New Orleans homeless profess little hope

Police on front lines
If homelessness and squatting have gone unaddressed by policy makers, police, fire and health officials have become too familiar with it.

The New Orleans Fire Department recorded 691 structural fires in 2006, the most recent statistics available. Squatters are suspected to have accidentally started one-fifth of them, according to fire Capt. Terry Hardy.

“It has stretched our manpower,” said Hardy, pointing out that the department is down by 100 firefighters since Katrina, and fire call response times are crawling.

According to New Orleans police records, there have been more than 1,400 trespassing arrests so far this year, ranking it the city’s fourth most common crime. Police say processing a homeless person, particularly for mental health care in a city where hospital beds are scarce, can take an officer off the street for four hours. “It’s draining resources,” said police spokesman Sgt. Joe Narcisse.

Homeless people sometimes call authorities on themselves, hoping to find a safe place for the night, said Dr. Joe Guarisco, chief of emergency services for the area’s Ochsner Health System.

“Frequently, it’s the homeless individual who generates the 911 call, or some type of distress signal,” said Guarisco.

'Living in a shell'
But not all of Katrina’s homeless are lawbreakers.

Katrina blew out the rear of Beverlyn Landry’s house in Gretna, across the Mississippi River from New Orleans. Her husband, Wallace, a carpenter, turned the power back on and nailed up siding before he died of lung cancer in March. With her husband gone, no homeowner or life insurance, and family members struggling with their own Katrina recovery, Landry has stayed in the patched together dwelling.

With an intact front, it looks like any other house in the blue-collar neighborhood. But inside, conditions are abject. Electrical wires are exposed. A rotting floor bends underfoot. At night, Landry sees Louisiana stars framed by the two-by-fours supporting her tattered roof.

“I’m living in a shell,” said Landry, 60. “If the board of health were to see this, I think they would make me get out anyway.”

But options for the post-Katrina homeless have not only been limited by government decisions.

The faith-based group that ran the largest homeless shelter in the state, the Brantley Baptist Center in New Orleans, told The Associated Press the facility, shut down by Katrina, will not reopen. Operated by the North American Mission Board, Brantley received the homeless for 77 years and recorded 77,984 sign-ins for food, counseling and shelter in 2003 alone.

A spokesman for the board said it has shifted focus to a volunteer partnership that has built 175 single-family homes in the city, with a goal of 1,000.

“We know if we opened a shelter with 400 beds, that would fill up pretty quickly,” said spokesman Mike Ebert. “But we’re also asking our partners: Is that really the best role for us to play?”

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