Post-Katrina, homeless squat in condemned dwellings

The number of shelters is shrinking.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — As she pushed a shopping cart of belongings through the still-life of the Lower 9th Ward, Tamara Martin knew only one source of shelter for this city’s burgeoning homeless population: the thousands of buildings left vacant and rotting nearly two years after Hurricane Katrina.

The angular 33-year-old, who takes the anti-anxiety drug Lexapro to drive away what she calls “that evil solution” of crack cocaine, slept for two months in the shell of her childhood home, rejected by family and emergency shelters who said they had no room for an addict.

Routed from the gutted house by National Guard patrols who warned that a weak roof could entomb her, Martin accepted a move-in invitation from a man in another abandoned building. It’s another poor substitute for the apartment she used to have at a housing project, one of four the government wants to demolish in a city where market rent has increased 81 percent.

Because she’s homeless, she said, “I can’t get right, you know ... I’m striving hard. I’m striving hard.”

Across New Orleans — from abandoned sections of the Lower 9th Ward to apartments near city hall and even wind-shredded suburban houses — a homeless population that has nearly doubled since Hurricane Katrina is squatting in the ruins of the storm. Through pried-open doors of some of the city’s estimated 80,000 vacant dwellings, the poor, mentally ill and drug-addicted have carved out living conditions like those of the Third World.

“These are abandoned people, living in abandoned housing, in a city which in many ways has itself been abandoned,” said Martha Kegel, executive director of UNITY of Greater New Orleans.

In January 2005, UNITY volunteers toured shelters, parks and flophouses and counted 6,300 homeless people in the city and its immediate suburbs. A UNITY count in January 2007 estimated 12,000 homeless, though only 60 percent of the city’s general population had returned.

Turned away

Shelters say they are turning away hundreds each night, their beds reduced citywide from 832 to 232.

“There’s no shelters left in this city. And I’d rather live in an abandoned home than under the overpass. That’s where people end up dying,” said Nick St. Laurent, 26, who came from Detroit seeking construction work but ended up in a gutted apartment about a quarter-mile from city hall. Nearby is a homeless camp under the elevated Interstate 10, in a neighborhood where police report a murder and nine assaults this year.

No one knows exactly how many people have taken refuge in abandoned buildings, but unprecedented increases in trespassing arrests and vacant-building fires suggest there could be thousands.

Of the 200,000 homes lost to Katrina, 41,000 were rental units affordable to people earning less than the area’s median income, according to a July study by the California nonprofit PolicyLink. Since the storm, fair market rent for an efficiency apartment has risen from $461 to $836, according to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center.

Addressing issue

“Yet again, New Orleans is showing how important it is that poverty be addressed in this country,” said Andy Kopplin, executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, who has promised the state would lobby for more federal money for housing and homeless services. The bulk of funding for such programs has been allocated and need is not nearly met, he said.

For example, a $26 million state plan to provide drug counseling coupled with long-term affordable housing is designed to restore pre-Katrina levels of assistance, not deal with the post-storm spike in homelessness, state officials said. The housing portion of the plan is tethered to federal tax incentives for developers who have thus far built little for the city’s poorest, according to the PolicyLink report.