The Katrina Housing Debacle, NY Times - Thanksgiving Day

[Coastie for Truth]

The Bush administration's mishandling of the Katrina housing crisis is shaping up as an epic policy failure. Nearly three months after more than half a million people were displaced by the hurricane, most are still at loose ends in provisional housing - many in isolated trailer parks. The government has no apparent plan for getting them settled in places where they might find jobs and schools.

The federal government has meanwhile been less than helpful to cities like Houston, which has worked feverishly to find housing for the tens of thousands of survivors who landed on its doorstep. Like other cities, Houston has been whiplashed by confusing federal directives. Recently, the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced that it would stop paying hotel bills on Dec. 1. Then it extended the deadline to Jan. 7 for those in the states with the highest concentrations of evacuees and to Dec. 15 for thousands of people in the other states.

The mayor of Houston, which has struggled to house about 80,000 evacuees, was rightly outraged by the first deadline. With about 19,000 people still in hotels and motels at the time of the first announcement, the city could not hope to meet the deadline. And FEMA had made the task of finding apartments all the more difficult by saying it wanted conditional leases that could be changed after three months. Landlords would understandably reject this option, given that many are already worried that they might not get paid for the evacuees they have already accepted as tenants.

No one city should have been asked to absorb so many displaced people. The administration could have easily avoided that by issuing Section 8 housing vouchers through the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The survivors would have been filtered through HUD's extensive locator system, which has a track record of directing people to decent and affordable housing all over the country.