Getting Home Before It's Gone

By Anita Johnson and Thenmozhi Soundararajan and Jeff Chang, AlterNet. Posted September 26, 2005.

A dozen miles north of Baton Rouge, in a rural Louisiana town called Baker, a new city is being erected for Katrina evacuees.

The structures they will live in aren't the stylish, modernist prefab homes one might see in the architecture magazine, Dwell. They are airless metal trailers, poorly suited for 90-degree heat. In less than two weeks, 600 of these containers will be standing in a field just off Groom Road. Rows of Porta Potties and showering facilities will complete the FEMA-funded trailer-home subdivision, swelling Baker's pre-Katrina population of 13,500 by 2,000 more.

Baker's trailer camp -- and many others like it -- are being developed by the Shaw Group, a politically well-connected Baton Rouge company that has received at least $200 million in FEMA funds for post-Katrina cleanup and reconstruction. The Shaw Group is a client of former FEMA director, now lobbyist and Salon.com-dubbed "disaster pimp" Joseph Allbaugh who resigned in 2003 and arranged for the disgraced Michael Brown to become his replacement.

Last week, Shaw's CEO, Jim Bernhard, a close friend of Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, stepped down from his post as the state's Democratic Party chairman, allegedly to avoid the appearance of cronyism. The week before that, after the Shaw Group announced it had secured two FEMA no-bid contracts, its stock had surged to a three-year high.

Louisiana's Shawvilles provide the outlines of what New Orleans organizer and journalist Jordan Flaherty has taken to calling "the Disaster Industrial Complex."

According to FEMA, some 300,000 displaced families in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama are in need of "temporary housing." Those involved in the Baker project interpret "temporary" to mean anywhere from five months to five years. But a temporary house is not a home. And as FEMA attempts to meet President Bush's request to close most shelters by mid-October, small white rural towns in Louisiana are reporting outbursts of NIMBY-ism.

The bigger picture, many community activists argue, is a resettlement policy that looks like selective depopulation. In New Orleans and parts of the Gulf Coast, predominantly poor communities and communities of color are being dispersed, as families scattered across the country with one-way tickets and no way to get back home.

At the Bottom of the List

At Houston's Reliant Center, Shawn, 34, waited in long FEMA lines for temporary housing. Like an overwhelming majority of evacuees interviewed, he wanted to return home to New Orleans. Failing that, he wanted to go to Atlanta where he had a cousin. But he was resigned to accept wherever they would send him and his wife and children. "It's like if they show it to you, if you want it (that's good). If you don't, you be waiting again. You'll be on the bottom of the list," he said. "So people are just going with whatever they could get. They just want to get out of the Center."

Curtis Muhammad, a longtime New Orleans resident and a leader of Community Labor United, an 8-year-old coalition that has swelled to include 49 Crescent City community-based organizations, captures the sentiment of many of the displaced. "One hundred-fifty thousand [New Orleans residents] are walking around somewhere in these United States," he says. "They're walking around wondering why their government wanted them there."

At the same time, many fear that if the Bush Administration, FEMA and the Red Cross don't accomplish the depopulation of their neighborhoods, human greed will.

Alice Britton, a 47-year-old nurse from Atlanta, returned to her birthplace of Biloxi, Mississippi, near the Gulf to clear the wreckage from the family property and pick up her elderly mother, who had ridden out the storm. She said she feared for the future of that community.

Thenmozhi Soundararajan and Anita Johnson are reporting from the Gulf Coast for Hard Knock Radio (Pacifica Radio) and Thirld World Majority. Jeff Chang is based in Berkeley, Calif., and wrote this article. Additional reporting done by Macho Cabrera Estévez.

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