After despair, New Orleans homeless camp cleared

NEW ORLEANS—Inhabitants of a New Orleans tent city that attracted donations, drugs and despair for nearly a year were cleared Thursday by a nonprofit group, which says it now must find lasting solutions to a doubling of homelessness since Katrina.

The encampment under a stretch of freeway overpass known as the Claiborne Avenue bridge was erased during an all-night operation by UNITY of Greater New Orleans, which used the promise of beds at a Salvation Army facility to get the 46 men and women to move. As people gathered their belongings, their mattresses and tents were disposed of in the morning light.

"At no time in the richest country in the world should hundreds of people be living underneath an interstate," said New Orleans City Councilmember Arnie Fielkow, one of several officials who held a news conference to call the effort a success.

Yet, since October 2007 the camp grew in the heart of the city, first establishing itself at a plaza in the shadow of City Hall. By the time state and city officials fenced off the area and made its inhabitants leave, the camp had become populated with as many as 350 residents who used pup tents and their wits to survive.

Much of the camp migrated to the overpass, where it attracted almost daily donations of food and clothing.

But while it was a place where the homeless received help, it was also a magnet for crack cocaine deals, petty theft, and many of the city's mentally ill.

"I'm glad it's gone," said John Fondran who returned from his part-time job as a mover to find the camp cleared out.

Martha Kegel, the executive director of UNITY, said the agency won't help anyone who chooses to live again at the overpass and will instead direct them to local facilities.

"It actually became a dumping ground," she said.

Kegel cautioned that the city was still populated with an estimated 12,000 homeless people, double its pre-Katrina number. Many more live in substandard and overcrowded housing, in a city where rents have increased by about 40 percent since the disaster.

Many at the overpass were taken to the city's Salvation Army facility, where they underwent checks for any physical or mental disabilities. They will be given a month at the facility, while they are provided housing vouchers that will buy them another three months of shelter in an apartment.

As he underwent processing, Lorenzo Johnson, 48, a lifelong New Orleans resident explained that his alcoholism turned into crack cocaine use at the camp. Taking a look at the scrubbed floors and neat cots that make the Salvation Army shelter one of the most modern in the city, he said he was now ready to make a better life.

"You can live through a storm. You can live through a drought," he said. "I have to keep my mind focused because these people are helping me."