Cash and 'Cat 5' Chaos - Newsweek Hurricane Katrina Coverage - MSNBC.com

If the Trailer's this Bad - How Bad can the Movie be?

I'm looking at the MSNBC/Newsweek coverage "Cash and 'Cat 5' Chaos", which has an aerial view of a group of trailers that FEMA has brought in to house folks left homeless by Katrina. Apparently, the same people who think housing 20,000 people in the Astrodome is good short-term housing think that nuvo-ghettos of white travel trailers is good long term housing. Count me in the minority of white people who think that the housing alternatives would be far different if the proposed residents didn't have a majority of black people.


Cash and 'Cat 5' Chaos - Newsweek Hurricane Katrina Coverage - MSNBC.com

The media are reporting these trailers as "mobile homes". No, that's not true. These are travel-trailers. These are the things you take if you want to rough it for a week. Most people don't live in these things as a principal residence.

A well-syndicated Washington Post article seriously at the trailer parks that FEMA installed in Florida after last year's hurricanes. The conclusion: these are ghettos in the making. Residents are segregated from society as a whole. They don't have ready access to social services, commerce or employment. At least in Florida many of the houses and neighborhoods destroyed may be rebuilt in months or a couple years at most. It will take at least a decade for New Orleans to get to its previous (if flawed) level of functioning. It is likely that many of the future residents will be newcomers rather than returnees.

The best thing the federal government can do is to provide vouchers for local housing and access to vacant government-owned housing. By spreading the evacuees over a large area, you improve the ability of the adopting communities to handle the newcomers as well as the newcomers' chance for successful re-establishment.