances. We don’t believe the decision will be upheld.”

Randy J. Maniloff, a lawyer in Philadelphia who represents insurance companies, including several of those in the New Orleans lawsuit, said Judge Duval appeared to be overreaching to solve the social and economic problems caused by Hurricane Katrina.

“Here is a phenomenon for which there is no insurance, and the court isn’t going to allow that to exist,” Mr. Maniloff said.

“The court is finding who is in a better position to bear the loss, and it is coming out in favor of the individual, the policyholder,” he said. “This is an aberration.”

Judge Duval, who was appointed to the federal court by President Bill Clinton in 1994, said in an 85-page decision that the insurers could have made clear “that ‘flood’ means water damage caused by negligent acts or omissions.” But, he said, they “chose not to do so.”

Nearly a dozen insurance companies had sought dismissal of the lawsuits over flood losses. But Judge Duval ruled in favor of only two, State Farm, the largest home insurer in Louisiana, with about 20 percent of the market; and Hartford, a unit of the Hartford Financial Services Group, which has a much smaller share.

Judge Duval said he cleared the way for an immediate appeal because “there is a substantial ground for a difference of opinion.”

    Judge Upholds Policyholders’ Katrina Claims, NYT, 29.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/29/business/29insure.html?hp&ex=1164862800&en=95f230c32692b2dd&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Another Social Conflict Confronts New Orleans

November 26, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 25 — The “second line” clubs of New Orleans, which lead the city’s distinctive black tradition of Sunday parading, say they feel threatened by new police fees, the latest sign of conflict between old customs here and the altered social landscape left by Hurricane Katrina.

The parades, an outgrowth of the late-19th-century freedmen’s benevolent societies, energize many a torpid weekend afternoon in the impoverished neighborhoods, drawing crowds with boisterous music and flashy attire. But some have begun attracting violence as well. In two such instances, gunmen fired into swirling crowds in January and March, wounding four people and killing one young man, a hurricane evacuee who had been making a brief return to the city.

In response to the violence, the Police Department has more than tripled the fees it charges for escorting the parades, to about $3,760 an event. That helps with the expense of bolstering the law enforcement presence, but the clubs, each of which typically sponsors one parade a year, say the new fees are unaffordable and will effectively kill a tradition that has lasted decades. The local branch of the American Civil Liberties Union has filed suit on behalf of 17 sponsoring clubs, claiming that officials are stifling freedom of expression.

Already the culture of second-lining — it was named for the dancers and others who followed the “first line” of parading musicians — is threatened, the civil liberties group says.

“These events take a year for the clubs to plan,” said Katie Schwartzmann, an A.C.L.U. lawyer. “Some organizations have said, ‘We don’t have the money to plan.’ There are clubs that have refrained from planning their annual events.”

The Police Department counters by saying that given the thousands of people who gather, it had no choice but to increase the number of escorting officers, to 20 from 6.

“Second lines are noted for the violence of the crowd afterwards — shootings, stabbings and fights,” said John Bryson, deputy police superintendent. “There’s too many people for six officers.”

The alternative to more officers would be more people shot at parades, said Mr. Bryson, who says the parading clubs, not taxpayers, should shoulder the expense.

The clash over second-lining is occurring against a backdrop of simmering, class-laden resentment over the course of the city’s recovery from Hurricane Katrina. In the view of some protest groups and residents who remain displaced, officials here are bent on excluding working-class blacks from New Orleans as it rebuilds. A tentative plan to replace the troubled housing projects here, mostly shuttered since the storm, has also drawn a lawsuit, underpinned by such suspicions.

The challenge to the steep increase in second-line fees lies firmly within this current.

“Many members of the clubs,” the complaint says, “are working-class families. They are persons struggling to return to the city of New Orleans, dealing with the loss of family unity, the loss of homes and the loss of normalcy. The city of New Orleans, rather than encouraging their return, has instead created barriers to the resumption of an important means of expression for these returning New Orleanians.”

Some say the parades have assumed even greater significance since the hurricane: displaced residents return to the city just to attend.

“The second lines have been even more important after the storm,” said Helen A. Regis, an associate professor of anthropology at Louisiana State University, who has written about the tradition. “If you go to a parade, you’ll see people exchanging phone numbers. It’s a really important way to reconnect with people.”

The second-liners firmly reject the notion that their celebrations necessarily draw criminals. But gunmen, too, seem to have seen the parades as an opportunity to renew acquaintances — and settle scores, according to bystanders and the police.

In the January attack, the popping sound of shots fired, so familiar here, rang out after a parade that had attracted thousands of displaced residents temporarily back in the city for a kind of collective homecoming. The police found three young men lying wounded in the street.

Then, in March, a gunman opened fire on a crowd in the Central City neighborhood, after a parade that followed a jazz funeral for a member of the Single Men’s Social Aid and Pleasure Club. The victim of that attack, Christopher Smith, a 19-year-old evacuee living in Dallas, later died of his wound at Touro Infirmary. A second man was hit in the leg by a stray bullet.

The pall left by the violence is heavy among members of the clubs, who, after all, will have spent months in eager anticipation of their group’s parade.

“It’s a culture thing, bringing back a lot of spirit,” said Corey Woods, one of the plaintiffs challenging the fee increase. “It brings everybody together. It’s like a reunion. We get to see everybody we haven’t seen in a long time. And it’s just a lot of fun.”

    Another Social Conflict Confronts New Orleans, NYT, 26.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/us/26parade.html

Editorial

Katrina’s Purgatory

November 18, 2006
The New York Times
 

Excuses sound hollow when you’re trapped in a flimsy trailer. For Gulf Coast residents waiting for long-promised government housing assistance, patience has given way to anger, and anguish. What is clear more than a year after Hurricane Katrina is that their needs — and the demand for action from the American public — have largely gone unmet.

In Louisiana, only 28 families have received their share of the federal dollars intended to help them repair or replace their homes. After a local uproar, and a strict new deadline from the governor, the number of residents approved for funds is now just under 5,000 — out of nearly 78,000 applications.

Louisiana’s housing reconstruction authority should not bear all of the blame for this problem. All the gears of government grind too slowly for the victims of the storm. It took the Bush administration nearly six months to request the necessary rebuilding funds. Congress hemmed and hawed until June before approving the legislation. Down the coast, Mississippi’s program has also been plagued with delays.

The federal housing money alone is not going to solve the difficulties faced by Katrina’s victims, particularly in New Orleans. The normal market mechanisms on the Gulf Coast have been shattered, and they need to be repaired if Katrina’s victims have any hope of putting their lives back together. Local banks are filling up with a reserve of billions of dollars in private insurance money. The Louisiana Recovery Authority points out that many victims who have been approved for help still have yet to ask for their checks.

Some people have shown amazing faith and determination, pressing on and putting construction costs on their credit cards. But other residents, in spite of their will to rebuild, are unable to use the funds for a host of reasons. Contractors are nearly impossible to find, and high prices reflect their scarcity. Insurance rates are rising to levels unaffordable for the average homeowner. Many victims have missed bill payments or lost sources of income, hurting their creditworthiness and leading to higher interest rates on any loans they might need.

The normal hard decisions of real estate are amplified a thousand times by the possibility that a house in an empty neighborhood in a broken city could be worthless. Imagine every house in your neighborhood is damaged or destroyed. The average government award in Louisiana is $60,200, and it will cost more than that to replace your house, and more than it was worth before the storm, when every house on the block was whole and children played out front. Do you rebuild?

The president’s Katrina czar, Donald Powell, is soft-spoken and deliberative. Those qualities have served him well in the past, but not now. As the government’s emissary (and the former head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation), he has a powerful pulpit and the ability to summon all the key players — major lenders, buyers of loans like the large investment banks and Fannie Mae, and federal regulators — to help fix the system. Mr. Powell needs to speak out more forcefully and act more aggressively.

The ruin of a region and the historic city of New Orleans could not be more important, and the tangle of destruction is nowhere near unwound.

    Katrina’s Purgatory, NYT, 18.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/18/opinion/18sat1.html

Slow Home Grants Stall Progress in New Orleans

November 11, 2006
The New York Times
By LESLIE EATON

NEW ORLEANS — The $7.5 billion program to rebuild Louisiana by helping residents repair or replace their flooded homes has gotten off to a slow start, frustrating government officials and outraging many homeowners who say they are still in limbo 14 months after Hurricane Katrina hit.

Though nearly 79,000 families have applied to the program, called the Road Home, only 1,721 have been told how much grant money they will receive. And just 22 have received access to the cash, which was provided by federal taxpayers and is being distributed by the state.

“I don’t know of anyone who has actually received any money,” said Cassandra D. Wall, who is active in a group of homeowners from the eastern part of New Orleans. Ms. Wall said she planned to attend a protest Nov. 17 in Baton Rouge, the state capital, “to go public with the outrage and the outcry.”

Many hopes have been pinned on the Road Home program, which is widely considered the most important factor in rebuilding the ruined neighborhoods of New Orleans and is also meant to start an economic boom in southern Louisiana. Homeowners who rebuild or buy new houses in the state are eligible for grants of up to $150,000 to cover their uninsured losses, although the average award has been about $68,000.

The city’s mayor, C. Ray Nagin, is so dissatisfied with the pace of the program that on Nov. 1 he announced that the city was developing a plan to lend money to people waiting for their Road Home grants.

[Officials announced on Nov. 6 that Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco had ordered the contractor managing the program to calculate 10,000 awards by the end of the month.]

“It’s time to kick into high gear,” said Walter Leger, a lawyer and a member of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which devised the federally financed Road Home program. “It’s time to forget the reasons and excuses” for the slow pace so far.

In some ways, the program’s low-speed beginning reflects an urgent need to avoid the kind of waste and fraud that plagued federal programs after the hurricane. The government, among other things, is demanding that applicants produce details of insurance policies and payouts, proof of title to a house, and, if possible, official assessments of a home’s prestorm value. Many New Orleans residents lost such paperwork in the flood, or never had it in the first place.

But the larger explanation is that the program is, in effect, a giant experiment.

“There is no precedent,” said Andy Kopplin, executive director of the recovery authority. “Louisiana’s version is the single largest housing assistance program ever done anywhere.”

The only similar program is in Mississippi, which got a full Congressional appropriation for its roughly $3 billion plan months before Louisiana got the full $7.5 billion it asked for. The Mississippi program is smaller and differs in many details; fewer people are eligible, for example, and the grants do not have to be used for housing.

But Mississippi’s program has been plagued by some of the same problems, including a slow start that drew public criticism from, among others, Trent Lott, the state’s junior Republican senator. New data from the program show that it has now paid $320.6 million in 5,201 grants — but officials had originally planned to have given out most of the grants by the end of August, the first anniversary of the storm.

Some Louisiana officials also point out that the Mississippi program got a public-relations black eye when it turned out that several state lawmakers had won a lucrative legal contract with the program. No accusations of fraud or conflicts of interest have surfaced in Louisiana’s program.

That is not much comfort to people like Lisa A. Lincoln, a social worker flooded out of New Orleans who now lives about 130 miles away, near Lafayette. Ms. Lincoln applied for a Road Home grant in August. She was interviewed, her house was inspected and her thumbprint was taken as a fraud-prevention measure.

But she still has not heard if she will get a grant to repair her Creole cottage in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans. The house still needs at least $60,000 worth of work, she said; it took all her insurance money, and help from community groups, to gut it and install some wallboard.

The delay appears to be that the program has to verify that she had insurance, and how much it paid her, she said. “And that could take however long to get,” she said. “I’m in limbo.”

Dealing with the insurance companies is just one challenge the program has faced, said Michael Byrne, a former New York City firefighter who is now chief program executive for ICF International, the private company the state hired to run the Road Home program.

Complicated federal regulations bar what is called “duplication of benefits,” so anyone who received insurance money or housing assistance from a different government agency, like the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has to document it and have it subtracted from the Road Home grant. And there have been computer systems to coordinate, documents to verify, hundreds of people to hire and offices to open across the state and, soon, in Houston.

Even figuring out how much a house was worth before the storm — the cap on the amount of a grant — is difficult, slow and often controversial.

Michael M. Homan, a professor of theology at Xavier University, is among the few who has been told how much he can get to repair his badly damaged house in the Mid-City neighborhood. But Professor Homan thinks the amount he was offered, about $64,000, is too low.

That is because the program assigned a prestorm value to his house of $146,000, less than he paid for it in 2002 and about $40,000 less than the appraisal when he refinanced his mortgage the next year. So he has appealed, and is hoping that his grant will be increased. Because he writes about his experiences on the Internet (at michaelhoman.blogspot.com), his results are being anxiously watched by other applicants.

Professor Homan said he was not dissatisfied with the program, compared with his other experiences after the storm. It has been, he said, “a year of incredible frustration,” starting when the levees broke. He had flood insurance, but is suing his insurance company, which denied his claim for wind damage.

It is not just the financial strain. As anyone here will tell you, trying to live in New Orleans is hard. Professor Homan, his wife and two children are living in the second story of their tilted house and in a FEMA trailer parked out front. Around them, some houses look abandoned, and a few have waist-high weeds in their yards.

Because housing in New Orleans has traditionally been relatively inexpensive, limiting grants to the prestorm value of a house may keep many people from rebuilding, said Melanie Ehrlich, a professor at Tulane University who is a founder of Citizens Road Home Action Team, a group that is pushing for changes in the state program.

Dr. Ehrlich, a molecular biologist, cites statistics suggesting that before the storm, about 10 percent of the city’s houses were valued at less than $50,000, and about two-thirds were valued at less than $125,000, far less than it would cost to build them from scratch. State officials say that low-income homeowners will be eligible for special loans that will be forgiven if they live in their houses for five years.

Salvatore S. Barone may be a test case, of sorts. Mr. Barone and his sister inherited a house in the eastern part of New Orleans after their mother died in 2000. Mr. Barone said that the house was valued at about $72,000, and that a contractor told him it would cost $52,000 to fix the flood damage.

But his situation, like many here, is complicated. His sister, who lived in the house before the storm, failed to pay the insurance or tax bills, probably because she was suffering from dementia, Mr. Barone said, adding that she was now in a nursing home.

A former driver for United Cabs in New Orleans, Mr. Barone said he was disabled by a stroke a decade ago and lives on $699 a month in federal benefits. He is staying in a trailer in rural Mississippi.

Though he has applied for a Road Home grant, Mr. Barone must first get his name on the title to the house, a common problem in New Orleans, lawyers there say.

Paul Tuttle, the pro bono counsel for Southeast Louisiana Legal Services, said that since the storm, his office had heard from hundreds of people living in family homes that they suddenly have to prove they own.

And the issue is critical. In Mr. Barone’s case, he said, “I’ll be living in a cardboard box under the Interstate if I don’t get this grant.”

    Slow Home Grants Stall Progress in New Orleans, NYT, 11.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/11/us/11louisiana.html?hp&ex=1163307600&en=1d213ba1503e43b3&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Budget woes wear on Center for Missing Adults

Updated 11/3/2006 2:11 AM ET
USA Today
By Kevin Johnson

WASHINGTON — The National Center for Missing Adults is dramatically scaling back its operations, saying the search for thousands of people displaced or killed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has nearly bankrupted the organization.

Kym Pasqualini, chief executive of the Phoenix-based operation, said the group's offices were closed last week and hotlines went untended for more than five days when the center was forced to smaller quarters elsewhere in the city.

The organization, called on by the Justice Department to help with hurricane relief efforts, handled more than 13,000 calls after last year's disaster. It recently has cut its staff from 13 to five, reducing its capacity to respond by at least 75%, Pasqualini said.

Federal assistance for the group, which has operated since 2002, has steadily declined since its opening, from $1.5 million at the start to $148,000 this year. Although the group does get some donations, it relies most on the federal funding.

"Now, we're praying that the public or some corporation will come to the aid to keep us going," Pasqualini said. "We're cutting everywhere we can."

By comparison, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) has 340 full-time staffers and receives an estimated $34 million in federal aid each year.

Search efforts for missing adults have always lacked the public support and funding that has been devoted to children, said John Rabun, chief operating officer for NCMEC.

"The public just hasn't viewed it with the sense of urgency that it does with children," Rabun said. "There is a view that adults ought to be able to fend for themselves."

Pasqualini said the missing adults center averages about 100 calls per day, although not all result in missing cases. The NCMEC received nearly 6,000 missing reports in the past quarter.

In days immediately after Katrina, Rabun said the NCMEC dispatched about 20 people to Phoenix for six month to assist Pasqualini's staff in the effort to locate thousands of adults.

A separate operation by the NCMEC handled reports of 5,200 missing children after Katrina.

Pasqualini said the Justice Department provided $50,000 to help defray the cost of locating missing adults after Katrina, but the effort actually cost the group about $200,000.

Domingo Herraiz, director of the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Assistance, said Pasqualini's group "provides an important service," but that the declining funding for the center was controlled by Congress.

"They (the Phoenix group) did a good job of staying on top of the (Katrina) issue," Herraiz said.

He said the group still has a fund balance of slightly more than $100,000.

Even so, Pasqualini said that money already has been budgeted to keep the group afloat for the next few months.

"A real problem for us is that because we have cut our staff, our ability to update families on the status of dozens of pending cases has been completely wiped out."

    Budget woes wear on Center for Missing Adults, NYT, 3.11.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-11-02-missing-adults_x.htm

After the Storm, Students Left Alone and Angry

November 1, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, Oct. 31 — John McDonogh High School has at least 25 security guards, at the entrance, up the stairs and outside classes. The school has a metal detector, four police officers and four police cruisers on the sidewalk.

In the last six weeks, students at McDonogh, the largest functioning high school here, have assaulted guards, a teacher and a police officer. A guard and a teacher were beaten so badly that they were hospitalized.

The surge hints at a far-reaching phenomenon after Hurricane Katrina, educators here say. Teenagers in the city are living alone or with older siblings or relatives, separated by hundreds of miles from their displaced parents. Dozens of McDonogh students fend largely for themselves, school officials say.

“They are here on their own,” Wanda Daliet, a science teacher, said. “They are raising themselves. And they are angry.”

The principal, Donald Jackson, estimated that up to a fifth of the 775 students live without parents.

“Basically, they are raising themselves, because there is no authority figure in the home,” Mr. Jackson said. “If I call for a parent because I’m having an issue, I may be getting an aunt, who may be at the oldest 20, 21. What type of governance, what type of structure is in the home, if this is the living conditions?”

In a second-floor cosmetology class, two of the six girls said their parents were elsewhere.

“I don’t get to talk to her as much as I want,” one girl, Tiffany Mansion, 16, said as she looked down.

Her mother is in Little Rock, Ark.

In the lunchroom, a shy 18-year-old who was asked whom he went home to in the evenings, said: “Nobody. Myself.”

His parents are in Baton Rouge.

Mr. Jackson said many parents whom he had spoken to were in Baton Rouge, Houston or elsewhere. “That’s the question that’s buzzing in everybody’s heads,” the McDonogh curriculum coordinator, Toyia Washington Kendrick, said. “How could you leave your kids here, that are school-age kids, unattended?”

The answer is as various as the fragmented social structure, which the hurricane a year ago made even more complicated. Some students describe families barely functional even before the storm. Others say pressing economic necessity has kept parents away.

Rachelle Harrell was living in Houston, working as a medical assistant and trying to pay off a $1,300 electricity bill in New Orleans. But she yielded to her son Justin and his cousin Kiante, both 16, and sent them back to New Orleans on a Greyhound bus while she stayed in Texas.

The decision anguished Ms. Harrell, 36, even though Justin was being picked on in Houston and yearned to return to McDonogh. Justin; his sister, Eboni Gay, 18; and Kiante set up housekeeping in Ms. Harrell’s old house in the Algiers neighborhood. A monthly check from his mother and a job at a fast-food restaurant helped make ends meet.

Ms. Harrell anticipated the inevitable question.

“ ‘Why are your children at home, and you’re in Texas?’ ” she asked. “Well, I’m trying to get home. It’s just crazy. But my kids know my situation. When school started, I had to work a couple of more weeks, because I had that light bill.

“It’s like, ‘Oh my God, is everything O.K.?’ I couldn’t even sleep at night. O.K. Lord, if anything happens, I’m going to be seen as such a bad mama, and I’m a hundred miles from home.”

Last week, she left her job in Houston and returned to New Orleans — for good.

If the causes are complicated, the consequences seem evident to school officials: a large cadre of belligerent students, hostile to authority and with no worry about parental punishment at home.

Since McDonogh reopened nearly two months ago with enrollees from 5 of the city’s 15 high schools, the students have committed six “very serious” assaults, Mr. Jackson said.

A young man suddenly bent over in the milling crowd waiting for a bus after school. The police were handcuffing him, for smoking marijuana, a school official said.

In the halls, students jostle one another and laugh on the way to class. In some classes, students strain attentively toward the blackboard.

But there is tension. The storm overturned their world, teachers and administrators say, destroying houses and scattering families.

“They’re rebelling against authority,” Ms. Daliet, the science teacher, said. “You ask them to do something, they have an attitude.”

In the lunchroom and in the corridors, students are ordered to tuck in their shirts. Many just grin in response.

“When you have guidelines at home that reflect guidelines at the school, it’s a seamless transition,” Mr. Jackson said. “But when it’s not there, you deal with a student who’s genuinely, ‘I don’t care, I’m going to do what I want to do.’ ”

Fights break out daily. About 50 students have been suspended; 20 have been recommended for expulsion.

Of the 128 schools in the city, fewer half have reopened. The state took over many of them after the storm. That change, hailed at first as a bright beginning, has proven to be partly stillborn, as teachers, textbooks and supplies came up drastically short in the state-run schools.

The McDonogh library has no books. State officials, fearing mold, threw out all of them.

Rundown before the storm, the school buildings are now even more battered. The stalls in a girls’ restroom have no doors.

Recrimination and finger pointing have been ample, and state officials are on the defensive.

“The same way other residents are calling it quits, teachers are no different,” Leslie Jacobs, a member of the state school board, said. “The teacher shortage is real. The book shortage is real. We have a labor shortage. There is a shortage of bus drivers. The whole food-service industry is short of workers.”

Mr. Jackson is a smiling, purposeful presence, friendly but firm, upbraiding youths for slovenly dress and pursuing others along for slacking in the halls. At every turn, it can seem, an omnipresent security guard or police officer speaks to teenagers, searching for weapons or admonishing for back talk.

As a group milled on the street corner of the three-story 1911 brick building, a guard called out from the steps: “He’s taken his shirt off! They’re getting ready to fight!”

Three burly police officers quickly went up Esplanade Avenue to break up the clash.

Mr. Jackson conceded that the scale of the unrest had taken him aback.

“I knew it would happen,” he said. “I had some forewarning. But I didn’t know it would be of this magnitude. We’ve seen things that really shouldn’t occur in a school.”

Several weeks ago, a teacher was “beaten unmercifully” by a ninth grader enraged at being barred from class because he was late, Mr. Jackson said. The teacher, hospitalized, has not returned to work. The student was arrested.

An 18-year-old knocked a guard unconscious. The police charged him.

The reputation for violence, first acquired through a shooting in the gymnasium in 2003 in which a young man with a rifle killed a student in front of 200 others, has grown.

Three weeks ago, a group of students summoned reporters to the school to complain about the many officers.

“We have a lot of security guards, and not enough teachers,” Maya Dawson, 17, said.

Jerinise Walker, 15, added: “It’s like you’re in jail. You have people watching you all the time.”

Mr. Jackson said the time had not come to reduce security.

“When we get our students to respond in a different way,” he said, “then I can back off. We’re trying to train our students to resolve conflict, and that’s something they haven’t been able to do.”

    After the Storm, Students Left Alone and Angry, NYT, 1.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/01/education/01orleans.html