In February, less than six months after Katrina and Rita hit, FEMA began transitioning from short- to long-term housing assistance for victims of the 2005 Gulf Coast hurricanes. The notification process was confused, information changed from week to week, and people simply were not able to navigate the red tape.
By April, when FEMA declared that some clearly uninhabitable homes were usable, it was obvious that the agency was unable to meet the challenge… yet the “transition” continued, resulting in lawsuits and interventions on behalf of the evacuees. Many months later, a decision has been made:
Condemning the bureaucracy at the Federal Emergency Management Agency as “Kafkaesque,” a federal judge Wednesday ordered the government to immediately resume housing payments to Gulf Coast residents who lost their homes to Hurricane Katrina.
[snip]
Leon ordered the agency to explain its actions, restore short-term benefits to evacuees who had been cut off and give them the two months of housing payments they would have received after payments finally stopped in August 2006. The ruling affects 11,000 families, mostly in Louisiana and Texas.
Since it’s common knowledge that the welcome wore off the mat in my part of Texas long ago, the ruling isn’t likely to be well-received in Houston. However, while much has been made of the increased violent crime in certain areas, the FEMA ruling hits the heart of what’s really got folks upset: many simply cannot understand how it’s possible to still need assistance so many months later.
Frankly, understanding is a luxurious irrelevancy for which we no longer have time. The fact is that there are people who still haven’t found their feet since last year’s hurricanes wiped them out.
FEMA, however ill-prepared, was never intended as more than an emergency stopgap. There is nothing hopeful about waiting for the money to run out, and if these folks could have solved the problems for themselves, they would have. It’s time to find and remove the last barriers, whatever they are, so that people can move on. More here.