Front page of the PR
Note: The following article about my experiences in New Orleans was published in the Prolific Reporter, Seattle University School of Law’s weekly student newspaper.
“How bad could it be two and a half years later?”
“Is it really worthwhile to rebuild at this point?”
“Aren’t the people in FEMA trailers just living off the Federal Government tit?”
These questions and more echoed through Dixon Hall at Tulane University on Sunday night. More than 400 law students from around the country – including 14 1Ls from Seattle University – were airing the doubts we’d heard after announcing our intention to donate our spring break to helping the residents of New Orleans. Admittedly, some of the questions were doubts I harbored, too.
Thankfully, our experiences over the next six days completely dispelled these myths.
Two and a half years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans continues to suffer myriad problems. The first people to return after the hurricane were people with money and power. Understandably, they had the noble vision of eliminating poverty and homelessness in their city, of creating a utopian New Orleans that celebrated the best the city had to offer. In 2005, Jimmy Reiss, chairman of the New Orleans Business Council, told Newsweek that he has been brainstorming about how “to use this catastrophe as a once-in-an-eon opportunity to change the dynamic.”
The problem, as you can well imagine, has been in the implementation. The vision of gentrification has had disastrous results for the 117,000+ people who were living below the federal poverty line before the hurricane. The city is building excellence at the expense of access. Private hospitals and charter schools popped up as soon as they could be built. Unfortunately, there is still no public hospital in New Orleans, so people without health insurance have nowhere to turn when they get sick. And while the charter schools are arguably very good, they have limited capacity. Minimum test scores limit access to these schools to only the brightest students in the city.
There’s no question that the managerial challenge of rebuilding an entire city is enormous. And as usual, most people have the best intentions. Unfortunately, lack of communication between federal, state, and local efforts has resulted in situations that are so tragic they’re almost comical. In one instance, a pastor of a church in the Lower Ninth Ward received funding from the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund to rebuild his church. No sooner had he invested in the materials and contractors to do the work, than the city bulldozed the remainder of the church thinking they were helping clean up.
By far the biggest problem in the city is lack of affordable housing. By the end of May, 100,000 people still living in FEMA trailers will be evicted. These people are largely subsisting on social security or disability payments – strong candidates for low-income housing. Unfortunately, the city has bulldozed most of its condemned low-income housing, with few plans to build more. Rent rates are simultaneously skyrocketing because of increased insurance rates and limited availability. Hundreds of people already live in tents below a highway that runs through the city, and these “tent cities” will only become more populated with the impending FEMA trailer eviction. Adding insult to injury, the city has proposed an ordinance to make camping illegal.
How bad could it really be two and a half years later? The city certainly doesn’t need humanitarian aid anymore, but it truly needs social justice aid. This is where the Seattle University law students joined the picture.
The FEMA Trailer Outreach Project
Ten of us joined a group of several hundred other law students from all over the country in providing direct advocacy to people affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. We traveled by car, sometimes several hours, to rural and underserved areas along the Gulf Coast. We served as a link between the residents of the FEMA trailers and local legal aid attorneys by passing information about the residents’ legal needs to the attorneys and by informing the residents about their legal resources and rights. We also collected data related to the recently discovered formaldehyde health problems found in FEMA trailers and the impending eviction notices. With any luck, lawyers would be able to aggregate this information and use it to the residents’ benefit. We also assisted the residents in filing taxes so they could take advantage of the Bush Economic Stimulus Package.
Many residents recently received eviction notices from FEMA, and in one community, residents had to move out by March 31. We tried to help residents find affordable housing in their local communities, which is difficult because the rent for a two bedroom apartment in many areas has doubled, from around $600 before the hurricanes to around $1,200 today. Residents also candidly shared their personal stories of loss and of the daily painful reminders of the hurricanes.
The Katrina Docket Project
The other four in our group worked with a small group of other law students to produce a report on the post-hurricane litigation. This involved contacting and interviewing dozens of local attorneys, often in-person. The process revealed the diversity, complication, and vastness of the litigation that has arisen in the wake of the storms. A small example of the areas the students researched include housing, contractor fraud, insurance claims, claims for damages from the levee breaches, and human rights cases, which include prisoner rights and police misconduct cases.
The document that the students generated is now circulating in the New Orleans legal community, and will hopefully prove to be a resource for attorneys, the media, and the public that will simplify and condense the massive amount of information researched.
This project educated the students a great deal, in terms of the substantive legal issues in each of these litigation categories, of the toll that the storms have taken on the legal community itself, and especially of how the legal community has rallied and responded.
More information
If you are interested in hearing more stories and seeing more of our photos from New Orleans, please join us for a panel discussion – New Orleans: Race, Class, and Other Hurricanes – on Thursday, April 17th at noon in room C1. Pizza will be served and we will give away a $100 gift certificate to Jazz Alley.
Finally, if you are interested in learning more about other Student Hurricane Network activities, please visit this website: www.studenthurricanenetwork.org
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