How the Bush Administration's Katrina recovery plan will deal with the poor

Easy: Just make 'em disappear. Just as they're doing in Punta Gorda:

"FEMA City is now a socioeconomic time bomb just waiting to blow up," said Bob Hebert, director of recovery for Charlotte County, where most FEMA City residents used to live. "You throw together all these very different people under already tremendous stress, and bad things will happen. And this is the really difficult part: In our county, there's no other place for many of them to go."

As government efforts move forward to relocate and house some of the 1 million people displaced by Hurricane Katrina along the Gulf Coast -- including plans to collect as many as 300,000 trailers and mobile homes for them -- officials here say their experience offers some harsh and sobering lessons about the difficulties ahead.

Most troubling, they said, is that while the badly damaged town of Punta Gorda is beginning to rebuild and even substantially upgrade one year after the storm, many of the area's most vulnerable people are being left badly behind.

The hurricane began that slide, destroying hundreds of modest homes and apartments along both sides of the Peace River as it enters Charlotte Harbor, and almost all of Punta Gorda's public housing. Then as the apartments were slowly restored -- a process made more costly and time-consuming because of a shortage of contractors and workers -- landlords found that they could substantially increase their rents in the very tight market.

As a result, the low-income working people most likely to have been displaced by the hurricane are now most likely to be displaced by the recovery, too.

The unhappy consequence is that FEMA City's population has barely declined -- its trailers are occupied by 1,500 check-out clerks, nurse's aides, aluminum siding hangers, landscapers and more than a few people too old, too sick or too upset to work. A not-insignificant number of illegal immigrants and ex-convicts live there as well.

To the county's surprise, Hebert said, finding solutions to their ever-increasing problems is now the biggest and most frustrating part of the entire hurricane recovery effort.

"Having lived through the last year here, this is my advice to New Orleans and the other Gulf Coast towns: Don't make big camps with thousands of people, because it doesn't work," Hebert said. "It takes a bad situation and, for many people, actually makes it worse."

Had you heard about this? I hadn't, and my dad has friends in Punta Gorda. We all heard about Hurricane Charley, but how many of us even knew there WAS a "FEMA City", which sounds like little more than a concentration camp for the displaced.

We already know that there was such a camp set up in Oklahoma in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, one which has since been closed, probably due to justifiably bad press.

But given the kind of cronyism that is already showing up in the New Orleans reconstruction effort, in which companies like Halliburton, Bechtel, and SCI didn't even have to line up to rake in the cash, and local woman and minority-owned businesses are being shut out completely (see CBSNews.com videos and click on "Who gets to rebuild?"), it seems likely that Bush's way of addressing the poverty in the Gulf area is to hide it away in some self-contained facility like FEMA City.

(via Americablog)