After shelters, where do we house victims?
Eight days after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, some 250 Houston apartment owners and managers gathered for an emergency meeting at City Hall. Most of them agreed to participate in a massive new public housing program that city officials had just invented to accommodate evacuees pouring into Houston.
“We improvised, immediately, a voucher program to get people from shelters into apartments,” thenMayor Bill White recalled Thursday. The federally funded program would eventually house some 35,000 families for up to a year, giving them a secure, reasonably comfortable place to stay while they looked for work and set about fashioning new lives in a strange city.
Twelve years later, Tropical Storm Harvey has again presented Houston leaders with the challenge of helping thousands of storm victims find a place to live while they rebuild their homes or secure new ones. This time, though, it’s our own people, not neighbors from the east, who need assistance.
Erica Washington, for example, recently moved to Houston from Atlanta. She and her son Jimmy, 3, were staying with friends in the Pasadena area when the flood hit; now she’s among the flood victims at NRG Center.
“I’m trying to get assistance, a house, a hotel, a room,” Washington told my colleague Nancy Sarnoff. “I just want to be OK with my son.”
Washington was among an estimated 30,000 people in Houston area shelters Thursday. While that’s far fewer than the 150,000 or so Katrina evacuees who came to Houston, post-shelter housing still represents a big challenge. Houston’s experience after Katrina provides a good illustration of what works and what doesn’t.
After past storms, the standard FEMA pattern was to move people from shelters to motel rooms,
and from there to a mobile home — the infamous “FEMA trailer” — or other manufactured housing. This model is far from ideal.
“You had these big villages of trailer homes in Arkansas and Louisiana,” said White. “What jobs are there in a trailer city?”
A modest apartment with an affordable rent, by contrast, provides a measure of dignity and independence, White said. It’s also less expensive: The cost of Houston’s voucher program was $180 million to $200 million, while “FEMA spent billions to build these cities of prefabricated housing which housed fewer people at peak than we did.”
White spoke to me by phone during a break from tearing out Sheetrock from his house in the Memorial area, which was flooded Sunday. As first reported by Peter Holley in the Washington Post, White waded to higher ground through waist-deep water.
A flooded house, of course, isn’t the same kind of crisis for White as it is for families of lesser means. “I arise each day lucky to be alive, and I know there are people who don’t have the safety net that my family does,” White told the Post.
Families who received post-Katrina rental vouchers in Houston were mostly low-income, and they paid reduced rents modeled on federal guidelines. The housing program earned Houston a reputation for extending generosity to distressed neighbors that persists to this day.
White, while acknowledging significant differences between the post-Katrina issues and the current crisis, said he believes the 2005 model could be adapted. FEMA might be able to provide apartment vouchers through a partnership with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, said John Henneberger, an Austin nonprofit leader and disaster recovery expert. This would free the city from the task of running the program, a massive undertaking when its officials are coping with many other challenges that Houston didn’t face after Katrina.
“I agree that the best thing to do is to house people in the community,” said Henneberger, the codirector of the Texas LowIncome Housing Information Service.
I asked FEMA official Tom Fargione Thursday whether the agency would consider providing apartment vouchers for people affected by Harvey.
“Right now, nothing is off the table,” said Fargione, FEMA’s Houston team leader.
The challenges Houston faces in recovering from Harvey are so vast that they can seem overwhelming. White understands this better than most, but he seemed sincerely optimistic during our conversation.
“We’re gonna rebuild and be back,” he said, “but who knows how long it will take?”
White was talking about his personal situation, but the statement could also apply to the city he once led.