Homeland Stupidity - New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin announced that the city would begin citing residents who did not vacate the FEMA trailers in which they have been living.
Anyone caught living in a FEMA trailer in New Orleans after July 1 could be subject to a $500 fine plus daily fines after that, according to city zoning administrator Edward Horan.
“The point of this is to have the trailers removed, not to issue massive citations,” Horan told USA TODAY. “But there will those who will resist. They will be issued citations.”
A FEMA spokesman said the trailers were meant to be temporary and could pose a threat to residents during hurricane season, yet many still live in the trailers because of poverty or special needs. Residents of the hardest hit areas of New Orleans, Gentilly, the Lower 9th Ward and East New Orleans, will have an extra three months, until the end of September, to vacate their travel trailers.
As if that’s enough time. Most of the people in these trailers simply have nowhere else to go. They lost everything in the flood, or never had anything to begin with. And for them a $500 fine — or more — would be harsh.
And while FEMA says it will relocate travel trailer residents to hotels or apartments, actually getting the bureaucrats to do this often proves just this side of impossible, which is why there are still nearly 4,000 people in travel trailers in New Orleans alone.
Meanwhile a $74.5 million program announced in December 2006 to build cottages for Katrina survivors in Louisiana to replace the travel trailers hasn’t produced a single cottage. The program has been mired in red tape and a bureaucratic game of hot potato as the program got passed from one state agency to another, the Associated Press reported.
So you’re poor and have nowhere else to go and little money, the housing market has imploded, and The Big Easy wants you gone. And if you don’t leave, they’ll just take all your money until you have absolutely nothing left but life on the streets. This is how governments treat the poor and disabled. We can do better.
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