Poor Feel Trapped In FEMA Trailers

By MARY FOSTER The Associated Press

Published: Aug 5, 2007

BAKER, LA. - It was bad enough when Hurricane Katrina chased Carrie Lewis out of her assisted-living home in New Orleans. Now she fears the rest of her life may be spent in the isolation of a federally sponsored mobile home park.

Because hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed so much affordable housing, Lewis and thousands of others displaced - mainly the poor, elderly and infirm - have nowhere else to go.

"I want to go home," said Lewis, 79, who lives in the Renaissance Village mobile home park. "They don't have places for old people in New Orleans yet. What am I supposed to do? I don't want to die in a little trailer in the middle of a field somewhere."

The Federal Emergency Management Agency provided 120,000 mobile homes to people displaced from their Gulf Coast homes by the 2005 hurricanes.

Pamela Lomis and her two children feel abandoned. Lomis lives in a FEMA mobile home in the Sugar Hill mobile home park in the midst of cane fields near Convent, La., about midway between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

It's 20 miles from the nearest grocery store. A bus leaves each day at 9 a.m. and returns at 4 p.m., Lomis' lifeline to a distant world.

"We just sit around here with life slipping by," Lomis said. "We're just on hold. Just waiting for something that never comes."

She isn't alone.

"Our biggest challenge is finding housing for people," said Mario "Sam" Sammartino, who supervises Catholic Services caseworkers at Louisiana's FEMA parks. "What's left here is the poorest of the poor. Anyone with a job or a house has already left."

Many of the hurricane evacuees from New Orleans didn't own homes or lived in the city's 5,100 public housing units. But federal officials plan to tear down four projects and replace them with mixed-income developments, and private rental housing - if it can be found - is expensive.

Sammartino and others working to resettle residents think it will take at least five years to clear the FEMA parks. About 45,000 mobile homes are still occupied in Louisiana, 20,000 in Mississippi, 17,000 in Texas and 400 in Alabama.

Those who remain in the mobile homes will start paying rent to FEMA in 2008, starting at $50 a month.

"How are you going to pay if you don't have money?" asked Sharon Norah, 50, who lives on disability assistance in a Renaissance Village trailer with her 9-year-old son, Calvin.

Renaissance Village, with 565 trailers about 100 miles northwest of New Orleans, is the Taj Mahal of FEMA parks, said Carol Spruell of Catholic Charities. Unlike some others, it has a basketball court, a tent for community activities, laundry rooms and a playground. Volunteer groups provide health care, mental health services and educational services.

FEMA is pushing to get people out of the mobile homes, spokesman Bob Josephson said. All hurricane-related housing assistance ends in March 2009, but replacement housing has been slow to develop in some areas such as New Orleans.

"We do provide rental assistance," Josephson said, but the help is temporary.

"We have a difficult challenge, particularly with people on fixed incomes," he said.