Habitat was a much-needed catalyst in communities outside of New Orleans--like Covington, La.--before Katrina compounded poverty housing situations.

Under the Radar
Pre-Katrina issues still linger in communities along the Gulf Coast.

by Rebekah Daniel

It was a situation that would tax the energy and creativity of any Habitat affiliate. The rental housing market was tight, Section 8 and housing authority waiting lists were long, and substandard housing was unavoidable for families with no other options.

And this was before the hurricanes.

In the year since Hurricane Katrina torpedoed ashore, bringing with it the scrutiny of a nation unaccustomed to such stark images of its own poverty on the evening news, Lafayette (La.) Habitat for Humanity has found itself fighting the same battles it had been fighting for 13 years. Only now, the battles are ... more. More urgent. More numerous. More expensive. More wrenching, not only for families displaced from the storm, but also for families displaced by other evacuated families.

"There have been a lot of issues around the fact that in some cases, people who were displaced by the storm have jumped to the head of the queue, and people who had been waiting for two years are still waiting," says Lafayette HFH executive director Melinda Taylor. "A lot of them are in almost untenable situations. They're stuck staying places they've been for a while that they need to get out of."

St. Tammany West HFH is in Covington, La., just north of Lake Pontchartrain. Wind and tree damage knocked a chunk out of the supply of available housing, interim executive director Vera Clay says: "We don't have the housing stock--even if it was bad housing stock--that we had before the storm. The apartment I'm in now a year ago would rent for $300 a month, and now I'm paying $650 a month. I can pay it, but other folks can't."

This rural town of 8,000 already had a need for better, more affordable housing; affiliate application meetings, held at least every other month, routinely attracted 10 or 12 people. The last meeting had 42.

The chaos of losing municipal organization, infrastructure capacity and communication networks made it simpler for many people to just put down roots wherever the winds had blown them. Meridian, Miss., is a town of less than 40,000 that sits squarely on the evacuation route north from the Gulf coast.

"We had over 7,000 evacuees in our community," says Lauderdale County HFH executive director Fonda Rush. "A lot of the families have decided they have nothing to go back to--they don't have a job, they don't have a home."

But due to persistence on the part of the families and guts on the part of the affiliate, some of them will have a home soon. Lauderdale County HFH, at 17 years old, had been building two to three houses a year. They'll finish 14 this year, 12 as part of Operation Home Delivery building.

"The families we're building for are the ones that fell in the cracks," Rush says. "They rented housing, and if you rented a house or apartment, you didn't get huge FEMA checks. Most of them, because of their income level, didn't pay for renters insurance. They didn't have money to fall back on to hold them over in a community until they could get back to the coast. These families stayed in a hotel for may be a week and said, 'This isn't for me,' and went out and got jobs.

"The families we are working with have so much courage, because they are on the bottom and they're having to fight their way back."

The common theme among affiliates in the Gulf coast--a theme born of long experience resisting the entrenched, generational poverty of their communities--is determination to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Helping hands along the way are needed, and welcome.

"People have heard this before, but this is going to be a very long haul, to rebuild and rethink and apply all the energy and creativity that needs to be applied to get us back," Taylor says. "It's going to take lots of years and lots of resources.

"I want people to know we need you down here."