Turning Away From New Orleans

We're three months removed from Hurricane Katrina, and in the 24 hour-news cycle, 3 months might as well be a century ago. But to turn away from this epochal tragedy is unconscionable. Yesterday we learned that over 6,000 people are still missing, 4 times that of the 1,306 confirmed dead in the Gulf Coast region. That unbelievably high number may have as much to do with the complete lack of organization in the area than anything else. Many returning to their homes are finding dead people in the attics (they stopped looking for the dead within a scant few weeks).

What aid is getting to the victims is being mismanaged by that familiar bugaboo, FEMA. We know that they're about to expel any refugee living in a hotel by December 1. What we don't know is that this is probably because they blew all the money beforehand:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency's evolving efforts to shelter Hurricane Katrina victims continue to waste huge amounts of taxpayer dollars and could soon leave many evacuees short of money and facing eviction, according to renter advocates and housing industry officials.

Apartment owners say they also are encountering problems collecting rents because FEMA hands money directly to storm victims, instead of using housing vouchers or payments to landlords as HUD does for some low-income renters. Some families that left their homes with only what they could carry have used FEMA's cash for food, clothing and transportation.

"We felt if we did the right thing, FEMA would step up and provide housing assistance for all these folks. Here we are four weeks later, and a lot of these folks simply do not have rent money to pay," said Kirk H. Tate, a member of Houston's Katrina housing task force and a partner at Orion Real Estate Services Inc., which manages 12,000 apartments in the city.

The warnings come as a wide range of players in the nation's housing and lodging industries express mounting exasperation with FEMA's shifting efforts to cope with the evacuee crisis. Although the administration has proposed cruise ships, trailers, President Bush's nascent "urban homesteading" initiative, hotels and now apartment grants, they say FEMA is ignoring advice from experts inside and outside the government.

"The normal FEMA programs just aren't working. They may be good for 1,500, 2,000 people, but when you're talking a half a million, they do not work," said Douglas S. Culkin, executive vice president of the National Apartment Association.

Culkin said 1 million rental units are vacant in the southeastern United States at half the rate of FEMA's $1,770-a-month hotel program. He called the current spending rate of $250 million a month "a horrendous waste of tax dollars."

We have agencies that aren't equipped to deal with this effort. We have no commission impaneled by the President to manage the problem at the macro level. And so the relief that is desperately needed is becoming bogged down in the typical internecine squabbles:

Less than three months after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, relief legislation remains dormant in Washington and despair is growing among state and local officials here who fear that Congress and the Bush administration are losing interest in their plight.

As evidence, the officials cite an array of stalled bills and policy changes. These are crucial, the officials say, to rebuilding the city and persuading some of its hundreds of thousands of evacuated residents to return. They include measures to finance long-term hurricane protection, revive small businesses and compensate the uninsured.

"There is a real concern that we will lose the nation's attention the longer this takes," said Representative Bobby Jindal, a Republican from Metairie, just west of New Orleans. "People are making decisions now about whether to come back. And every day that passes, it will be a little harder to get things done."

Officials from both parties say the bottlenecks have occurred in large part because of a leadership vacuum in Washington, where President George W. Bush and Congress have been preoccupied for weeks with Iraq, deficit reduction, the CIA leak investigation and the Supreme Court.

Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a Democrat, said recently on CNN, "We feel like we are citizens of the United States who are nearly forgotten."

Among all the typical stories that dot the media landscape, this above all is the one that cannot be forgotten. This is a major American city razed to the ground. Lots of areas still have no power. Without any housing, businesses can't hire workers and reopen their shops. Half a million people are displaced all over the country. If ever there was an urgent emergency, this is it. And it grows worse by the day.

I'd like to put together some sort of action item, but it's hard to know what to do. Clearly citizens need to get this to the top of the legislative agenda when Congress comes home for recess over the next few weeks. We need a new Tennessee Valley Authority to rebuild the region and bring the population back. We need leadership to oversee this reconstruction, not ad hoc committees and programs. This seems crystal clear to me, but its being bogged down and underfunded. This is horrific. If we cannot care for our own citizens, it's time to get out of the government and civil society business. You cannot give up the Gulf Coast as some kind of consequence of social Darwinism.

UPDATE: I'm glad that FEMA has pushed back the deadline for removing evacuees from hotels by five weeks. I'm not glad that this was in response to public pressure and there's really no money for it because it was squandered. Recently it was reported that Fannie Mae offered 1,500 rent-free housing units and FEMA replied that they weren't needed. There's a chasm of leadership at the top of this reconstruction effort.