New Orleans to Washington: 'We Want to Go Home'
Feature Story by Mariam Babayan - 10/9/2007
Residents of Katrina-ravaged New Orleans banded together in Washington D.C. on September 25 to admonish the Bush administration for its failure to address the displacement of families and loss of homes after the hurricane.
The event, sponsored by the Advancement Project in collaboration with Turkey Creek Community Initiatives, brought together groups supporting the Gulf Coast Recovery Act of 2007, which would provide housing relief for thousands of Gulf Coast families. The bill is sponsored by Senators Christopher J. Dodd, D. Conn., and Mary Landrieu, D. La.
Two years after Katrina, an estimated 65,000 families continue to be housed in FEMA trailers in the Gulf Coast.
"People are dying everyday," said a distraught New Orleans resident.
The housing crisis faced by families displaced by the hurricane was dramatically illustrated at a DC rally which included a tour of a FEMA trailer.
A July 2007 health study sponsored by the Sierra Club found that these trailers contain dangerously high traces of formaldihyde, nearly 75 times the amount permissible to ensure no harm to the body.
"This is utterly unacceptable for a country that carries such high ideals. We invite you to walk into the trailer and try to imagine it—six to eight people, for two whole years," said Karen McGill Lawson, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund (LCCREF)
Two years after the hurricane devastated the Gulf Coast, residents continue to lobby for housing rights and against the displacement of their families. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development plans to demolish the four major public housing developments in New Orleans in the largest demolition in the city's history.
This would mean that thousands of families dependent on public housing would be unable to return to New Orleans.
"Before the storm, we lived as families. We lived as a community," one Katrina-survivor said. "The government is not just taking our homes—it's taking our lives."
If passed, the Gulf Coast Recovery Act of 2007 would provide for one-for-one replacement of public and assisted housing damaged by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The bill also authorizes funds needed to repair and rehabilitate all public housing in the affected areas, and perhaps most significantly for the New Orleans panel at the press conference—allows the right to return for all displaced persons.
