It is the Gulf Coast of AmeriKa, and NOT EVERYBODY is hurting!
"Homeless on the rise in New Orleans; Squat in buildings condemned after Hurricane Katrina" by John Moreno Gonzales/Associated Press August 19, 2007
NEW ORLEANS -- As she pushed a shopping cart of belongings through the still-life of the Lower 9th Ward, Tamara Martin knew only one source of shelter for this city's burgeoning homeless population: the thousands of buildings left vacant and rotting nearly two years after Hurricane Katrina struck.
The angular 33-year-old, who says she takes the antianxiety drug Lexapro to drive away what she calls "that evil solution" of crack cocaine, slept for two months in the shell of her childhood home, rejected by family and emergency shelter officials who said they had no room for an addict.
Routed from the gutted house by National Guard patrols who warned that a weak roof could entomb her, Martin accepted a move-in invitation from a man in another abandoned building. It's another poor substitute for the apartment she used to have at a housing project, one of four the government wants to demolish in a city where the market rent has increased 81 percent.
Because she's homeless, she said: "I can't get right, you know . . . I'm striving hard. I'm losing so much weight I'm striving so much."
[No one cares, darling!]
Across New Orleans -- from abandoned sections of the Lower 9th Ward to apartments near City Hall and even wind-shredded suburban houses -- a homeless population that has nearly doubled since Hurricane Katrina is squatting in the ruins of the storm. Through pried-open doors of some of the city's estimated 80,000 vacant dwellings, the poor, mentally ill, and drug-addicted have carved out living conditions like those of the Third World.
[George W. Bush's AmeriKa -- BY DESIGN!!!]
Martha Kegel, executive director of UNITY of Greater New Orleans, a group that helps the homeless:
"These are abandoned people living in abandoned housing in a city which in many ways has itself been abandoned."
In January 2005, UNITY volunteers toured shelters, parks, and flophouses and counted 6,300 homeless people in the city and its immediate suburbs. A UNITY count this past January estimated 12,000 homeless, though only 60 percent of the city's general population had returned. Shelters say they are turning away hundreds each night, their beds reduced citywide from 832 to 232.
Nick St. Laurent, 26, who came from Detroit seeking construction work but ended up in a gutted apartment about a quarter-mile from City Hall:
"There's no shelters left in this city. And I'd rather live in an abandoned home than under the overpass. That's where people end up dying."
Nearby is a homeless camp under the elevated Interstate 10, in a neighborhood where a slaying and nine assaults have occurred this year. No one knows exactly how many people have taken refuge in abandoned buildings, but unprecedented increases in trespassing arrests and vacant-building fires suggest there could be thousands.
Some are longtime locals such as Martin. Others, like St. Laurent, came to the city for rebuilding jobs but ran into a wall of gentrifying rents and damage to affordable apartments and shelters.
Of the 200,000 homes lost to Katrina, 41,000 were rental units affordable to people earning less than the area's median income, according to a July study by the California nonprofit PolicyLink. Since the storm, fair market rent for an efficiency apartment has risen from $461 to $836, according to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center.
Andy Kopplin, executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, who has promised the state would lobby for more federal money for housing and homeless services:
"Yet again, New Orleans is showing how important it is that poverty be addressed in this country, and the bulk of funding for such programs has been allocated and the need is not nearly met."
[Never will be because it was never meant to be!
Yet we got BILLIONS and BILLIONS for WARS!]
For example, a $26 million state plan to provide drug counseling coupled with long-term affordable housing is designed to restore pre-Katrina levels of assistance, not deal with the poststorm increase in homelessness, state officials said. The housing portion of the plan is tethered to federal tax incentives for developers who have thus far built little for the city's poorest, according to the PolicyLink report.
Tax credits currently fund the reconstruction of only 8 percent of the apartments that were affordable to people earning 30 percent of the median income, the report found. The four housing projects slated for demolition, including Martin's, accounted for 3,000 low-income units. Affordable replacements are funded for only 1 in 4 of those, the report found.
[So EAT SHIT, poor Amurkns!!!]
The only effort to tackle post-Katrina homelessness comes from the proposed Gulf Coast Hurricane Housing Recovery Act of 2007, which could mandate [?] the restoration of all affordable housing and bring a tenfold increase in funds for other homeless assistance.
Police, fire, and health officials have become too familiar with squatting and homelessness.... According to New Orleans police records, there have been more than 1,400 trespassing arrests so far this year, ranking it the city's fourth most common crime.
Police say processing a homeless person, particularly for mental health care in a city where hospital beds are scarce, can take an officer off the street for four hours. Homeless people sometimes call authorities on themselves, hoping to find a safe place for the night.
Alan Wheeler, 43, of Pittsburgh, has been sharing rat-infested apartments with three other squatters. Wheeler said he would live in a shelter and seek drug counseling if they were available. Life in Katrina's ruins has seen him spiral from a construction entrepreneur making a quarter-million dollars, he said, to a crack addict.
David Cooper, his former business partner in Ostrander, Ohio, who confirmed Wheeler's past and expressed shock at his present condition: "Alan's homeless?"
[Good Lord, this story is TRAGIC!!
Remember that brave, cogent, sharp, quick media that was right in there and reported on the horrors of Katrina?
Well, WHAT HAPPENED?
They all DROPPED the STORY for Anna Nicole, Paris Hilton, et al.
So WTF?
What happened to that incisive, bold, dashing and daring MSM?
Why did they LEAVE New Orleans to ROT?
Out of sight, out of Amurka's mind, just like the WARS!!!!
SHIT MSM!!!
Buy, hey, SOME PEOPLE came out of Katrina good!]
"Barbour contacts gain from recovery; Miss. governor's ties raise concern" by Timothy J. Burger/Bloomberg News August 19, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Many Mississippians have benefited from Governor Haley Barbour's efforts to rebuild the state's devastated Gulf Coast in the two years since Hurricane Katrina struck. The $15 billion or more in federal aid the former Republican national chairman attracted has reopened casinos and helped resettle residents.
Among the beneficiaries are Barbour's own family and friends, who have earned hundreds of thousands of dollars from hurricane-related business. A nephew, one of two who are lobbyists, saw his fees more than double in the year after his uncle appointed him to a special reconstruction panel. FBI agents in June raided a company owned by the wife of a third nephew, which maintained federal emergency-management trailers.
Meanwhile, the governor's former lobbying firm, which he says is still making payments to him, has represented at least four clients with business linked to the recovery.
No evidence has surfaced that Barbour violated the law; at the same time, the pattern that emerges from public records and interviews raises "many red flags," said Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, a watchdog group in Falls Church, Va., that investigates the investments of government officials. "At the minimum, the public is entitled to a full explanation of the facts," he said.
Barbour, 59, who is running for reelection this year, turned down an interview request.
Mississippi records show that Henry and Austin Barbour, sons of Haley's older brother Jeppie, registered as state lobbyists soon after their uncle was elected in 2003. In January 2004, Henry, who managed the gubernatorial campaign, and Austin joined Capitol Resources LLC in Jackson, which represented such big-name clients as Lorillard Tobacco Co.
In July 2005, Capitol Resources signed on to represent Government Consultants Inc., a local firm that advises Mississippi and Louisiana on state bond issues. Deborah Phillips, president of Government Consultants, praised the work of Capitol Resources, saying Henry, 43, and Austin, 31, have "good resources."
After the Aug. 29, 2005, storm, Haley Barbour formed the Governor's Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal and appointed Henry Barbour as its unpaid executive director. In an e-mail, Henry Barbour says he took a leave of absence from lobbying while volunteering on the commission.
Government Consultants paid $65,000 for Henry Barbour's lobbying from July 2005 through 2006, a period that included his work on the governor's commission, state records show. Principals in the firm also gave at least $27,500 to Haley Barbour's reelection campaign in 2006; Henry Barbour is the campaign's treasurer.
[They just can't help lying, can they?]
Among the commission's recommendations was the sale of bonds to finance the Katrina recovery. According to state reports and figures provided by Government Consultants, the firm landed about $2.4 million in Mississippi bond fees in 2006, including at least $400,000 from Katrina-related issues.
All told, Henry Barbour's lobbying fees -- $150,000 in 2004, his uncle's first year in office -- rose to $183,000 in 2005, the year of the hurricane, and $379,000 last year.
In his e-mail, Henry Barbour said, "I don't have any role with state bond issues in Mississippi." Steve Pittman, vice president of Government Consultants, said in an e-mail that most of the fees the company earns are awarded by cities and counties, not by the state.
Barbour said in his e-mail that he worked hard "to help position Mississippi for the best possible recovery," adding that having "the same last name as Governor Barbour clearly puts a target on my back." He said Capitol Resources decided after the storm "to not take any new, recovery-related clients."
[Piggies at the trough -- PROFITING off SUFFERING!
That's AmerKa's government under George W. Bush: MISERY = MONEY!]
