NYT editorial: Katrina’s Purgatory: More than a year later, housing needs still unmet

[DeepModem Mom]

Katrina’s Purgatory
Published: November 18, 2006

Excuses sound hollow when you’re trapped in a flimsy trailer. For Gulf Coast residents waiting for long-promised government housing assistance, patience has given way to anger, and anguish. What is clear more than a year after Hurricane Katrina is that their needs — and the demand for action from the American public — have largely gone unmet.

In Louisiana, only 28 families have received their share of the federal dollars intended to help them repair or replace their homes. After a local uproar, and a strict new deadline from the governor, the number of residents approved for funds is now just under 5,000 — out of nearly 78,000 applications.

Louisiana’s housing reconstruction authority should not bear all of the blame for this problem. All the gears of government grind too slowly for the victims of the storm. It took the Bush administration nearly six months to request the necessary rebuilding funds. Congress hemmed and hawed until June before approving the legislation. Down the coast, Mississippi’s program has also been plagued with delays....

***

The president’s Katrina czar, Donald Powell, is soft-spoken and deliberative. Those qualities have served him well in the past, but not now. As the government’s emissary (and the former head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation), he has a powerful pulpit and the ability to summon all the key players — major lenders, buyers of loans like the large investment banks and Fannie Mae, and federal regulators — to help fix the system. Mr. Powell needs to speak out more forcefully and act more aggressively.

The ruin of a region and the historic city of New Orleans could not be more important, and the tangle of destruction is nowhere near unwound.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/18/opinion/18sat1.html

[texpatriot2004]

1. Here's the 1st DU thread on this topic

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x2749503

[barb162]

2. 28 families? Can that be right?

[barb162]

3. BTW, I read there are still people in trailers in Florida too

from the hurricanes from the year before Katrina.