The mayor constantly contradicted, and thereby undercut, his stance on land-use planning and planning-process protocol when he spoke to groups with different agendas.2 He immediately rebuked the most controversial, racially charged aspect of the commission’s work—the recommendation to shrink the city’s physical footprint.3
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of austere trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) rolled into virtually every residential neighborhood, commercial district, and industrial and recreational area. The public was told that these temporary housing units were the federal government’s best solution to providing emergency housing for returning evacuees. At one point FEMA claimed to be delivering nearly five hundred units daily. Unfortunately, although not unexpectedly, Nagin was ill prepared to cope with the controversy that erupted over the trailers and their placement. Soon, one subset of trailers, the roadside nomads, dotted the city’s main commercial arteries and those of the surrounding parishes. To the chagrin of the relatively few unscathed residents and business proprietors, as well as for the homeless occupants of the trailers, they posed myriad problems. These centered on the design and manufacture of the units; their cost (approximately $70,000 each, including delivery and installation); the level, or lack thereof, of commodity, firmness, and delight they afforded inhabitants; and their pattern of installation across a delirious and devastated urban landscape.
As politicians bickered about rebuilding strategies and who would be responsible for what, an armada of FEMA trailers quietly conquered the landscape. These trailers, with their flimsy stark white vinyl-sided exteriors and their cutout doors and small black wheels, became an omnipresent sight. Though they arrived inauspiciously, often under cover of darkness, their impact on the urban landscape became unmistakable. The adage “Life is what happens to you while you are busy making plans” comes to mind when thinking of how oblivious the local so-called decision makers were to the profound ramifications of the trailerization of New Orleans. The politicians appeared to be little different from fish unable to see the water surrounding them. To them, the trailer armada was a necessary evil.
The few planners who managed early on to attempt any community planning acted as if they were oblivious of the trailer armada. Few spoke of it, at least publicly. Perhaps this was because they were focused on the “long term” rather than anything temporary, ephemeral. This applied to the out-of-town New Urbanist planners who came into the area—such as Andres Duany, apt to be referred to by his critics and admirers alike as the high priest of the movement—as much as to notable, respected local architects. The New Urbanists brought with them their brand of heroic postmodern romanticism. A series of four one-week charrettes (intense design and planning meetings) were conducted by Duany and his Miami-based firm, DPZ and Associates.4 The two charrettes (attended by this author) in St. Bernard and Gentilly took on a delirious, surreal atmosphere of their own.5 How was a homeless, shell-shocked audience to take seriously, especially in the case of the charrettes, the romanticized images of canals, idyllic footbridges, and pastoral town squares presented to them by Duany and his team?6 Any vital sign of life along the sprawl of the roadside strip, even if only a trailer dispensing hot dogs, was warmly welcomed by returnees. Despite everything, people never lost their sense of humor. As difficult as things were, even an abandoned rescue boat beached on a neutral ground could be transformed into a somewhat humorous spectacle (Fig. 5.1).
The FEMA Trailer: Lifesaver or Folly?
FEMA, post-Katrina, in accordance with the convoluted policy of its parent organization, the Department of Homeland Security, ordered its travel trailers from a list of approved U.S. manufacturers. Trailers were designed, built, and manufactured according to a stringent set of specifications provided by the agency.7 The prime installation contractor was responsible for delivering the unit, blocking and leveling it on the site, securing it with anchoring and strapping devices, hooking up sewer lines to the unit aboveground, hooking up water lines to the unit at grade, wiring the trailer to the external power source, filling the propane tanks, installing steps and ramps for ingress and egress, and taking any additional measures necessary to prepare the unit for immediate occupancy, or what in the lingo is referred to as RFO (ready for occupancy).8
5.1: Stranded rescue boat, Broadmoor, 2005 (post-Katrina).
The push was on by October to get as many trailers to where they were most needed on the devastated Gulf Coast. By February 2006, there were 18,336 units positioned in staging areas in the region. A total of 79,798 units were already on site and RFO, and a total of 26,160 units were positioned but not yet approved for occupancy. In Louisiana, the figures were 1,606, 48,428, and 8,742, respectively.9
Despite their exorbitant cost and the great effort expended in installing them, the trailers had an anticipated life expectancy of only eighteen months. The preoccupancy phases consisted of manufacture, procurement, routing, transportation to a site, and installation. At the end of eighteen months, the designers’ intent was for the unit to be disposed of. This was planned obsolescence at its best (or worst). The Keystone Corporation’s Fifth Wheel and Travel Trailer Owner’s Manual stated:
Remember, your trailer is not designed, nor intended, for permanent housing. Use of this product for long-term or permanent occupancy may lead to premature deterioration of structure, interior finishes, fabrics, carpeting, and drapes. Your recreational vehicle was designed primarily for recreational use and short-term occupancy. If you expect to occupy the coach for an extended period, be prepared to deal with condensation and the humid conditions… . The relative small volume and tight, compact construction of modern recreational vehicles means that the normal living activities of even a few occupants will lead to rapid moisture saturation of the (indoor) air.10
The manual also stated:
Allow excess moisture to escape to the outside when bathing, washing dishes, hair-drying, laundering and using appliances and non-vented gas burners… . Do not hang wet clothes in the coach to dry… . Keep the temperature as reasonably cool during cold weather as possible… . Use a fan to keep air circulating inside the vehicle so condensation and mildew cannot form in dead air spaces. Allow air to circulate inside closets and cabinets… . The natural tendency would be to close the vehicle tightly during cold weather. This will actually compound the problem.11
Soon, FEMA subcontractors set up trailer villages for their workers all over the metro area, with little oversight. It was inevitable that fires would erupt in the trailers. The general public quickly learned that their little shoebox could prove dangerous: “As he pulled up to Dow’s temporary housing site in St. Charles Parish, where a travel trailer sat engulfed in flames, Hahnville’s Fire Chief Reggie Gaubert recalled feeling a sudden swell of apprehension as he realized the predicament facing his firefighters. ‘There was no provision to provide us with firefighting water,’ he said. The blaze incinerated the trailer and damaged two others, all within a matter of minutes.”12
As it became evident that the trailers would be occupied for far longer then the expected eighteen-month life span, locals began referring to them as “little matchboxes” (Fig. 5.2). Propane-tank gas leaks would emerge as the number one fear in the short term. The number of inspectors in New Orleans had plummeted from their preKatrina numbers. Corporate “angel” sponsors, and even FEMA itself, failed to apply for required construction and inspection permits in many cases. This further exacerbated an already untenable situation. Newspaper accounts began to appear on the deplorable living conditions in the trailer encampments. The so-called Renaissance Village opened to house 1,600 displaced New Orleanians in 573 units installed on a disputed, desolate, sixty-two-acre patch of open land in Baker, north of Baton Rouge.13
The FEMA bureaucracy did not want to add anything that might somehow create an appearance of permanence. Six months after the hurricane, FEMA stopped providing food service at the park, leaving residents to fend for themselves. The neediest were referred
to Meals on Wheels for assistance. Although most residents could afford to buy groceries on their own, the cramped quarters of the trailers made cooking a chore. The minuscule standard-issue refrigerator and freezer unit did not provide much storage, a particular problem for larger families. Since residents were also required to purchase their own propane, the handwriting was now on the wall, although most continued to have no viable housing alternatives because of the tedious pace of recovery in New Orleans. Families able to return to the sites of their disemboweled homes and apartments in the New Orleans area fared slightly better. The six members of the Howard family shared two FEMA trailers installed side by side in the front yard of their ruined home in Slidell:
Inside Judith Howard’s FEMA trailer, a thin, blue curtain divides her bedroom from the rest of the living area, offering the appearance of privacy without actually providing it. “This is our door,” she said, pulling the curtain taut, as though extra tugging could make up for its lack of width. “It doesn’t even shut all the way.” Howard misses privacy most, but she misses other things too, like 15-minute showers, indoor storage space and a refrigerator that can hold more than one gallon of milk. After Katrina upended the contents of her home … the family has made the best of it, slapping hooks onto trailer walls to hang clothing, keeping pots and pans and other bulky items on a table outside and stacking cereal boxes on their sides so they’d fit into the too-short cabinets… . There are moments when life feels like a “camping trip that never ends,” as Judith put it. Welcome to life in a FEMA trailer … an inconvenience that has become as much a part of the post-Katrina era as contractors and gutted homes.14
By April 2006, more than 63,000 travel trailers and mobile home units had been delivered to southeastern Louisiana. But while trailers have offered a number of residents the chance to return home, start over, and rebuild, critics charge that the trailer units—poorly designed, too small, and flimsily constructed—functioned as a major source of stress and health problems to their inhabitants. They confronted occupants with an unprecedented array of safety risks.15 Meanwhile, FEMA officials stressed that the units were designed and built for temporary use, not as long-term housing. As returning residents battled the stresses of rebuilding, trailer dwellers vacillated between relief and frustration: relief, because a shoebox trailer was better than nothing; frustration, because in the richest country in the world, it still wasn’t much.16
Worse, the negative stereotypes associated with trailer parks in general were difficult for many to overcome. Manufactured housing, the trade name for trailer homes, had its origin as affordable dwellings for blue-collar World War II veterans and their families. They were grouped together into “parks” on the edge of town, near enough to places of employment that could be reached via a private auto or public transportation. The epithets are well known, “trailer trash” being the most common pejorative term in use today. Post-Katrina, as the months passed, more and more occupants used their trailers only as places to eat, bathe, and sleep. Few opted to use the gas oven. Most returnees considered their FEMA trailers a mixed blessing at best—for without them they could not have returned at all.
By January 2006, five months after Katrina, FEMA trailers had begun to roll into town in ever-increasing numbers. Recipients received their trailers, but utilities were not being hooked up until many weeks later. FEMA attributed this to a lack of coordination among its various subcontractors. The problems behind the delays were many: a bankrupt public-utility company (Entergy), an understaffed city inspector’s office, and FEMA subcontractors who failed to explain the multistep process homeowners had to follow to activate their units. The net result was mass confusion. Residents were baffled. The layers of seemingly endless red tape were enough to make residents wonder why they had bothered to return home in the first place. Many families had to wait as long as six weeks for power to be turned on.17 As for the plight of the utility company, it had filed for bankruptcy shortly after the hurricane, when it became clear that nearly all of the utility’s customers would be lost for months, and some perhaps for years. The company faced storm-related damages of up to $325 million and had no money for repairs. These constraints severely limited the number of repair workers deployed in the field.
5.2: Typical FEMA trailer enclave.
In the frantic days after Katrina left 66,000 homeless in St. Bernard Parish, parish president Henry “Junior” Rodriguez ordered 6,535 travel trailers, even though he knew his devastated parish would never be able to afford the nearly $90 million price tag. It took five long months for FEMA to agree to pay for the trailers.18 In places such as St. Bernard Parish, the devastation was so complete that no neighborhood was intact. As more units appeared on the scene, whispered epithets discreetly voiced by neighbors soon turned into vocal public outcries. The trailers were being demonized and the message was always the same: not in my backyard (NIMBY) (Fig. 5.3).
Perhaps the most public battle was fought in the Lakewood Estates gated community in Algiers, an affluent suburban neighborhood on the west bank. Algiers is located across the river from downtown New Orleans. Carrying signs that rebuked FEMA for “raping” their neighborhood, about one hundred Lakewood residents staged a protest in April 2006. The protest was incited by the construction then underway of a FEMA trailer village to house displaced women and children. It was targeted by the NIMBY faction solely because it was being built immediately next to their gated enclave, called Park Timbers, an area within Lakewood Estates.
5.3: Demonizing the homeless in New Orleans: NIMBY, 2006.
Calling the site “illegal and illogical,” residents of adjacent neighborhoods accused FEMA of refusing to consider their demand to shut down the construction site now and erect a new one elsewhere. As property owners in one of the few parts of the city not flooded by Katrina, the protesters, interestingly, said they were not simply echoing the chorus of unscathed residents throughout the region who were expressing wholesale opposition to the interloping FEMA trailer parks. Nagin had agreed in January not to authorize any group trailer sites in a district except those supported by the district’s city council representative. However, only two weeks earlier he had approved ninety-eight locations for FEMA trailer installations all across New Orleans. These sites were to hold anywhere from six to as many as a thousand trailers.19 FEMA continued to maintain its innocence in the Lakewood Estates matter. Construction had begun, $2 million had been spent thus far, and FEMA did not plan to stop now. Despite residents’ protests, construction was nearly complete on the day of the protest and sit-in.
The trailers sat high on cinder blocks along several blocks of Tullis Drive. Several of those along the tract’s northern edge were only a few yards from a brick wall that enclosed Lakewood Estates. Residents whose properties abutted the wall on the other side said the proximity threatened their privacy and safety, and that the trailers’ windows overlooked their bedrooms, bathrooms, and living rooms. For some residents, most infuriating was the notion that the site might have been developed without proper city building permits. When they heard the grind of heavy machinery along Tullis Drive, they quickly formed a human and vehicular chain that pressured about twenty-five FEMA workers to leave. They then set up a picket line nearby to prevent the workers’ return. About four in the afternoon, the crowd homed in on a pack of sport-utility vehicles clustered at the edge of the trailer site. Men wearing hard hats accompanied by members of the Federal Protective Service, which protects federally leased facilities, then entered the site.20
The flare-up in Algiers ended only when New Orleans police showed up and threatened to arrest the federal security guards. Under a frontpage headline three days later that read “Nagin Halts Trailer Site Work,” the tale of the battle of Lakewood Estates was recounted.21 After much public acrimony between FEMA and Nagin, the mayor agreed to rescind his shutdown of all trailer-construction sites. By April, only 11,555 trailers were occupied, and almost all of these sat next to flood-ravaged single-family homes.22
The New Orleans area has plenty of parks and other wide open spaces that could accommodate large numbers of the travel trailers being provided by FEMA. What the area seems to lack, though, is the requisite hospitality … we lack even the compassion needed to comfort our own. Not foreigners, mind you, but people who want to come home, people who have no options… . More than 200 people attended a meeting to discuss the recent construction of a temporary trailer park near the intersection of Ames and Lapalco boulevards. “Our crime rate is not as bad as New Orleans,” a woman said. “If they want to take in Jefferson Parish residents only, that’s one thing. But outsiders, no.” … (politicians) insist on having a say in the placement of trailers in their districts, but their intentions are (equally) clear: they don’t want trailer parks at all. They ought to know that returnees don’t want trailer parks, either. No more than they wanted the storm that made the trailers a necessity.23
By June 2006 there were more than 100,000 evacuated households living in FEMA trailers in the areas devastated by Katrina. Of these, more than 68,000 occupied units were in the New Orleans metro area. Soon, collateral concerns would emerge.24 What chaos would ensue, for instance, if tens of thousands faced with another direct hurricane hit decided to hitch up their trailers and evacuate all at once?
Delirious New Orleans Page 15