Andrew Genszler Director for Domestic Policy ELCA Washington Office

Richard says he likes walking and seeing where and how people live. This helps him understand them better and they can see he is serious.

He shouts again and stops one of the ladies passing us. I try not to crowd as Richard reminds me that people will immediately assume I am with the government. “They don’t really take time to distinguish here,” he says, smiling. I talk for awhile with Brandon Reeves, Caseworker Manager for LSSS. He was finishing his Ph.D. in sociology when the storms hit. He tells me this real life experience should definitely count for something when he returns. Beverly Carr and her husband Amos invite us into their trailer and offer us Cokes to drink. I almost accept until I see they are the last two.

After hearing all of the news about them, I have not been inside a FEMA trailer until this moment. It is a medium size trailer - probably not as big as some you see on the highway. You enter a sitting area with a bed behind a wall to the right, kitchenette on left and bathroom across on right. Past this is a general use room. Not elaborate but sufficient in a government sort of way. Picture living in one of these things for ten months. With a few relatives. Most are exactly alike outside - differentiated only by a letter-number address painted on the end. One has pots of plants growing outside.

Most of the folks here are from New Orleans. Many have been here since they first evacuated last September. Many are waiting somewhere else to get in. An LSU study estimates that Baton Rouge has absorbed approximately 250,000 evacuees and displaced people into a pre-storm population of 400,000. Fifty percent of the households here have hosted someone in the last ten months.

Brandon, Richard and I talk walking back to the security post. They say that many residents are deciding to try and stay permanently in Baton Rouge. A very tough decision for most, to not return to their home city, but they are tired of waiting for decisions about rebuilding, insurance on their previous homes and cars and rented apartments. Just tired of waiting for a plan to materialize.

Brandon mentions that FEMA shouldn’t be in the long-term housing business anyway and that he feels it has been sapped by its current location and purpose in the Department for Homeland Security. He advocates for a permanent affordable housing community, built with some government funding and mostly volunteer labor, maybe strengthened by supportive services. If FEMA would agree, those neighborhoods could be built right here on park sites.

He is aware of the HOPE 6 program - a previous government attempt at mixed-income buildings and neighborhoods. Brandon says this would be different because of the situation. It could be a good answer - certainly better than indefinite extensions on trailer homes for people growing more anxious by the minute with no incentive to plan beyond the doomsday scenario of “the deadline” (FEMA currently sets the trailer park site at 18 months - February 2007).

This last point is borne out by the other social workers I talk to. One named Calandra is talking about two people whose own conditions are only aggravated by being in a small confined environment. They have taped over bright red lights - warning lights - on any appliance in the trailer and are in danger of being evicted because of not keeping the inside neat.

“I’d like to go back to Washington with you,” Calandra says when I explain what I do. “I have a few things to say.” I reply that several politicians are pretty evasive and very slick. “Oh, you should let her go,” replies a colleague, “She’ll talk them a new hole in the head.”

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A second major problem here in Baton Rouge is transportation. Five out of six New Orleans households did not own a car before the storm. Now most of those cars are sitting on top of each other at a gathering space under Interstate 10. FEMA has contracted with a Baton Rouge bus company to come out to the parks (3 in a row by the airport) and take people into downtown. However, the last bus now leaves downtown at 4:00 p.m. It is hard to get both a job and transportation to work together.

As I pull out of the entrance - one person in my own car - I stop to sign out with the FEMA guard. He teases me about Cleveland when I show him my Ohio license. Two residents run up and ask me where I am going. I happen to be going right past the convenience store they’re headed for and give them a ride there and back. No more than five minutes out of my day, but apparently quite a big deal for them. “It all comes back to the car,” one of them says as they get out.

They are a brother and sister from Chalmette, outside of New Orleans. Their mother and uncle died trying to get through his roof to escape, and this reminds me that I have heard estimates of about 1000 who died similarly. Every resident I see today has a relative who died in much the same way.

These folks left more than houses and jobs in New Orleans.  +

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I meet with Rev. Robin McCullough-Bade, my host along with her husband John, and talk with Charlette Minor from the Southern University Agriculture Center. She mentions that she has taken in about 23 relatives since the storm. She adds that this can be trying, but that the holidays are better because they are together without anyone making excuses for not being able to come. They are communicating.

That is more than she can say about official decision-making. “People are trying to make decisions about what to do: rebuild or not, get a job here or not, urge relatives to relocate or not. Insurers, levee builders, planners need to decide and then announce something.”

Charlette also works on economic development. She is skeptical that the city would agree to a housing plan that involves a new mixed-income neighborhood of permanent affordable housing because of the stereotype of previous attempts at this. However she adds that an easy way to stimulate new mortgage and home ownership interest would be to forget bad credit exclusions for mortgages when that bad credit was specifically related to the hurricanes.

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READERS RESPOND

I have heard from several readers who have returned from volunteer trips, and are wondering what they can do now in their communities with these memories, these images of people needing help.

Friends, a few changes in policy, or the passage of several good, commonsense laws can turn the corner on many of these problems.

I know the government can not love. We are not asking it to.
I know the government can not be as nimble as a church group in a van. We are not asking it to be.

Christian advocacy asks our officials to do nothing more or less than their jobs, specifically on behalf of people they represent who need help and are not heard.

Too often, policy is made on behalf of the few who can pay.

Speaking for those who cannot to those who can change things is not only good social policy, it is a central biblical value. It is good theology. It is lifting up for others one of the best things about our Christian faith.

Please join e-Advocacy by going to www.elca.org/advocacy. We’ll send informational updates about hurricane-related legislation in language easy to understand. We’ll ask for your help in a timely way. You can then call your Member of Congress about an issue that interests you when it is sure to make the most difference.

My friend Alycia Ashburn in Minnesota ends her e-mails with the Danish proverb: “Your life is God’s gift to you. What you do with it is your gift to God”.

Advocacy is an opportunity to open your gift, and share it with people currently living in trailer parks in Baton Rouge, before you give it back.

Sincerely,

Drew Genszler

Renaissance Village in Baton Rouge October, 2005.

Renaissance Village in Baton Rouge, a FEMA trailer park of 537 units housing some 1600 evacuees.

A FEMA trailer parked in front of a house amidst the rubble, a sign of rebuilding.