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By Rich Webster
New Orleans City Business
March 13, 2006
NEW ORLEANS — Six months after Hurricane Katrina, the homeless population in New Orleans is rapidly expanding.
An estimated 2,000 homeless men, women and children need shelter in New Orleans on any given night compared with 6,300 before the storm, said Martha Kegel, executive director of Unity of Greater New Orleans, a homeless assistance organization. That equals the per-capita number homeless pre-Katrina given that roughly one-third of all New Orleans residents have returned.
"If I counted all the people who are technically homeless the number would be higher," Kegel said. "I’m just talking about people living in housing earmarked for the homeless and on the streets. I’m not counting people here looking for work living in tents and teepees and cars and abandoned homes."
Kegel doesn’t count low-income New Orleanians who lost homes and are living in trailers and hotels or people living in overcrowded conditions because they have nowhere else to go.
"Katrina destroyed affordable housing and brought needy people into our community in search of work and they’re not just coming in by themselves, they’re coming in with their families," she said. "We’re experiencing a new epidemic of homelessness and I see no end in sight."
One open shelter
A lack of services and shelters exacerbates the problem.
Of four primary adult male shelters — the Ozanam Inn, the New Orleans Mission, the Brantley Baptist Center and the Salvation Army — only Ozanam Inn has reopened.
Roy Allain, acting administrative assistant for Ozanam Inn, said its 96 beds are filled and people are turned away daily.
"More than 50 percent of the people who come here are new and came to New Orleans to find jobs but can’t find a place to stay," Allain said. "I can’t believe people are actually coming into town knowing the situation here. We can at least feed them but as an overnight shelter we’re full."
Brantley Baptist Center housed 200 homeless people before the storm but it is not likely to function as a shelter again, said John Spencer Prentiss, former director of development.
"When our staff got back into town, there wasn’t a substantial homeless population and we didn’t want to be part of inviting that population group back into the city. That still pretty much stands," Prentiss said. "Part of the problem that existed prior to the storm was the way homeless shelters and other agencies provided services. It perpetuated the problem as opposed to doing anything to help alleviate it. It made it easy for people to stay in that situation because there were very little long-term rehabilitation services. But we’re already observing a huge percentage of people coming into town that … were never here before, which is an interesting anomaly."
Chronic cases
The number of the chronically homeless — people homeless for at least a year — has dropped from 1,100 to an estimated 300, Kegel said.
"While our outreach teams are saying there is a significant number of folks who never left or came back shortly after the storm, for the most part they’re seeing a brand new population of homeless," said Kegel. "The problem now is not so much chronic homelessness but an acute homeless epidemic, people suddenly made homeless as opposed to people who are homeless long term because of disability. These are the folks who are homeless because of Katrina."
Karen Martin, executive director of Traveler’s Aid, a New Orleans crisis intervention and job search organization for the homeless, said they worked primarily with the chronically homeless pre-Katrina. Now their clients are almost exclusively the victims of Katrina.
"We’re now dealing with the new homeless, people who came into town for various reasons, sometimes to document their losses for FEMA, and didn’t have the resources to get back out," Martin said. "They were told to come back and take a chance but aren’t finding affordable housing or their trailers haven’t arrived or they’ve gotten jobs but the contractors stiffed them out of paycheck. This is now the bulk of our work."•