Project Katrina

Almost nothing, I mean nothing surprises my anymore related to Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans.

In New Orleans shotgun houses are located all throughout the city and account for a large percentage of housing for lower income folks. These type of homes usually are no more than 12 feet (3.5 m) wide, with doors at each end, and consist of three to five rooms in a row with no hallways. They add a charm to New Orleans that is hard to express.

So in the aftermath of Katrina a fund was set-up to help the owners repair them and get renters back into them. Pretty smart and simple idea isn’t it. Well the execution seems to be harder than you might think.

According the numbers gathered by The Road Home, of the money allocated to help repair/rebuild these homes, more than three years after Katrina only .027% has been distributed to owners.

The four-unit shotgun house that Sandra Marshall bought after decades of double shifts has sat untouched since the flooding of Hurricane Katrina, while nearly $850 million in federal aid for her and thousands of other mom-and-pop landlords sits on a bureaucratic shelf.

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She has applied for a repair loan from the nearly forgotten Louisiana Small Rental Property Program, created in the aftermath of Katrina to provide financial help to as many as 13,000 live-in owners of the shotgun and cottage conversions that kept rents cheap here for generations.

So far, it has put money in the hands of only 352 landlords. The hurdles have been its flawed implementation, limited financial resources among applicants, and lately, the national credit crunch. Now, the state is seeking to overhaul the program and divert the funds.

Let me say that again, more than three years after Katrina only .027% has been distributed to home owners. Maybe we ought to get some of the TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program) folks down there. They can give away hundreds of billions in a couple weeks.

Even before the storm, they were some of the country’s neediest kids. Now, the children of Katrina who stayed longest in ramshackle government trailer parks in Baton Rouge are “the sickest I have ever seen in the U.S.,” says Irwin Redlener, president of the Children’s Health Fund and a professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. According to a new report by CHF and Mailman (direct link to PDF) focusing on 261 displaced children, the well-being of the poorest Katrina kids has “declined to an alarming level” since the hurricane. Forty-one percent are anemic—twice the rate found in children in New York City homeless shelters, and more than twice the CDC’s record rate for high-risk minorities. More than half the kids have mental-health problems. And 42 percent have respiratory infections and disorders that may be linked to formaldehyde and crowding in the trailers, the last of which FEMA finally closed in May.

The “unending bureaucratic haggling” at federal and state levels over how to provide services and rebuild health centers for the Gulf’s poor has made a bad situation much worse, says Redlener: “As awful as the initial response to Katrina looked on television, it’s been dwarfed by the ineptitude and disorganization of the recovery.”

More findings from the report (direct link to a PDF) that should make every single American sick to their stomach include:

• 55% of elementary school age children had a behavior or learning problem.
• 42% of children were diagnosed with allergic rhinitis and/or upper respiratory infection and 24% had a cluster of upper respiratory, allergic, and dermatological diagnoses. These high rates of diagnoses could reflect the harsh environmental conditions at shelter, such as exposure to formaldehyde which was found to be present in the trailers.
• 41% of children under four years of age were diagnosed with iron deficiency anemia. This is twice the rate for homeless children in shelters in New York City.
• 27% were diagnosed with a hearing or vision problem.
• Nearly one-half of the children required at least one specialty medical visit and 12% required two or more specialists.

Iraq was and is a terrible thing. And many folks tell me decades from now it is be the biggest failure of George Bush’s eight years in office. Well I beg to disagree, and studies like this just show how right I am.