NEW ORLEANS — The rescue van pulls up in front of a sad shell of a house, a few blocks from the police station and criminal court. It’s turning into a cold January night.
Slipping on gloves, social workers Mike Miller and Katy Quigley head in. “Homeless outreach! Anybody home?” Miller shouts as he climbs over a balcony and up a flight of stairs.
No one’s home. But the signs of life are disturbing: A slept- on mattress, bits of food, smells of urine and feces.
The upstairs apartment hasn’t been touched since Hurricane Katrina. There are paperwork, letters, clothing, medicine bottles, a child’s stuffed animal, a “Star Wars” X-Wing fighter plane on the carpeted stairs.
They move on.
At an abandoned 100-year- old factory, they find a few squatters. The factory has become a spot for day laborers working for temp services, restaurants and construction crews. The wages and tips, plus side tricks like collecting aluminum cans, aren’t enough to get them into an apartment because rents skyrocketed after the storm.
“On New Year’s Day, a guy was hit by a cab and killed on Claiborne and Gravier on his way to his temp job,” Quigley says. “He lived right here.”
Falling-apart homes
More than five years after Katrina, New Orleans is struggling to deal with about 43,000 blighted residential properties in various states of neglect and collapse. The city has a larger percentage of blighted properties than any other U.S. city, about a quarter of its housing.
And in these wastelands, an estimated 3,000 homeless find refuge every night. They are wretched people suffering from mental illness, disability or substance abuse, or simply down-on-their-luck working poor. They can be found sleeping in schools, rundown shotgun-style houses, warehouses, sprawling factories, and even funeral homes and hospitals.
UNITY of Greater New Orleans, a collaboration of 63 homeless agencies, has been running sweeps across the city every week for more than two years looking for “the sickest of sick puppies,” as Miller puts it.
“Worked someone out of there, someone out of there,” Miller says, pointing as he drives through Mid-City. “It is every neighborhood in New Orleans: people living in abandoned buildings. There’s not one neighborhood where we haven’t pulled someone out.”
Decades of poverty, the trauma of Katrina, the economic downturn and the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico are a toxic socio-economic cocktail that has made the reality of dire homelessness stubbornly vivid here. With about 11,000 homeless, New Orleans has the nation’s highest number per capita, according to UNITY.
Help simply fell short
“The homelessness here does seem very Third World, and that shouldn’t be happening in America in 2011,” said Martha Kegel, executive director of UNITY. “I am just horrified by the magnitude of the problem.”
It took Congress until the summer of 2008 — three years after Katrina struck — to give the New Orleans metro area enough money to house 875 of the most vulnerable people living on the streets. By then, tent cities had sprung up in front of City Hall and along Canal Boulevard, a major thoroughfare.
“There was a lot of hope at the beginning (after Katrina) that since everyone had left the city, that we could prevent the recurrence of homelessness at all as people came back,” said Nan Roman, head of the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
Not enough was done, she said — “not what we had hoped, something like a game changer. That didn’t happen.”
Meanwhile, rebuilding programs for renters have languished, as has the construction of cheaper housing. Mental-health and other health care services remain crippled.
The city gets about $15 million a year from U.S. Housing and Urban Development to help the homeless, and $7 million for homeless programs was made available through economic stimulus funding.
But some targeted funds are drying up. More than 500 of the 875 special HUD permanent housing vouchers have been used. Once they’re gone, a door will close on housing the most desperate.
“It’s harder and harder to get funds for the long-term recovery,” Kegel said.
By the numbers
11,000 Homeless people in New Orleans, the nation’s highest number per capita
43,000 Blighted residential properties in New Orleans, a larger percentage than in any other U.S. city
$15 million Federal funds the city receives from HUD each year to help the homeless
