October 15, 2006
Houston social service agencies and Hurricane Katrina victims living in the city welcomed a decision by Federal Emergency Management Agency officials to extend housing subsidies past an Oct. 31 deadline for recertification for at least another four months. The specter of thousands of jobless people being thrown out of their apartments onto the streets still remains, but the FEMA action provides a window of opportunity to prevent that from happening.The federal disaster relief agency dropped its requirement for extensive documentation for housing assistance recertification after few of the estimated 21,000 evacuee households in Houston made submissions. Instead, a simple one-page form is being accepted, with an automatic extension of all housing payments through the end of February.
Here we are, over a year later, and these folks still are not working and pulling their own weight. Indeed, the only substantive contribution they have made to the Houston community is their impact upon the crime rate, which has skyrocketed since September 2005. And for all Mayor White and others say that 18 months is the upper limit for FEMA assistance of this sort, I've no doubt that come the first of the year we will be hearing the Katrina sob stories again. After all, I've got some Katrina kids, here for a year, still trying to use the hurricane to explain why they don't have basic school supplies. They don't have because they don't bother -- and that explains the housing and employment situation for many of these folks.
Enough is enough -- either cut off the asistance or concede teh reality that we will be supporting these folks and their descendents until the end of time.
Posted by: Greg at
07:25 AM
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This is the result of an entire generation of folks being hand fed by various entitlement programs in order to set them free from the economic burdens that they were unfairly born into. You can see that it has worked wonders for their ability to fend for themeselves in any situation.
Posted by: T F Stern at Sun Oct 15 11:44:32 2006 (z1IoH)
"This past weekend FEMA and the City of Austin, along with the Texas Workforce Commission setup a job training/hiring/interview/job fair for all the Katrina FEMA evacuees in the Austin area to be held at the ACC campus on Webberville Road in East Austin. Several of the evacuees said they had no transportation to get from the apartment complexes, private homes, hotels, motels, and inns where they are living.
So the city of Austin/FEMA/TWC set up transportation for each of them to ensure they would be able to partake of the benefit of job searching. The transportation consisted of nine buses and vans, to run from four locations in Round Rock, and five locations in Austin, in continuing shuttles back and forth to the campus to ensure that the hundreds of people looking for jobs would be transported in comfort. The vehicles were brought to their residences; drivers knocked on the doors; and every effort was made.
At the end of the day, the nine vans and buses transported a total of one person. Not one person per bus — one person total.
The bill to FEMA was $7800."
Posted by: john at Tue Oct 17 09:31:29 2006 (bcYJP)
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