NY Times: Life on the Streets of New Orleans (Most Homeless in NOLA from City, Survey Says)

[marmar]

Most Homeless in New Orleans From City, Survey Finds
By SHAILA DEWAN
Published: May 28, 2008



NEW ORLEANS — Mayor C. Ray Nagin recently suggested a way to reduce this city’s post-Katrina homeless population: give them one-way bus tickets out of town.

Mr. Nagin later insisted the off-the-cuff proposal was just a joke. But he has portrayed the dozens of people camped in a tent city under a freeway overpass near Canal Street as recalcitrant drug and alcohol abusers who refuse shelter, give passers-by the finger and, worst of all, hail from somewhere else.

While many of the homeless people do have addiction problems or mental illness, a survey by advocacy groups in February showed that 86 percent were from the New Orleans area. Sixty percent said they were homeless because of Hurricane Katrina. And about 30 percent had received rental assistance at one time from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Not far from the French Quarter, flanking Canal Street on Claiborne Avenue, they are living inside a long corridor formed not of walls and a roof but of the thick stench of human waste and sweat tinged with alcohol, crack and desperation.

The inhabitants are natives like Ronald Gardner, 54, an H.I.V.-positive man who said he had never before slept on the streets until Katrina. Or Ronald Berry, 57, who despite being a paranoid schizophrenic said he had lived on his own, in a rented house in the Lower Ninth Ward, for a dozen years before Katrina. Both men receive disability checks for $637 a month, not nearly enough to cover post-hurricane rents.

“If I could just get a warm room,” Mr. Gardner said, sitting on the cot under which all his belongings are stored, “I could take it from there.”

Lurlene Newell, 54, said the Federal Emergency Management Agency had paid her rent in Texas after the storm, but when she moved back to New Orleans, she could not find a place to live. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/us/28tent.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

[izquierdista]

1. Nagin must be adopted

His birth name is probably C. Ray Saystupidstuff

[southern_belle]

2. kick & rec. This needs to be seen.

[dixiegrrrrl]

3. The old one-way-bus-ticket problem solving approach

goes back a long ways in the South.

I am amazed Nagin said it out loud.

[NOLALady]

4. And they are destroying structures that were minimally damaged.

Evidently they believe they can keep the unemployed and working poor permanently out of the city if their homes are gone. It seems they didn't count on the exploding homeless population.

It will only get worse when the FEMA rental aid stops. New Orleanians will probably head for home rather than be homeless in a strange town. :cry: