Some call mobile homes inconvenient shelter

NEW IBERIA, La. -- Yvonne Williams, a retired Holiday Inn housekeeper rescued by canoe with her grandchildren from Hurricane Katrina's flood waters, spent two weeks in a humid emergency shelter in Thibodaux that aggravated her asthma.

Last week she moved into a new home: a 32-foot camper with air conditioning, set up by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Williams is breathing easier, but there's a catch. The trailer sits 118 miles from her former home in New Orleans, in a roadside campground surrounded by sugarcane fields. There is no store for miles and no public transportation, just the occasional rumble of tractor-trailers towing oil-rig equipment on state Route 90.

''I have a place to stay, but it's really inconvenient," she said of the cramped trailer, where she might live for up to two years. She has no car and no phone. She wondered aloud when the school bus would bring her grandchildren back to the campground and its algae-filled swimming pool.

Williams, 64, is among the first Louisiana residents uprooted by Hurricane Katrina to participate in a massive, expensive, and controversial housing program that will bring up to 300,000 trailers, mobile homes, and prefabricated houses into the state to serve as temporary homes while New Orleans and surrounding parishes are rebuilt, a process that could take years.

FEMA has ordered the first 115,000 portable housing units and said it has identified 15,000 sites -- like the Chase's RV Park in New Iberia, with 31 FEMA trailers -- where the units can be parked. Rows of trailers stretch across a field in Baton Rouge, where they are waiting to be towed by contractors throughout the state. Louisiana's interstate highways are clogged with the structures and their ''wide load" signs.

''This is the biggest direct housing campaign in the history of our agency," said Brad Gair, FEMA's housing director in Louisiana. The government had earmarked $3.6 billion for the project as of last week. President Bush cited the operation in his speech from New Orleans on Thursday night as he listed how his administration is spending the $60 billion in federal relief money allocated thus far.

Federal and state officials said they want to keep as many dislocated people as possible close to New Orleans and surrounding communities. They plan to install roads and sewers in the new trailer communities. But the plan has been criticized by national housing specialists who say handing out rental vouchers would be cheaper and easier.

And the prospect of huge new mobile-home parks and makeshift campgrounds -- some containing up to 25,000 evacuees -- is generating resistance among some local officials. While many of Louisiana's parishes are welcoming evacuees and are impatient with what they call a slow pace at FEMA, some parishes fear the project will import urban problems into their communities.

''We don't want that to turn into a slum," said Gordon A. Burgess, the elected president of Tangipahoa Parish, north of New Orleans, said of federal plans to put 700 trailers in his parish. ''It would lower property values. It's a tough call."

Residents would have a better quality of life if the government gave them money to relocate temporarily to Houston, for example, where jobs are more plentiful than in rural Louisiana and the residential vacancy rate before the hurricane hovered at 15 percent, said Susan Popkin, a housing specialist at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Washington.

''The idea of concentrating them in trailer homes in the middle of nowhere risks recreating the same conditions or worse they were living in New Orleans, extreme poverty without access to resources and without access to opportunity," she said.

FEMA took criticism from Louisiana's governor, Kathleen Blanco, for moving too slowly to create new housing in the state earlier in the relief effort. Now it says it is taking a multipronged approach, trucking in the trailers and mobile homes, identifying vacant buildings that can be restored in cities, and providing rental assistance for those who can find something to rent on their own. Federal, state, and local officials work together to make sure that transportation is provided for people who need it, said FEMA spokesman James McIntyre.

''They are not just plopping people down and leaving them," he said. ''Transportation will be provided to get them to buy what they need to buy."

The depth of the housing problem is apparent throughout the state. Last week, more than 52,000 people were living in 318 emergency shelters. Baton Rouge, the state capital, has become the temporary home for an estimated 100,000 evacuees, most of whom are living in motels or with relatives.

More than 1,600 people, including many families with children, live side-by-side on cots on the concrete floor of the Baton Rouge convention center, which sits near a casino and the Mississippi River. Some families have pitched tents among the vast expanse of sleeping bags, pillows, and stuffed animals. Meanwhile, Baton Rouge's local newspaper, The Advocate, listed just 29 apartments for rent in the area last week.

Joann Davis, 36, said she would jump at the chance to stay in a FEMA trailer. The displaced New Orleans resident, her boyfriend, and her two sons initially fled to Houston and stayed with a relative, but there was not enough room, she said, so they came to Baton Rouge and sleep in their sport utility vehicle. With the windows cracked, Davis said, they catch a slight breeze off the river. Most nights are nonetheless stifling hot. She has been waiting for FEMA to respond to her application for assistance for two weeks.

''FEMA trailers? Where are they? We want one," she said.

Amid FEMA's declarations of urgency and a massive program, some parish officials said they have not received clear messages about how many trailers will be placed in their communities, when they will arrive, and how much money will be made available to handle the increased strain on services and infrastructure.

''We're still looking to FEMA for some answers," said Charlotte Randolph, president of Lafourche Parish, which has 1,000 evacuees living in school gymnasiums south of New Orleans. ''These people have had no place to live for 2 1/2 weeks."

In New Iberia, at the Chase's RV Park, Yvonne Williams and the other residents settling into new government campers on a 90-degree afternoon reacted with mixed emotions. They said they were glad to move out of emergency shelters and into more stable circumstances. But most did not relish the thought of living for long far from their old homes.

''I got to try and get back and start working on my building," said Richard Vaughan, the owner of the Barracuda Lounge in St. Bernard Parish, east of New Orleans. On a picnic table outside his FEMA trailer, Vaughan carefully picked apart muddy pages of telephone lists salvaged from his bar as the flood waters rose. He dialed his insurance agent, asking about coverage. He plans to enroll his son, Steven, 15, in a New Iberia school, making him one of 22,000 displaced students to enroll in districts statewide. Vaughan said he had no idea how long he would be living in sugarcane country.

Gaylin Davis, 18, cradled his baby girl, Crystal, as he sat on the steel steps of his new trailer and considered a future in New Iberia with his girlfriend. When his New Orleans apartment complex was flooded, Davis lost his furniture and belongings but not a home that he owned. He said he will consider staying in the countryside even after New Orleans is rebuilt.

Residents of New Iberia have helped find him a possible job as a maintenance worker and have given him a new bicycle to ride. And, so far, he likes his trailer.

''It's like a miniature house, store bought," he said. ''It's just like a home."