They miss old New Orleans:
“Right now, I feel like I’m an alien in another country,” [Karen Williams] said, sitting on a couch in Room 515 at the Hampton Inn & Suites near the Astrodome. “I want to go back home.”
“I just don’t feel like there’s any soul,” said Erika Hahne, a Mid-City mother of three who fled Katrina with her husband to a rented house on Houston’s northern edge. “There’s no soul. There’s no flavor.”
While 70% of evacuees in Houston are contemplating seeking employment in there, with 40% wanting to stay permanently, there is still a sizable number for whom
…sentiment is strong for leaving the Lone Star State and heading back to the Crescent City, even as its future remains cloaked in uncertainty and some of its neighborhoods still lack drinkable water and electricity more than three months after the Aug. 29 storm.”
Why do New Orleanians want to return, despite newer and sometimes better accommodations?
[They want to go back] to where bus drivers know every nook of each neighborhood. Back to where cashiers call shoppers “dawlin’ ” and “baby.” Back to block parties, costume balls and drinking beer out on the sidewalk. Back to streetcars. Back to crawfish. Back to shelves stocked with Bunny Bread and Blue Plate mayonnaise.
For others, Houston is too big, impersonal and unneighborly. For Hahne, she liked the diversity of a New Orleans magnet school for her children, where every school day was heralded by a song and there was art and music. She didn’t own an SUV, she said, and she didn’t vote for George Bush. It would be a death sentence, she added, if her husband’s company extends its temporary stay in Texas.
Others bemoaned Houston as lacking that indefinable New Orleans character that makes Halloween a holiday for costumed adults and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival a perfectly acceptable excuse to miss a workday in early May.
“It’s like, in New Orleans, if you would see a man dressed as a woman, you wouldn’t think nothing. Here, you would stare,” said Brian Colletti, who evacuated from Chalmette to Houston when his wife’s employer transferred her job as a nuclear medicine and X-ray technician.
Meanwhile, Habitat for Humanity wants alleviate the shortage of FEMA trailers and provide for permanent housing later:
The group is pitching a plan to provide temporary homes in New Orleans that would later be moved to other sites, thereby shoring up the city’s permanent stock of affordable housing.
After a disaster-relief stint, Habitat for Humanity-built houses would roll into the city’s neighborhoods.
The idea appears to be gaining momentum, with a City Park golf course targeted as a construction site.
Nagin appears to like the idea:
Jim Pate, director of the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity, said Mayor Ray Nagin immediately embraced the proposal to provide a planned community of transitional housing for “critical city employees, specifically the police officers and firefighters that protect us.”
“He was ecstatic,” Pate said, recalling his October meeting with Nagin about the plan to build as many as 400 homes on City Park’s north golf course. “It’s a win-win, where trees won’t be damaged.”
Only one problem: why just city employees? FEMA already has dozens of empty tents and provisions for staff that don’t use them. Why not allow 400 families to have the housing?
The need is for evacuees to have housing. Unfortunately, under Habitat for Humanity’s proposal, they wouldn’t get it until farther up the chain–within 18 months.
FEMA spokesman James McIntyre said the proposal is in “the discussion stage.” Paul Soniat, the director of the New Orleans Botanical Garden at City Park, said it appears from staff meetings that “the park wants to do it,” but details are being worked out to determine whether City Park would receive rental fees from FEMA.
Rental fees?
For the homes still standing and still livable in the Crescent City comes a new worry: the reliability of existing elevation maps are now suspect. Which means that
“There’s a lot more subsidence (sinking) than people ever thought. People don’t realize that the subsidence is continuing to happen, it’s not stopping,” [Roy] Dokka [of the Louisiana Spatial Reference Center at Louisiana State University] said, noting that the issue affects planning for new levees as well as homes. “Over in east New Orleans, the 9th Ward, places like that, those places have sunk substantially over the last several years. Some of those places may be 1 to 2 feet lower than (residents) think they are.”
In other words, the elevation of many buildings has dropped 6 inches to a foot over time, not including the onslaught of the levee flooding. Result: this may increase rebuilding costs on a populace that is forced to go it alone, abandoned by its own government and even by its own people.
