The Spark Newspaper articlesThree years since Katrina: A balance sheet
On June 1, as hurricane season begins in 2008, thousands of victims of the 2005 Hurricanes Katrina and Rita still lack housing.
What has FEMA done in the three years since those disastrous hurricanes? It studied the issue of prefabricated housing. It let people stay in FEMA trailers laced with formaldehyde. And now it is closing all trailer parks.
The only thing that neither FEMA nor any other part of the government did was to organize a response to the lack of affordable housing in the Gulf area including especially New Orleans. But of course they didn’t. Rather, government officials took advantage of the hurricanes to drive the poor out, so the wealthy could gobble up prime coastal real estate.