"Are There No Poorhouses?"


Um, actually, no, there aren't:

More than two years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is suffering from an acute shortage of housing that has nearly doubled the cost of rental units in the city, threatening the recovery of the region and the well-being of many residents who decided to return against the odds. Before the storm, more than half of the city’s population rented housing. Yet official attention to help revive the shattered rental home and apartment market has been scant.

In some core middle and lower-income areas, blighted dwellings stretch for blocks on end, and the city has been slow to come up with ideas for what to do with those that have been abandoned. Last week, the city housing authority approved the demolition of 4,000 public housing units at five projects damaged by the storm. In their place, the authority plans to build mixed-income projects, large parts of which will not be affordable to previous residents.

On my first visit to Willie Mae's Scotch House (yeah, I know, I'm just a tourist) I was startled to find out that the waitress lived in...Baton Rouge. She commuted the 60-70 miles or so. Ouch.

And FEMA, of course, is responding to the housing crisis by...making plans to close down the trailer parks that might be as depressing as all hell but are pretty much the ONLY option for some low-income residents. Now THAT'S "compassionate conservativism." And I guess we can forget about any sort of initiative to rescind the idiotic restrictions disallowing "permanent" solutions like Katrina Cottages...because only Terry Schiavo deserves extraordinary measures.

I mean, it's not like New Orleans is a major port of entry, or that the Gulf Coast is a region of vital strategic and economic concern...oh, wait...