WASHINGTON, DC - House Democrats Wednesday accused the Bush administration of playing shell games to deny financing they say could speed the repair of hurricane-damaged public housing in New Orleans and other Gulf Coast communities. The accusations came at a contentious hearing Wednesday at which Carlos Castillo, FEMA's assistant administrator for disaster assistance, said that when an existing federal program is available to pay for repairs, in this case a program run by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the emergency agency "defers" to the existing program.
But Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said the explanation does not make sense because the HUD program, Section 9(k) of the National Housing Act, is not financed. Now, I'm not a great mathematician," Frank said. "But probably to FEMA, zero is a real number." Under plans embraced by the New Orleans City Council, HUD plans to replace 4,500 demolished public housing units with 3,200 public housing units and 1,765 subsidized units for people at slightly higher income levels than permitted for public housing.
But Frank and Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., said those plans still leave considerable repair work on unoccupied public housing units not slated for demolition. Frank said the failure to provide more help for poor Gulf Coast residents, who lost their homes through a disaster and no fault of their own, will go down as one of the biggest U.S. government failures.
Jeffrey Riddel, director of HUD's Office of Capital Improvements, said one solution to the duplicative housing programs might be to eliminate his agency's perennially underfinanced Section 9 housing program to clarify that repairing public housing is a FEMA responsibility.
While acknowledging that mistakes have been made in providing housing options for Katrina victims, Castillo said FEMA and HUD are working together to improve the situation. Waters asked Castillo about a new draft disaster housing plan in which FEMA states it will use trailers as a last resort in future disasters, despite an earlier commitment not to use them because of health problems associated with high formaldehyde levels.
Castillo said the agency will work hard to avoid using trailers, including by helping homeowners, when possible, make sufficient repairs to homes so they can more quickly move back in and, if trailers are still needed, FEMA would set deadlines for their use. The agency's draft report states trailers would be used for no more than six months. He also said they would be tested to ensure that formaldehyde levels are not too high.
Ed Blakely, executive director of the Office of Recovery and Development Administration for New Orleans, said the shortage of affordable housing has resulted in significantly higher rents in the city. "An indicator of the reduced stock of affordable housing is the rise in homelessness," he said in testimony prepared for the subcommittees. "Since Katrina, the homeless population in the New Orleans metro area has doubled from approximately 6,000 before the storm to the current estimate of 12,000."
Source: NOLA.com