The Louisiana Weekly provided this new update to my report last year about rapes during and after the hurricane and flooding. The risk of sexual violence against female evacuees and their children is increasing as extended family members and neighbors continue to be cramped into temporary housing nearly eleven months after Katrina hit.
Verified rape cases have climbed to nearly 70 according to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center located in Harrisburg, Pa, while Judy Benitez of the Louisiana Foundation for Sexual Assault (LAFASA) said in a June 13 article that an epidemiologist has confirmed at least 46 verifiable cases in their database.
However, new rape cases are occurring due to the lack of housing, especially affordable housing, as speculating landlords jack up apartments up to New York City and San Francisco prices, often asking for deposits up to three times the monthly rent:
“We have families doubling and tripling up in substandard housing, families living with extended family members they wouldn’t normally choose to live with,” said Alisa Klein, a public health and violence prevention specialist with the nonprofit National Sexual Violence Resource Center in Harrisburg, Pa. “We’re seeing this increased vulnerability to sexual violence . . . When people are stressed, feel powerless, out of control, one thing we know: People do–if they already have violent tendencies–act out sexually.“
FEMA trailers and old automobiles could be said to be “substandard housing” as well. Especially those with no water or gas connections or working toilets. The trailers were notorious for having missing amenities, even keys, and there are still not enough for everyone.
Nationally, at least 50,000 households of hurricane evacuees are currently receiving FEMA rental assistance, according to FEMA officials.
About 68,000 evacuee households are housed in trailers in Louisiana; 34,000 in Mississippi; and 1,800 in Alabama, according to a Louisiana state government Web site.
Added to this, in early June, the New Orleans Housing Authority and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced that the St. Bernard, C.J Peete, B.W. Cooper and Lafitte public housing complexes where many poor black residents lived in New Orleans were going to be bulldozed to make way for “mixed income housing,” a combination of public housing, rental housing and single-family homes.
Sabrina Williams of the Advancement Project told The Louisiana Weekly on Monday (July 3), “The move by federal officials to demolish 5,000 public-housing buildings in New Orleans, would sabotage the chance for the mostly low-income, black displaced population to return home, and would worsen their already deepening housing crisis. For years, HUD and HANO have been squeezing Black families out of the city, demolishing about 6,000 public housing units in the past decade. Now, with black families scattered, and units flooded HUD and HANO is using Hurricane Katrina as an excuse to finish the plan. Instead of `bringing back New Orleans,’ (quotes mine) HUD plans to keep black families locked-out and displaced.”
These mixed housing schemes always results in much fewer law-abiding, working poor residents returning because the population is skewed towards the upper and middle class. It may allow for the vaunted tax base Nagin wants to create, but the cost would be the exodus of thousands who have lived and worked in New Orleans for generations. Pre-Katrina, most of these people took most of the lower-paid positions in the tourist, transportation, medical, hotel and restaurant industries. They often held two jobs, even three. Less than 6,000 people were on welfare or AFDC.
So much for Nagin’s controversial “chocolate city” pronouncement to make sure all the black citizenry of New Orleans would return. In the mayoral election between Landrieu and Nagin, blacks were placed between a rock and a hard place–and even with Nagin’s win against so-called machine politicians, they are still being abandoned to “market forces.” Nagin was the first to hail the decision to demolish the housing complexes as a step towards a new New Orleans.
Amid continuing protests and demonstrations by residents of the public housing complexes slated for demolition, a civil rights lawsuit was filed last week contending that the Housing Authority and HUD are preventing poor and low-income black families from returning to the city.
