Katrina victims get more federal money for housing

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Source: LA Times

An additional $132 million will go to poor Mississippi residents whose homes are still damaged from the 2005 storm. There are believed to be at least 5,000 such homes.

Ending a bitter dispute over rebuilding priorities in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan announced Monday that they would make available $132 million in federal funds to help poor residents whose homes remain damaged.

The Mississippi Center for Justice, a housing advocacy group, estimates that there remain at least 5,000 storm-battered homes statewide, even though Mississippi, as of June, had spent about $3.5 billion of the $5.4 billion of the Katrina recovery money appropriated by Congress.

One problem is that residents had been prohibited from receiving rebuilding money if their homes were damaged by wind in the August 2005 storm, said Reilly Morse, a senior attorney for the advocacy group. Along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, he noted, many working-class people lived north of an east-west railroad bed that provided a kind of levee protection against the massive storm surge. But they were not spared by the wind.

Read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-katrina-housing-20101116,0,3702352.story