FEMA Still Sucks

Yeah, yeah, Brownie's out, but the ongoing handling of Katrina relief is a disaster. I'll leave it to my favorite online housing and architecture critic to comment on this story I came upon yesterday.

Undeterred by the expense, FEMA is building 10 more trailer parks in the region, evaluating 79 potential sites and increasing its budget for park construction by hundreds of millions of dollars.

The agency's pursuit of its trailer-park plan comes as more than a million apartments sit empty across the South, prompting many critics to say FEMA missed a golden opportunity to house hurricane victims using the same kind of rapid-response rental voucher system that was used during a previous natural disaster.

"To be frank, I'm bewildered by what has gone on here," said Bruce Katz, a former official with the Department of Housing and Urban Development. "There doesn't seem to be a plan that was really thought out in any significant way."

Katz, who helped lead the government's housing response after a major earthquake near Los Angeles in 1994, relied on vacant rental units instead of trailers.

Criticism of today's temporary housing program has come from conservatives and liberals, who see the plan as costly and detrimental to hurricane victims' well-being. Beyond the fiscal cost is the social one: The trailer parks are likely to become crowded, remote and undesirable, giving residents little chance to conveniently tap into jobs or schools.

"I don't think it's the way to go," said John Weicher, a housing expert at the conservative Hudson Institute and a former Bush administration HUD official.

Just to open the one park completed so far, the government had to run electric lines, sink telephone poles and build a sewage treatment plant. For the next 18 months - because the park was plopped down so far away from jobs and stores - the government will need to cook victims' meals and post security guards while they sleep.

And when it's all over the government will pay again - to tear it all down.

Bad things happen when you put people who don't believe that government can be an effective solution in charge of making government the effective solution; there's a tendency, conscious or otherwise, to make their belief come true.