Hurricane evacuees in Bay Area to lose federal housing help

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Thanksgiving is less a holiday to many Gulf Coast evacuees living in the Bay Area than it is a reminder of a deadline.

For people still living in motels, such as Angela Matthews, Thanksgiving means that she has as little as three weeks to find permanent housing for herself and her two elementary school-age children before the federal government stops picking up the tab.

"I didn't sleep at all last night, staying up, racking my brain about what to do," said the 31-year-old Matthews, her lids still droopy Tuesday morning as she cradled a cup of coffee at Oakland's Jack London Inn, where she has stayed since mid-September after being chased from her home by Hurricane Katrina.

Matthews and other evacuees living in temporary shelter got a small reprieve Tuesday when the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it would pay their housing costs for an additional two weeks, until Dec. 15. After that, though, they could be on their own.

Matthews was living in Marrero, La., a few miles outside New Orleans, when her home was destroyed by Katrina's floodwaters. After a couple of days of sheltering in the Louisiana Superdome and a quick stop in Texas, she got bus tickets to Oakland. But the relative who paid for the tickets doesn't have a place large enough for her family to stay, so the Red Cross placed her in the Jack London Inn.

She had an interview for a receptionist job Monday, but even if she gets it, she worries about affording BART or bus tickets and child care.

"I am really stressing out," she said.

There is a chance Matthews and others will have a bit more time to look for housing. For 10 states with the highest concentration of evacuees -- including California, with 15,000 who moved here from the Gulf Coast after Katrina hit in late August -- FEMA will continue paying for motel rooms until Jan. 7, as long as state officials come up with a plan for permanent housing for motel guests by Dec. 15.

Some of that planning has begun locally. Last week, housing and mental health leaders in the East Bay joined with faith and community groups and the Red Cross to develop a Long Term Recovery Group to figure how to place the 191 evacuees still living in Alameda County motels.

In San Francisco, the Mayor's Office of Housing has been coordinating similar efforts for the 131 evacuees still living in hotels in the city.

"The concern is that when this deadline is up, there will be a lot of people showing up on our doorstep and on our partners' doorstep not knowing what to do," said Bruce Burtch, a Red Cross spokesman for the Bay Area.

Arthur Fortner wondered about his options Tuesday as he headed out to the cashier's job he got three weeks ago at McDonald's in East Oakland. Even with a job, the 24-year-old evacuee still doesn't quite have enough cash to be on his own yet.

"I don't know what I'd do (without the FEMA subsidy)," said Fortner, who has been living alone at an Oakland motel for a couple of months. He's not sure whether he wants to -- or can -- return to Louisiana.

His state of limbo, bred of the uncertainty in both his old life and his new one, is similar to the story told by other evacuees.

In San Francisco, housing officials have steered roughly 50 evacuees into permanent housing, and another 115 are exploring their options in the city. But the city has lost touch with another 80 to 100 evacuees, said Matt Franklin, director of the Mayor's Office of Housing.

Some may have left town without saying anything, Franklin said, while others have been hesitant to explore units in San Francisco because they hold out hope they can go home soon.

"For many people, their lives are still in such flux," Franklin said. "They don't know exactly what's going on back home. They hear about relatives starting to get jobs, but they don't know if they should go back yet."

For many motel-dwellers looking for stability, the biggest challenge remains bridging the huge gap in housing prices between the Gulf Coast and the Golden State.

FEMA is giving families $2,358 apiece over three months in renewable housing subsidies, but that figure is based on a national average of what it costs to rent a two-bedroom apartment. In San Francisco, the average rent for a two-bedroom unit is $1,539 a month, according to federal housing figures.

About 3,500 Gulf Coast evacuees are living in the Bay Area, FEMA says. "The challenge for some states, like California, is finding enough affordable housing," said agency spokeswoman Jean Baker.

Those who haven't found housing yet are those with the fewest number of options, say relief workers and housing officials. They either have no relatives in the area or have exhausted their ability to stay with them.

They haven't found jobs or haven't saved enough from the ones they landed here to pay for a security deposit. The looming FEMA deadline is raising their anxiety level into a dangerous zone.

"Mentally, people are losing it," said Ollie Arnold, housing outreach coordinator for Eden Information & Referral, a Hayward firm that lists 50,000 units in Alameda County in its database.

As the Katrina story has faded from the top of the news, fewer people are calling Eden to offer discounted apartments and rental homes, leaving the organization's disaster database of properties "almost bare," Arnold said. Red Cross officials say donations are drying up.

"It's a bad situation," Arnold said. "(Evacuees) are seeing fewer and fewer options, and there's no end in sight. They can't go home to New Orleans. They didn't have insurance, so they don't have a lot they can do."

One result: Some evacuees are feeling like "they've been abandoned twice," said Spence Casey, a Berkeley social worker who has worked with evacuees through that city's Katrina Resource Center.

"They feel alienated," Casey said. "They feel that they don't have permission to talk about what happened to them."

The FEMA deadline is pushing people "into desperation," he said. "There's a huge fear of homelessness. But for some, going into a shelter is going to be the only option."

Rachel Moore figured that would probably be her fate, so the 18-year-old is returning next week to Hammond, La., where she plans to enroll at Southeastern Louisiana University. The home that her grandma passed on to her mother, five blocks from Bourbon Street in New Orleans, is infested with mold and uninhabitable. Moore has been living in a Bay Area motel alone since Sept. 10, as her family scattered to northern Louisiana, Atlanta, Seattle and Texas.

Ordinarily, her grandma would prepare Thanksgiving for 60 people. This year, Moore will eat the turkey dinner that's been donated for evacuees at the Jack London Inn.

"It makes me sad, but it's out of my control," Moore said. "I'm thankful to be alive, to breathe my own breath."

Matthews feels the same way. She doesn't usually make the Thanksgiving meal, but this year she wants to. With so much of her life out of control, she wants to take charge of at least one small part of it. Even for one day.

"I know there's a meal waiting for me here," Matthews said. "But I really just want to do something for myself."

(source:SFgate.com)