WP: FEMA's City of Anxiety in Florida (Hurricane Charley Victims)

[Pirate Smile]

FEMA's City of Anxiety in Florida
Many Hurricane Charley Victims Still Unsure of Next Step


By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 17, 2005; Page A01


About 1,500 people who lost their homes or were already homeless still live in a makeshift mobile home/trailer park run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Charlotte County, Fla., since Hurricane Charley struck last year. (By Marc S. Kaufman -- The Washington Post)


PUNTA GORDA, Fla. --

-snip-
Forman's place is FEMA City, a dusty, baking, treeless collection of almost 500 trailers that was set up by the federal emergency agency last fall to house more than 1,500 people made homeless by Hurricane Charley, one of the most destructive storms in recent Florida history. The free shelter was welcomed by thankful survivors back then; almost a year later, most are still there -- angry, frustrated, depressed and increasingly desperate.

"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.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/16/AR2005091601922.html

[Child_Of_Isis]

1. That was a freaky read.

Sounds like a prison set up.

[madrchsod]

2. it is a prison without fences

[RamboLiberal]

3. Pay attention New Orleans and Mississippi

if you're poor or middle class - here's what will happen to the land you used to live on. You won't be able to afford to move back. And if they can't grab it any other way look out for eminent domain.

An old, damaged Holiday Inn on the town's waterfront, for instance, has been demolished and will be replaced with an $80 million condominium-hotel complex, and other upscale projects are moving forward. Many residents are excited by the changes, but others -- especially the poor and some in Punta's Gorda's long-standing African American neighborhood -- worry they will be permanently priced out of their old home town.

Those fears were stoked last month when the city made clear that it plans to tear down a public housing complex on the waterfront to make way for much higher-income people.

"That land was just too valuable to have poor people on it," said community leader Isaac Thomas. He said that the local government is trying to help him and other black leaders save some of the modest but historic homes in the African-American East End, but that "it's a really uphill fight."

[Pirate Smile]

4. kick