City of refugees

New Orleans refugees struggle to find a place in the crowded, pricey Bay Area

By G.W. Schulz

› gwschulz@sfbg.com

Richard Lewis has been a Saints fan for all of his 23 years. But he's beginning to like the Raiders too.

He's learning the local bus system. Streets are becoming more familiar. Despite the fact that perhaps the only things in the East Bay that resemble New Orleans are the palm trees, it's beginning to feel like home.

Lewis escaped Hurricane Katrina in September and headed to the Bay Area to stay for a time with an uncle. He's since moved into a federally subsidized hotel in Oakland, where he's been for three months, unsure of what'll come next.

"As of right now, I don't know if I'll get any further help from FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency]," he said.

Lewis's voice is almost inaudibly soft, and his slow Southern accent leaves most full syllables for dead. A pencil-thin line of hair extends the length of his jaw, and he wears a black ski jacket to keep warm.

He says he's considering enrolling in barber school or a tech program for airline mechanics. He's waiting for FEMA to process a longer-term assistance application so he can move into Section 8 housing in Sausalito that a Berkeley nonprofit helped him find.

The world's attention has begun to fade since the storm ended, but for Lewis and thousands of other families and individuals who escaped west and found themselves in California, constructing new lives after the flood is still a Herculean effort.

For now they live anxiously in a world of looming FEMA deadlines and the agency's automated telephone answering service. The federal aid that allowed many to stay in local hotel rooms officially expired Feb. 13 — and while some have managed to wrangle extensions out of the thick bureaucracy of a federal agency that had largely bungled its response to the disaster, they will soon be on their own in a tight housing and job market 2,200 miles from home.

California is among 10 states, including Nevada and a handful of others in the Gulf Coast region, that contain a large number of Katrina victims relying on housing assistance from FEMA. The San Francisco Chronicle recently reported that approximately 3,300 evacuees are in the Bay Area, but that number could not be confirmed by FEMA before Guardian press deadline.

Marion Brown, who found an apartment in Oakland with assistance from her brother after coming here, said permanent employment is still out of reach. Employers want highly specialized skills, she said. Some say she's overqualified to work as a bookkeeper. Others say her experience is great, but she doesn't have a degree. All of them give her the "Katrina face."

" 'Ohhh, I'm so sorry,' " she mocks them sardonically.

We first met Brown in early February, when she was gathered with demonstrators at FEMA's Oakland offices, where the agency was given a dummy eviction notice to protest the impending deadlines on hotel subsidies.

FEMA spokesman James Sheble said in a recent interview that many evacuees who made it here are wary of becoming too entrenched.

"A lot of them want to go home," he said. "But for a lot of them, there is no home to go to; some people just can't imagine; they subconsciously want to go back to the way it was."

Some have found a subsidized apartment, but the application process is complex — Congress has been calling on FEMA for weeks to simplify its assistance-eligibility policies.

Sheble insists the agency is doing the best it can. He said most evacuees obtained an "administrative code" by late January that enabled them to stay longer in hotels until their applications for longer-term subsidized housing could be processed. He said those who failed to get a code are being handled on a case-by-case basis.

But everyone we interviewed said prying cash stipends and rental checks from FEMA remains a colossal battle. In San Francisco at least 65 families were still receiving help from the Mayor's Office of Housing the weekend before the Feb. 13 hotel deadline, from security deposits to social services referrals, according to spokesperson Amy Tharpe. She said about 100 families have appealed for help from City Hall since the storm hit.

Mark Grapes has been staying in the Castro, at Beck's Motor Lodge on Market Street, for about three months. He escaped before the storm hit in an old Nissan 240 packed with his cat, his computer, and a bag of clothes. Checks from FEMA, along with grocery vouchers from social-services groups, have kept him afloat.

"Still, to this day, I receive hot meals from Meals on Wheels," he said.

He's tempted to stay in San Francisco because the gay and arts communities have a lot to offer him, he said. But, "It's still hard to grasp that maybe next year, I'll be here." When we last spoke with him, he was close to giving up and heading back to New Orleans.

He had paid to stay an additional day at Beck's after the Feb. 13 deadline — and now FEMA is claiming they never received his application for apartment assistance. He says a FEMA representative picked it up from him personally a month ago, but he now must submit an application all over again and hopes he can stay with a friend until he can find an SRO or efficiency if he chooses to stay.

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities cautioned in late January that the longer it takes evacuees to find out if they'll get cash for housing, the more likely landlords will balk at leasing apartments to those relying almost exclusively on FEMA for support.

Just two days before Lewis faced his eviction deadline, he was granted an extension to mid-March, buying him some additional time at Oakland's Jack London Inn while his application for housing vouchers continues to be processed. He could be eligible for three-month installments of $2,300 for 18 months.

"I was really supposed to be out by the seventh," he said when we met again recently.

But as the process of rebuilding New Orleans drags on and on, the refugees may become long-term residents of the Bay Area — and despite all the promises of help, it's not going to be easy. *