Hurricane Katrina victims around the Gulf Coast who were told to vacate their temporary trailers by the end of May will instead be allowed to buy them for $5 or less, White House officials announced on Wednesday.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development will also give the 3,450 families still in trailers or temporary housing — including many elderly, poor and disabled people — priority for $50 million in permanent housing vouchers. The money for the vouchers was appropriated by Congress last year.

Some of those living in trailers are destitute and have no other housing. Others, including many people in New Orleans, are living in trailers outside their damaged homes, while waiting to complete repairs that would allow them to move back. The May 31 deadline set off a panic among both kinds of residents and raised an outcry because so much of the housing destroyed by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita has yet to be replaced.

Residents were overjoyed to hear that they would not be evicted. “Are you serious?” asked Belinda Jenkins, a disabled woman living in a trailer in front of her house in the Seventh Ward of New Orleans. “Oh, wow. That’s a blessing.”

Ms. Jenkins and her husband had stored their clothes and important papers in their car, out of fear that they would come home to find their trailer gone.

Obama administration officials also said they would allocate additional money for case managers to help people find permanent housing. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has twice offered money to the Louisiana Recovery Authority for that purpose, but the program never materialized. This time, a senior administration official said, federal agencies will manage the program and hire experienced workers who will visit clients in person.

Advocates for Katrina evacuees were warily optimistic about the announcement, which Obama administration officials have characterized as an effort to fix a messy situation they inherited.

“It is a tremendous step in the right direction,” said Laura Tuggle, a housing lawyer at Southwest Louisiana Legal Services. “This is kind of an acknowledgment that there may have been some missteps along the way.”

Martha Kegel, the director of Unity of Greater New Orleans, a homeless service agency, said vouchers and case management were desperately needed, though she said she remained cautious.

“It’s been such a long history of FEMA making announcements in the media,” Ms. Kegel said, “and nothing much in the way of assistance has ever trickled down to the elderly and disabled people trying to repair their homes.”

The administration official, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the subject, said trailer residents would be notified of the change in policy within a week. The official said families that had already left their trailers because they were afraid of eviction would be eligible for the vouchers if they met the income requirements.

And FEMA said no one would be forced out of a trailer. “No one will face evictions from a temporary unit while these new measures are implemented,” said Clark Stevens, a spokesman for the emergency agency.

Because of the severity of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the complexity of rebuilding, the temporary housing program lasted far longer than anyone anticipated. At the beginning of May, FEMA notified trailer residents that they had until the end of the month to vacate or legal action would be taken against them. An agency official said at the time that the trailers would be auctioned off or sold for scrap.

Almost two-thirds of those still in trailers are homeowners who are trying to complete their repairs. Many said they had been bilked by contractors or had received grants from the Road Home, a taxpayer-financed program to help rebuild houses, only in the last few months.

Susan Mangipano, a waitress living in Lacombe, La., said that after many false starts and a fight with her insurance company, renovations of her home were 75 percent complete. She had previously been told she could buy the trailer she was living in from FEMA for $9,000, a price far out of her reach. Ms. Mangipano, who had put all her things in storage in case the trailer was removed, said she would probably buy the mobile home for the giveaway price, but worried that it would be expensive to move it when it was no longer needed.

Mobile homes will be sold by the government for $5, and smaller “park model” travel trailers will go for $1. The smallest travel trailers, which do not meet the government’s definition of “manufactured housing,” and any units whose formaldehyde levels exceed safety standards, will not be sold. Of the 3,446 trailers now in use, about 1,160 are eligible to be sold. Families living in trailers not for sale will be able to apply for one of several hundred trailers that the agency hopes to donate through nonprofit groups.

Ms. Mangipano said she had been told that she would have to buy insurance and dig a new septic tank to qualify for a donated trailer.

The housing vouchers will help those who were renters before the storm and who make less than 50 percent of the area’s median income. The $50 million is enough for about 6,800 families.

The trailers were only one part of FEMA’s housing assistance program. Tens of thousands of other families moved into apartments that were paid for by the agency. There were also vouchers for the eligible among those families, but thousands have gone unused because of a bottleneck at the housing authorities that are supposed to be processing them. That program, which currently houses more than 16,000 families, was extended until Aug. 31.

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/us/04trailers.html?ref=us

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