Federal Govt's disastrous handling of the Katrina housing crisis is looking more and more like an attempt to force displaced families into the streets

The New York Times
Still Battering the Katrina Homeless

The federal government's disastrous handling of the Katrina housing crisis is looking more and more like an attempt to force displaced families into the streets. The latest chapter came when the Federal Emergency Management Agency informed many families who had expected to have their rent paid for a year that they would soon be forced to assume their own housing costs or to leave their homes and apartments.

This is not the first time the families and the communities that have struggled to house them have been whipsawed by the federal government. They have been peppered with policy changes and letters written in clotted bureaucratese.

Things got off to a disastrous start soon after the hurricane, when the federal government concentrated on grotesquely expensive trailer parks and hotel housing — and then on short-term leases for private housing that frightened away potential landlords. The common-sense approach would have been to furnish displaced families with at least 12 months' worth of rent vouchers through the Department of Housing and Urban Development, as was done after other disasters. That way, the families could have settled into functioning communities, where they could have found schools for their children and perhaps gotten jobs.

The Bush administration avoided making HUD the star of the resettlement effort because that would have built a constituency for the voucher program, which ideologues in Congress have been busy trying to destroy. This result was on display this week in a Times article by Shaila Dewan, which showed deepening confusion among already devastated families who fear that the next stop will be a homeless shelter.