Gov't Fulfills Few Katrina Promises

By Matt Crenson
The Associated Press

Saturday 19 August 2006

Nearly half of New Orleans was still under water when President Bush stood in the Crescent City's historic Jackson Square and swore he would "do what it takes" to rebuild the communities and lives that had been laid to waste two weeks before by Hurricane Katrina.

"Our goal is to get the work done quickly," the president said.

He promised to spend federal money wisely and accountably. And he vowed to address the poverty exposed by the government's inadequate Katrina response "with bold action."

A year after the storm, the federal government has proven slow and unreliable in keeping the president's promises.

"This is not something that is going to be able to be accomplished in 365 days," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said. "The president has set the federal government on the course to fulfill its obligations."

The job of clearing debris left by the storm remains unfinished, and has been plagued by accusations of fraud and price gouging. Tens of thousands of families still live in trailers or mobile homes, with no indication of when or how they will be able to obtain permanent housing. Important decisions about rebuilding and improving flood defenses have been delayed. And little if anything has been done to ensure the welfare of the poor in a rebuilt New Orleans.

How has the government performed in the most critical areas of the recovery and reconstruction effort?

Emergency Assistance: A June report by the Government Accountability Office concluded that FEMA wasted between $600 million and $1.4 billion on "improper and potentially fraudulent individual assistance payments."

Government auditors found that debit cards distributed to Katrina victims were used to pay for things like Dom Perignon champagne, New Orleans Saints season tickets and adult-oriented entertainment. The audit also found that people used fictional addresses, fake Social Security numbers and the identities of dead people to fraudulently register for assistance. FEMA also double-deposited funds in the accounts of 5,000 out of the nearly 11,000 debit card holders.

Cleanup: The job still isn't done. More than 100 million cubic yards of debris have been cleared from the region affected by Katrina. So far the government has spent $3.6 billion, a figure that might have been considerably smaller had the contracts for debris removal been subject to competitive bidding.

Working through the US Army Corps of Engineers, FEMA gave each of four companies contracts worth up to $500 million to clear hurricane debris. This spring government inspectors reported that the companies - AshBritt Inc. of Pompano Beach, Fla., Phillips and Jordan Inc. of Knoxville, Tenn., Ceres Environmental Services Inc. of Brooklyn Park, Minn. and ECC Operating Services Inc. of Burlingame, Calif. - charged the government as much as four to six times what they paid their subcontractors who actually did the work.

Housing: In his Jackson Square speech, Bush said his goal was to "get people out of shelters by the middle of October."

By and large that goal was met, with all but a few thousand of 270,000 Katrina evacuees out of shelters by mid-October.

But that didn't solve the monumental housing problem created by Katrina. Most of the people who had been in shelters went to hotel rooms, with FEMA picking up the bill. About 50,000 families who had evacuated to other cities were promised a year of rent assistance, though in April FEMA began cutting off some who the agency said did not qualify for the program. More than 100,000 families moved into trailers or mobile homes parked either in the yards of their damaged houses or in makeshift compounds.

Meanwhile, FEMA flailed and flip-flopped on its contracting policies for trailers, mobile homes and other temporary shelter. The first big contracts were handed out non-competitively to four well-connected companies - Shaw Group, Bechtel Corp., CH2M Hill Inc. and Fluor Corp. Then in October FEMA director R. David Paulison promised to rebid the contracts after Congress complained that smaller companies, especially local and minority-owned firms, should have a chance to compete for the work.

A month after that, FEMA said the new contracts would not be awarded until February. That deadline came and went, and then in March a FEMA official announced that the contracts weren't going to be rebid after all.

A week later FEMA reversed itself again, giving up to $3.6 billion in business to small and minority-owned firms.

"I promised Congress I was going to bid them out, and that's what I'm doing," Paulison said.

Rebuilding: Despite Bush's Jackson Square promise to "undertake a close partnership with the states of Louisiana and Mississippi, the city of New Orleans and other Gulf Coast cities," state and local officials had a hard time reaching a deal for federal aid to help residents rebuild their ruined homes.

In January the administration rejected a $30 billion plan for Louisiana as too expensive. The White House also balked at subsidizing the reconstruction of homes in flood plains, a policy that would have excluded all but a small fraction of Louisiana homeowners whose houses were significantly damaged.

The state finally won funding in July for the $9 billion 'Road Home' program, which pays homeowners up to $150,000 either to repair their damaged property or rebuild elsewhere in the state. People who leave the state are eligible for a 60 percent buyout. The money, which is being distributed through escrow accounts to prevent fraud, is just becoming available a year after the hurricane.

Levees: The federal government hasn't broken any promises with regard to flood protection - mostly because it has assiduously avoided making any.

White House Katrina recovery czar Donald Powell has said that the administration intends to wait for the completion of a $20 million U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study, due in December 2007, before it decides whether to enhance the flood protection system in southern Louisiana enough to resist a Category 5 hurricane.

A preliminary draft of the study released in July was widely criticized because it omitted five projects that state officials say should be started right away. At the same time, it focused on a massive levee that would stretch hundreds of miles along the Louisiana coast while paying only lip service to the critical task of shoring up the state's vanishing wetlands, which provide a natural barrier to hurricane flooding.

"We're wasting our time and money and attention contemplating large-scale levees across the entire state," said Tim Searchinger, an attorney with the advocacy group Environmental Defense.

The federal government has committed about $6 billion since Katrina to repair and improve the Big Easy's existing levee system. The first goal was to bring the levee system back to "pre-Katrina" levels by the beginning of the 2006 hurricane season on June 1. That goal was largely achieved. The next step will be to make improvements that will bring the system up to what is variously called Category 3 or 100-year protection by 2010.

But planners and state and local officials say that the levees need to be brought up to Category 5 protection, a level that would cost up to $30 billion, if people are to have confidence moving back to areas destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

Poverty: Bush offered three proposals in Jackson Square to help combat poverty around the Gulf Coast region. Two of them never went anywhere - the creation of "worker recovery accounts" that would help evacuees find work by paying for school, job training or child care while they looked for employment, and an Urban Homesteading Act that would give poor people building sites for new homes that they would either finance themselves or obtain through programs such as Habitat for Humanity.

A third proposal, the creation of a Gulf Opportunity zone, did come to pass. Signed by President Bush in December, the legislation gives $8.7 billion in tax breaks to developers of low-income housing projects, small businesses and individuals affected not just by Katrina but by hurricanes Rita and Wilma as well. The law also provides debt restructuring for financially troubled local governments in the area.



Go to Original

Testers Posing as Katrina Survivors
Encounter "Linguistic Profiling"
By Lorinda M. Bullock
National Newspaper Publishers Association

Sunday 20 August 2006

Washington - As the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches August 29, displaced Americans from Louisiana and the Gulf Coast have been slowly rebuilding their lives and looking for a place to call home.

While Katrina's Black victims shop the housing market, calling realtors and potential landlords, one thing may be standing between them and their new homes even before an appointment is made or paperwork filled out-their voice.

It's called linguistic profiling.

A study of five states done by the National Fair Housing Alliance and linguistics expert John Baugh revealed in 66 percent of phone tests administered by White and Black testers inquiring about housing as Katrina survivors, "White callers were favored over African-American callers," the report said.

"Yes, people do use the telephone as a screening device in many, many businesses," Baugh said.

Shanna Smith, president and CEO of the Washington-based NFHA, said the organization's report on "Housing Discrimination Against Hurricane Katrina Survivors" showed repeated bias in a number of areas, including Black testers not getting return phone calls, and being quoted higher rent prices and security deposits.

"In Birmingham, a White tester was told that a $150 security deposit and $25 per adult application fee would be waived for her as a Hurricane Katrina victim. She was also told she needed to make 2.5 times the rent to qualify for the apartment. The African-American tester was told that she would have to pay $150 for the security deposit and a $25 application fee for each applicant. The African-American hurricane survivor was also told that she would have to make three times the rent to qualify for the apartment," the report stated.

The testing took place in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and Texas, and showed instances of White testers being offered free televisions and partially refunded security deposits. But those offers were not extended to Black testers, who were often saddled with additional administrative fees that were non-refundable.

"It's a different kind of behavior in discrimination from the 70s until now where they would just simply say we don't have anything available. Now they try not to trigger suspicion so they may say when do you need it or I won't know until the end of the month, when in fact, they may have three or four apartments available right now. But if you're the caller that sounds reasonable," Smith said.

Smith, whose organization has worked with Baugh since the early 1990s, said another tactic that is used is asking a potential renter or buyer for their name to be put on a waiting list and "Names that didn't sound middle America White, they didn't get the return emails about availability."

The current trend happening with the Katrina victims is no surprise to either Smith or Baugh.

Baugh has logged thousands of calls, since 1987, using testers of different races and backgrounds, including himself.

Baugh, an African-American man, started studying the practice of linguistic profiling after his own personal experience when he was looking for an apartment in the San Francisco Bay Area.

"I was calling various landlords to go look at apartments and in about two or three cases, I got there and they told me there had been some mistake and the apartments had already been rented. And it just didn't seem right to me and I speculated that they didn't realize I was African-American when they made the appointment with me. But once they saw me in person they came up with some excuse. They didn't say, 'No, we don't rent to Black people' but they came up with some 'unquote' legitimate excuse," Baugh said.

He found the questions from the landlords varied, depending on the voice they heard, but Baugh, who flawlessly uses three different voices-a "Latino rendition, modified African-American rendition and standard English"-always kept the opening line the same, "Hello, I'm calling about the apartment you have advertised in the paper," he would say.

"It's exactly the same phrase. The only thing I've done there is modify the intonation. So it isn't like I used the word ain't or be or anything. Even if you use a certain kind of intonation, it is possible that somebody might discriminate against you just based on the sound of your voice over the telephone," Baugh said.

Baugh who just finished a five-year study with the Ford Foundation looking at the issue in the United States, has started a new two-year project with the Ford Foundation. This time, he's examining linguistic profiling globally, for people of African descent in places like South Africa, Brazil and France.

Baugh has also used his expertise in civil and criminal court cases. Many of the civil cases dealing with linguistic profiling have settled out of court. As for the criminal cases, he is developing ear-witness testimony in hopes of having a similar impact of DNA testing used to exonerate the innocent and solidify proof against the guilty.

While Baugh says Black and Hispanic people in the U.S. are discriminated against heavily because of their voice, he also makes it very clear that linguistic profiling is not even limited to just those groups.

"They (southern Whites) think they need to show up in person so the people there don't think they're Black. Even within any racial group, there is enough linguistic diversity you get different prejudicial issues coming up," he said.

But even Whites seeking diversity find that realtors and landlords are drawing the lines deciding where clients should live despite their wishes, said Smith, who is White.

"As White people we get those direct comments made to us. I've been doing testing where people say, you're going to like it here. We don't rent to Blacks. I've been told when I've asked for housing in interracial neighborhoods, real estate agents will say, 'well who will your kids date?' It's not going to be safe for you. It's going to be better for you to move here. White people hear this all the time. The problem is they don't know they can do something about it."

Smith said the Fair Housing Act strictly states that truthful information must be given to everyone who calls.

If people feel they are getting different treatment, Smith suggested they can call one of the 100 fair housing centers in the country or the national office in Washington. The fair housing centers can have a White tester call in as little as 30 minutes and will compare the results. Both Smith and Baugh suggest keeping detailed notes of the experience.

"We estimate there are close to 4 million instances of discrimination that occurs annually in the U.S. My members only report about 18,000 a year. HUD only gets around 3,000 complaints a year," she said.

But the reported numbers are so low because there are only 100 centers and states like California, Ohio and Michigan have multiple centers leaving other states without centers at all. "So you have thousands of cities that don't have a private fair housing center," she said.

While everyone "accommodates linguistically" depending on the situation, be it a job interview or joking with friends, Baugh said people should not have to hide who they are but shouldn't be naive to society's biases either.

"People should not feel they need to mask their linguistic background," he said. "The United States should be the most linguistically tolerant nation on the face of the earth because our citizens come from everywhere. And because of the fact that all of our ancestors had to go through a transition where English was not their mother tongue... You should be free to speak in whatever way is comfortable for you and your fellow citizens don't misjudge you."