Sunday, August 5, 2007

BAKER, La. (AP) — It was bad enough when Hurricane Katrina chased Carrie Lewis out of her assisted-living home in New Orleans. Now she fears the rest of her life may be spent in a federally sponsored trailer park.

Because Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed so much affordable housing, Miss Lewis and thousands of others who were displaced have nowhere else to go.

“I want to go home,” said Miss Lewis, 79, who now lives in the Renaissance Village trailer park. “They don’t have places for old people in New Orleans yet. What am I supposed to do? I don’t want to die in a little trailer in the middle of a field somewhere.”

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) provided 120,000 trailers to people displaced from their Gulf Coast homes by the 2005 hurricanes.

Pamela Lomis and her two children feel abandoned. Miss Lomis lives in a FEMA trailer in the Sugar Hill trailer park in the midst of cane fields near Convent, La., about midway between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

It’s 20 miles from the nearest grocery store. A single bus leaves each morning at 9 and returns at 4 p.m.

“We just sit around here with life slipping by,” Miss Lomis said. “We’re just on hold. Just waiting for something that never comes.”

She isn’t alone.

“Our biggest challenge is finding housing for people,” said Mario “Sam” Sammartino, who supervises Catholic Services caseworkers at Louisiana’s FEMA trailer parks. “What’s left here is the poorest of the poor. Anyone with a job or a house has already left.”

Many of the hurricane refugees from New Orleans didn’t own homes or lived in the city’s 5,100 public housing units. But federal officials plan to tear down four projects and replace them with mixed-income developments, and private rental housing — if it can be found — is expensive.

Mr. Sammartino and others working to resettle residents think it will take at least five years to clear the FEMA parks. About 45,000 trailers are still occupied in Louisiana, 20,000 in Mississippi, 17,000 in Texas and 400 in Alabama.

Along with the isolation and cramped quarters in the trailers, now there are claims the trailers themselves are making people sick.

Reports of illness had trickled in to FEMA, but documents presented to Congress recently showed FEMA discouraged investigation of formaldehyde in its trailers. The chemical, commonly found in manufactured housing, can cause respiratory ailments and even cancer.

Workers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have begun collecting samples from FEMA trailers in Louisiana and Mississippi.

“That’s just one more thing on the list of things I worry about,” said Helen Felton, who lives in a trailer at Renaissance Village.

Those who remain in the trailers will start paying rent to FEMA in 2008, starting with a modest $50 a month and then rising.

“How are you going to pay if you don’t have money,” asked Sharon Norah, 50, who lives on disability assistance in a Renaissance Village trailer with her 9-year-old son, Calvin.

FEMA is pushing to get people out of trailers, spokesman Bob Josephson said.

“We have a difficult challenge, particularly with people on fixed incomes,” he said.

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