jackson weather: 57f (14c)

home > Noise > Katrina> State

FEMA Offers Hurricane Victims Trailers for $1


Courtesy FEMA
More than 3,400 people living in FEMA trailers on the Gulf Coast since 2005 can now buy them for $1.

June 4, 2009

Four years after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck the Gulf Coast, and a month after the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it was going to end its temporary housing program necessitated by the storms, FEMA officials are offering victims a bargain: $1 will allow victims to own the trailers they've been calling home since August, 2005.

More than 3,400 people still live in the FEMA trailers in Mississippi and Louisiana, according to The Los Angeles Times, waiting for home repairs and rental units that have yet to materialize. All faced eviction at the start of yet another hurricane season, which began last Monday, June 1. The last residents of the trailers were to have moved by May 1, but without another place to go, those victims never moved out.

"We were going to have another homeless crisis on our hands," said Laura Tuggle of Southeast Louisiana Legal Services, a free legal aid program in New Orleans, to the LA Times. "The fear among people was that one day they were going to come back to the trailer they had been living in and it would just be gone. There was so much anxiety. People worried they would have to buy tents."

The story goes on to say that most of the people still living in the trailers are poor, elderly or disabled, and do not have the resources to find other housing. The current recession hasn’t helped, either.

The sale of the trailers will end the most expensive emergency housing program in FEMA's history. The agency provided more than 143,000 households with temporary housing units, mostly mobile homes and trailers, after the two major hurricanes.

 
posted by on 06/04/09 at 11:40 AM. [printer version]    Share |

COMMENTS

 

You are not logged-in. To post a comment, you must be a registered user and logged in. Click here to register or click here to login.

:: recentcomments
Nov 20, 2009 | 06:37 PM
[Editor's Note] Love Thy Neighbor
Izzy: it's not enough to just study something - at some point you have to act. Systematic exclusion can be read as hatred, even when those involved in it do not feel it to be that. This is ...
Nov 20, 2009 | 06:37 PM
[Editor's Note] Love Thy Neighbor
J.T.: Wintrhop, your last sentence "I don't want a small and manageable God. I prefer one that I can't fully understand." bears out that we each have perceptions of God. And, when the ...
Nov 20, 2009 | 06:03 PM
[Editor's Note] Love Thy Neighbor
Wintrhop Sargent: Funny you should mention the gender issue of a deity. I was at lunch with a St. Andrews priest one time and a very conservative member of the Cathedral came to our table ...
Nov 20, 2009 | 05:37 PM
[Editor's Note] Love Thy Neighbor
Izzy: I wouldn't be too sure your church doesn't preach hate if your liturgy is not gender-inclusive. Think about it - is God really a "He" or a "Father"? Those are some images or visions of ...
Nov 20, 2009 | 03:35 PM
Barbour Wants to Merge State's Black Universities
baquan2000: Goldenae - you pointed out a key element in your post, "the point is that he would even suggest such a thing. And the sad part is that from the polls, the people ...
Nov 20, 2009 | 03:15 PM
[Doyle] From Dixie, With Love
amoderatemississippian : check out the following link: http://www.oxfordeag le.com/news2.html It does appear, by the article written today, that possibly a sizeable portion of the student body ...
Nov 20, 2009 | 02:55 PM
[Editor's Note] Love Thy Neighbor
Wintrhop Sargent: WMartin - At the church I attend, St. Andrew's Cathedral, there is no teaching or preaching about hate (unless you include the teaching and preaching AGAINST hate). I'm ...
Nov 20, 2009 | 02:10 PM
[Doyle] From Dixie, With Love
ladd: A fail-safe principle I've always sworn by: If the Kluckers agree with me about something, I need to rethink it.
Nov 20, 2009 | 01:39 PM
[Doyle] From Dixie, With Love
Goldenae: I would truly be ashamed of myself if I looked at life and others the way the some people do. Some folks can not put themselves in another person's shoes to save their lives. It is ...
Nov 20, 2009 | 01:27 PM
Barbour Wants to Merge State's Black Universities
Goldenae: Why is it so hard to understand that regardless of what we would like to think, there are different standards. That is quite obvious in Barbour's suggestion of ...
 


view "flip" version of this week's issue

 

Guests online: 84
Logged-in members: 1
Anonymous members: 1
Elapsed time: 1.1612
The most number of visitors ever was 920 at once on 04/28/2009
currently online: chaffeur 

 

© Jackson Free Press, Inc. - portions of code by CC with EE.
phone: 601-362-6121 (ext 11 sales, ext 16 editorial, ext 17 publisher)
fax: 601-510-9019 * P.O. Box 5067 * Jackson, MS * 39296