Southwest Louisiana Hurricane Resources

800-239-7379

Southwest Louisiana Hurricane Resources

Call 225-342-2727, or go online to reach out to loved ones who may be in state-run non-congregate shelters. Click here to access the form.

To find an open shelter, go to the nearest evacuation center, visit redcross.org or view open shelters through the Red Cross Emergency app. If you don’t have access to a computer or smart phone, call 800-RED-CROSS (800-733-2767) to be directed to an evacuation center where you will be provided with sheltering options near you. Alternatively, try calling 211 or 311, if these services are available in your area.

Calling 211 can help you find a shelter for medical needs and pets.

If you are low on funds and need a place to stay the state of Louisiana paying for rooms and giving free meals (898211 text LASHELTER)

FEMA Assistance to individuals and households for the following parishes is now available.

Allen (Parish)

Beauregard (Parish)

Calcasieu (Parish)

Cameron (Parish)

Jefferson Davis (Parish)

Apply for assistance by registering online at www.DisasterAssistance.gov or by calling 1-800-621- 3362 or 1-800-462-7585 TTY. If you didn’t get the 500 initial assistance, you have to call FEMA and explain that Calcasieu Parish is still under a mandatory evacuation order and you have run out of funds. The funds are for displaced individuals.

The FEMA disaster code is: 4559.

FEMA Hotel Vouchers https://www.femaevachotels.com is a website to look up available hotels in other areas.

Crisis Cleanup hotline: Call 844-965-1386

FEMA is providing Tarps–Call 1 888 Roof Blu or 1 888 766 3258

Cajun Navy (504) 517-6289  or (844) 482-6289 will put up Tarps and more such as food.

Christian World has volunteers 2001 E Gauthier Rd.  Call 1800-730-2537

Samaritan’s Purse at Sale Street Baptist Church 337-244-0982

First Baptist Moss Bluff 844-965-1386 free services to cut trees, remove drywall flooring and appliances, tarping, mold mitigation

If anyone believes they may have been victimized by a scammer, please contact the Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s Office at 337-491-3605.

Report Insurance problems/questions to the Louisiana Department of Insurance  at (225) 342-5900

New Orleans Resources

New Orleans shelter capacity has been reached. If you are still in need of shelter, the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services is directing people to the Alexandria Mega Shelter, 8125 Hwy 71 South, Alexandria, LA 71302. This information is also available via 2-1-1.

Crawford Transit Services provides transportation to pharmacies and Walmart 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Call (504) 729-0529 for more information.

RTA provides transportation to City of New Orleans resource center at the Convention Center 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. (Resource center closes at 2 p.m. and is no open on the weekends or holidays).

Text WELCOMENOLA to 888777 for information from the City of New Orleans on resources, services, and events available to you.

Baton Rouge Resources

Catholic Charities 225-336-8700

Free Haircuts and Food 6649 Sullivan Rd. Greenwell Springs, LA.

Baton Rouge Emergency Aid Coalition breac225@gmail.com

Food Bank Elizabeth Baptist Church 205 E Main St Elizabeth, LA 318-634-7422

Lake Charles Resources

List of all Food Sites https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qZ6UFoM_AjinFLqunpotdQOOyn6tWaUXomA2IQDoItg/edit?usp=sharing

For those in Lake Charles or checking on their property, SWLA Center for Health Services at 2000 Opelousas Street will serve as the command center to North Lake Charles. Open daily from 9 am to 7 pm to offer food, toiletries, baby diapers, wipes, masks, baby milk, baby food, and hot meals.

SWLA Center for Health Services patients can have their prescriptions filled at our Lafayette location.
Prescriptions can be mailed to patients outside of Lake Charles.
Prescriptions can also be transferred to another pharmacy. Patients may call us at (337) 769-9451 to update their pharmacy.

The National Guard will be distributing food, water, ice and tarps to residents at 8 a.m. Sunday, Aug. 30 at the Lake Charles Civic Center. One tarp per vehicle.

United Way of Southwest Louisiana TEXT LAURA to 40403

World Central Kitchen Hot Meals at Walmart: 3415 Gerstner Memorial Blvd in Lake Charles (Lots of other stuff going on in this parking lot like selling generators and stuff but probably for a lot of money).

Hot Meals at Hancock Whitney on 3401 Ryan Street Lake Charles

Mercy Chefs, a Virginia-based disaster relief and humanitarian aid organization, serving lunch daily from 11 – 1 and dinner from 4 – 6 at Life United Church, 1800 East College St.

The Jolly Pig Cooking Team from Texas will be serving free hot meals at Brookshire Brothers in Sulphur. Meals will be served at 11:30 a.m. on Sunday, August 30.

Moss Bluff Pentecostal on La-378 is serving free hot meals, starting at noon.

Red Cross and Southern Baptists will be providing meals at 6 p.m. at the Civic Center. On Monday, two meal times will be provided at this location. Times TBA.

Meals being given out at Walmart on Hwy. 14 in Lake Charles.

Open Door Baptist on 2154 Hwy 171 in DeRidder will be handing out supplies Monday through Thursday from noon to 3 p.m. They will have pet food, toiletries, non-perishable food, water, tarps, and female products.

Huber Park Rec. 2510 4th Ave.–Red Cross–water,ice, food, cleaning supplies, cots, tarps, PPE’s, etc. distribution trucks throughout the city.
Glad Tidings Church–3501 Texas Street–Convoy of Hope serving meals and distributing food from 10am to 2pm daily.

Calcasieu Parish Temporary Work Permits

Prien Lake Park, Harbor’s Edge Pavilion, 3700 West Prien Lake Road in Lake Charles, will be open from 8 a.m. – 5 p.m. Monday through Friday

Calcasieu Parish Schools

Will start virtual learning on Sept. 28th

GAS

Sam’s Club has gas 2025 Sam’s Way Lake Charles

Raceway and Shell on Highway 171 in Lake Charles have gas.

Chevron on Lake and Gauthier in Lake Charles has gas.

Tobacco Plus on Ryan in Lake Charles has gas.

The Neighborhood Walmart on Ryan Street

7080 Gulf Hwy. Sunday 12 p.m. – 6 p.m., Monday – Friday 10 a.m. – 6 p.m. (cash only)

1901 Sam Houston Jones Pkwy. Sunday 12 p.m. – 6 p.m., Monday – Friday 10 a.m. – 6 p.m. (cash only)

2401 Westwood Sunday 12 p.m. – 6 p.m., Monday – Friday 10 a.m. – 6 p.m. (cash only)

108 – Exxon and Chevron near Lowe’s (all grades not available)

EZ Mart, corner of Hwy. 90 and 108 (all grades not available)

Walmart Neighborhood Market in Moss Bluff open from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Stores

Stine open from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. in Lake Charles and Sulphur.

Lowe’s in Sulphur is open

Food is available at the old Rite Aid on the corner of Beglis and 90

SWLA Center for Health Services on 2000 Opelousas Street will have porta-potties, medical trailers, and showers

SWLA Center for Health Services and Mount Olive Baptist Church will be providing meals, water and clothing. Please call 337-304-8302 or 337-540-5332. Might have to text if phone lines are down. They will do wellness checks for people who didn’t leave.

CVS on Ryan Street in Lake Charles and CVS in Sulphur open and refiling prescriptions.

Walgreens -Lake Charles, 4097 Ryan Street from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. (337-474-0434)

Lake Charles, 2755 Country Club Rd. from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. (337-477-7564)

Moss Bluff, 120 N. Highway 171 from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Their pharmacy will not be open until noon. (337-855-4848)

Misses Grocery is open 106 E Lincoln St, Sulphur, LA 70663

Target is open 1720 W Prien Lake Rd. until 5pm

ATT Charging Stations to charge your phone:

2801 Derek Drive in Lake Charles
419 West Prien Lake Rd in Lake Charles
1405 Beglis Parkway in Sulphur

Red Cross: Tarps, food and ice:

Calcasieu Parish –

• Site #1: Lake Charles Civic Center, 900 N. Lakeshore Drive, Lake Charles, LA 70601

• Site #2: McMurry Park, 300 South Hazel Street Sulphur, LA 70663 

Beauregard Parish –

• Site #1: Park Terrace Shopping Center, 1011 N Pine Street, Deridder, LA 70634

• Site #2: South Beauregard Elementary, 12380 Highway 171, Longville, LA 70652

The Red Cross has a site at the Allen August Multipurpose @ 2000 Moeling St., Lake Charles. They will provide items such as cots, mops, brooms, buckets, PPE, snacks and bottled water. Partnering with the Southern Baptists, Red Cross will also be providing two meals daily at this sites

Facebook Group: Hurricane Laura Aftermath (people are requesting pictures of their property from people who are driving around)

FEMA Hotel Vouchers https://www.femaevachotels.com

If you can’t go to the FEMA Hotel Voucher site, please Call 211 before traveling to see which voucher centers are open and if they have vouchers.

For those evacuated to the New Orleans Area:
New Reception Center Opens for Evacuees Seeking Shelter. Louisiana DCFS is operating non-congregate shelters for evacuees from areas impacted by Hurricane #Laura. Evacuees in need of shelter must go to the reception center to be placed at a hotel. Anyone who arrives directly at a hotel will not be admitted and will be required to go to the reception center.
New Orleans Reception Center: The Shrine on Airline/Zephyr Field Baseball Stadium 6000 Airline Dr. Metairie, La 70003.  Text LAShelter to 898-211 or call 211. The reception center will be open 24/7 until further notice.

https://ready.nola.gov/incident/tropical-storm-laura/new-reception-center-opens-for-evacuees/

This information is also available by texting to – or by calling 211.

Southern University Law Clinic is helping.  Need disaster relief assistance? SULC Disaster Relief is to help those impacted by #HurricaneLaura. Visit sulc.edu/lawclinics or call 225-771-3333.

Disaster food stamps: You can pre-register but they not ready yet. http://www.dss.state.la.us/page/dsnap

Even if you get regular food stamps, you have to sign up separate for disaster food stamps when they become available.

Hotspots will be opened by Comcast / Xfinity

https://www.ksla.com/2020/08/26/xfinity-provide-free-wifi-hotspot-network/

https://www.shreveporttimes.com/story/weather/hurricanes/2020/08/26/comcast-xfinity-free-wifi-prepares-hurricane-laura/3443575001/

Banks

Jeff Davis Bank- Drive-through service available Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. – 3 p.m. on Kirby St., Big Lake Rd., Morganfield, Moss Bluff, Welsh and Kinder.

24-Hour ATM service is available at the following Lake Charles area branch locations: Big Lake Rd., Hwy 14, Morganfield, Carlyss, Iowa, Moss Bluff, Sulphur, Welsh. and Westlake.

Cameron Parish  DAMAGE SURVEY

Cameron OEP/OHSEP encourages residents to fill out this survey to report damage to your home or business (structures only, no vehicles). Information collected here will help parish, state, and federal authorities understand how and where locations were impacted by this disaster event. This survey is to be used only for reporting damage or loss of personal property. Completion of this survey is not an application for or guarantee of assistance, nor does it initiate a claim to your insurance provider. Note that any information submitted via this form may become public information.

https://survey123.arcgis.com/share/36c861fc544f46b3817e4a244f7f05cf?field:incident_id=20-02

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Please Help Lake Charles, Louisiana A Community Voice organize for safety and help for Hurricane Laura survivors

Lake Charles A Community Voice leader Mark Thibodeaux asks ACV to do all we can for SW Louisianans affected by the upcoming hurricane.

Hurricane Laura landfall is expected due south of Lake Charles, LA around 1 a.m. Thursday. There is a wide industrialized waterway that leads directly from the Gulf of Mexico to the city of Lake Charles, itself built around a large estuary, originally named Lac du Charles. After H. Rita, members of ACORN in North Lake Charles’ African American working and poor communities were badly flooded and needed assistance. By now we know plenty about what we can do to help and the Lake Charles members will tell us, too. It starts with organizing the residents to have a voice and a way to receive help.

Please contact us about where to send all volunteer supplies, help, etc. Donations can be made through the acommunityvoice.org donate button. Email bethbutler.south@gmail.com, messages at 800-239-7379.

Looking for more ideas and ways to help, please contact us.
Any info or strategies on how to test the water and soil is urgently needed. Lake Charles is surrounded by a vast array of petro-chemical industry, all in the hurricane’s pathway too. If you can generate some help on this, Thank you.

Friday August 28, 6:30 p.m.
Community Conference Call with Lake Charles and Southwest Louisiana members of A Community Voice / ACORN
To register for the phone call, residents who are asked to please leave your name and phone number at 800-239-7379
You will receive a text and or a phone call to give you the dial-in number for the Friday phone conference.
Lake Charles Mayor Nic Hunter will provide a list of resources for residents and we will be prepared to answer questions.

Please share this info.
Thanks everyone, fingers crossed!
Prayers and healing vibes can go straight to those in need.

Debra Campbell
Rev. Richard Bell
Beth Butler
A Community Voice – ACORN International
Higher Ground, National Flood Fighters coalition
info@acommunityvoice.org
FB: A Community Voice Louisiana
www.acommunityvoice.org
800-239-7379
Map of SW LA
https://www.pickatrail.com/topo-map/l/7.5×7.5/lake-charles-se-la.html

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New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward is still reeling from Hurricane Katrina’s damage 15 years later

Copy of Article by John Simerman

Kent Montgomery settled in for bad weather last week under a roof in the Lower 9th Ward that’s been gashed since 2005.

He slept on a metal cot, surrounded by bare wall studs, dangling wires, spiderwebs and shattered glass, in a gutted brick apartment building on North Derbigny Street.

He awoke one recent morning and backed his wheelchair through a swarm of bees into a courtyard dotted with graffiti and trash. Doctors amputated his left leg two years ago, said Montgomery, 61. Another set of scars runs down his right knee.

“Twenty-two trap. I took a lick from the blind side,” he said, describing a play and an injury he dated to a college game, after attending Francis T. Nicholls, the neighborhood high school later renamed for Frederick Douglass.

Montgomery has taken plenty of licks since: repeated drug convictions, years in prison, runs through homeless shelters, a lost leg.

Low on options, he returned to the Lower 9th Ward, and familiar surroundings.

“I love my neighborhood,” he said. “They know me.”

Chicken vs. egg

Grim hideouts like this one are plentiful across a Lower 9th Ward that 15 years ago became a world symbol for poverty, neglect and utter devastation, and since has shown few signs of a rebound.

Overgrown lots still blanket the landscape in the “backatown” area lakeward of North Claiborne Avenue, where the market for homes has flatlined.

Houses here continue to cost far more to build than they sell for, so much so that $75,000 in subsidies are often needed to bridge the gap in some areas, said Seth Knudsen, planning director for the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority.

But there is a citywide demand for low-income housing, which is where developers working with NORA, and others, have turned much of their focus in the Lower 9th Ward.

Critics fear a downshift in the aspirations for a revival of a neighborhood developed in the 1940s and 50s that had a jaw-dropping rate of homeownership and a population that was 98% Black when Katrina struck.

Brenda Breaux, NORA’s executive director, argues that the neighborhood must address “a chicken-and-egg problem” in a desert for services, such as a supermarket.

“That portion of the Lower Ninth Ward that didn’t come back, and hasn’t come back, that’s the reality of where we are. We are rebuilding a neighborhood,” Breaux said. “We’re talking about how to get more rooftops in an area and a community that fulfills all the things everyone wants to see.”

Gwendolyn Guice, for one, wouldn’t mind seeing less wildlife.

“I have to throw mothballs down to keep the snakes away,” she said.

It was hardly so rural or weed-infested when Guice, 73, bought into the neighborhood four decades ago, raising her three children in a house that would sit under 18 feet of water in Katrina.

Guice had barely made it to Texas when she resolved to come back. “I hate Houston right now today,” she said.

A patchwork recovery

In 2007, she and her next-door neighbor, Josephine Butler, became the first Lower 9th Ward residents to move home into new houses on their deserted street, both built by ACORN. Soon, another neighbor joined them. One more came home. The 2300 block of Delery Street had a quorum.

But then no one else did come back, Guice said. Another neighbor was planning a return, but died first. One by one, the three neighbors who had joined her back home passed. Butler died in 2015.

Guice’s daughter, Karonda Williams, moved three years ago to a spot just beyond Jackson Barracks in St. Bernard Parish. Guice said what keeps her on Delery Street are the memories. The house had to be stripped down and re-drywalled a few years ago.

“We are homeowners. That’s the reason I thought they would come back,” she said. “They said they was gonna build up everything, and da-da-da, and they didn’t do nothing. I think they took all the money that they promised to put down here and put it Uptown. Didn’t put it down here. Because the streets been falling apart down here.”

Just about every home that gets built in the neighborhood is still subsidized, one way or another, Knudsen said. NORA offers up the land in many cases at a steep discount, from a glut of more than 500 properties it owns here, many of them sold off to the state’s Road Home program by former residents who walked away.

The federal rebuilding program was found to have discriminated in its funding formula against claimants in depressed areas like the Lower Ninth Ward. The formula pegged the payout to home value, rather than the cost to rebuild, leaving many people here well short of the money they’d need for a house.

That was one among many well-chronicled roadblocks for Lower 9th Ward residents trying to make it back. Most still have not.

As recently as 2018, the neighborhood’s population stood at about a third of its pre-Katrina levels, with fewer than 5,000 residents, according to U.S. Census estimates.

There were 4,820 households in the Lower 9th Ward in 2000, five years before Katrina. Five years after the storm, the census logged 1,060 households. More recent estimates place the number at about 1,675, according to an analysis by The Data Center.

Tangled succession issues continue to plague numerous properties that have sat idle for years.

For NORA, that has meant development of enclaves of houses in areas where the agency has managed to aggregate enough lots, such as along Andry Street, lakeward of Claiborne, where houses line the block.

For longtime homeowners like Freddie Ross, it spells an eyesore.

“That right there is real, real irritating. I’m sick of looking at it. Katrina’s been, what, 15 years? It’s a damper on my day,” he groused from his porch on Tupelo Street.

Across the street rose a cloud of brush that blotted out the house facing his neatly manicured compound. Ross, 63, expanded after the storm, buying the properties on either side of him through the popular “Lot Next Door” program. He’d been tending to those lawns anyway while they sat.

“I went to a lot of meetings about rebuilding,” he said. “They come with broken promises.”

Managing expectations

On a recent drive through the Lower 9th Ward, City Councilwoman Cindy Nguyen offered a scorched-earth proposal as she slowly passed dump sites, tire piles and empty lots choked by weeds along streets shrouded in overgrowth near Florida Avenue.

“You know what I really want to do with all this? Burn it down,” she said.

Not all of it, Nguyen clarified. She didn’t mean, for instance, the nearby Sankofa Nature Trail and Wetland Park — a post-Katrina restoration project that offers peace from an urban bustle somewhere else.

Then she turned back from Florida Avenue, a haven for illegal dumps.

“Look at this lot right here. If I want to buy it by auction, buy the tax lien – which is probably high – then I still gotta invest probably about $40,000 to get the land clear,” she said. “Now if you burn it down – controlled burn – it’s a way of really getting things going.”

Nguyen, a first-term councilwoman from New Orleans East who worked for Road Home after the storm, said city fire officials balk at her plan. In the meantime, she’s pushing a resolution, urged by developers, to free up narrow lots by removing a driveway requirement in the neighborhood on the lakeside of Claiborne Avenue

“I want to change the neighborhood according to people that live out here now, not based on people that used to live out here,” Nguyen said.

“I think people out here would love to have a little bit more people out here. Some green space where their children can play. Small little delis in between these neighborhoods. I’m saying burn it down so we could entice people to do something.”

The recent closing of a CVS pharmacy that opened to fanfare in 2016 on North Claiborne didn’t shock too many residents.

“Every time I went in there the only person in there was me and an employee,” said Lisa Lemieux as she swept a broom across the narrow walkway in front of her house on Egania Street, which she bought in 2003.

Lemieux pointed to an abandoned house on North Robertson, a gray wooden shell. Her friend Floyd, the “godfather” of the block, had lived there. He’d put on a new roof after Katrina, but died soon after Hurricane Isaac in 2012, she said.

“The old values are gone, because the older people don’t live here anymore,” she said. “It’s more like a new neighborhood starting over.”

Nguyen favors a gut-check on expectations for commerce in the Lower 9th Ward.

“I’ll be candid — having Wal-Mart come to the neighborhood, it ain’t gonna happen,” she said. “The concept of even like a Raising Cane’s, I don’t think it’s going to happen.”

Nguyen cited local tastes for the latter.

“This is just a reality OK, and this is not putting anybody down: I think people in the Lower Nine like those greasy fried chicken [places],” she said.

“I don’t like to have conversations just to sugarcoat people and say, ‘Yeah, we can get a Raising Cane’s,’ when you know very well that people here like those chicken, those fried chicken…You can’t ask people to start up a business and not be able to make money.”

Meanwhile, Nguyen said she’s pushing a plan to have “Black Lives Matter” painted in huge letters on St. Claude Avenue, outside a civil rights center that broke ground at the old McDonogh 19 Elementary School a few days before the pandemic struck in March.

Affordable housing is planned above a museum and anti-racism center at a site where a 6-year-old Leona Tate walked up the steps to help desegregate New Orleans schools one morning in 1960, amid racist jeers from the street. Tate is a co-owner of the project.

The devotion to honoring the neighborhood’s tortured history and musical culture endures, along with a crumpled infrastructure.

Lately, municipal crews have been digging up numerous cockeyed, neglected streets along the Industrial Canal and farther downriver. The “full-depth” reconstruction project, funded by FEMA, promises new water and sewer lines, sidewalks, curbs.

But the direction she sees in redeveloping them — and talk of burning debris-riddled lots — doesn’t sit too well with Laura Paul, executive director of lowernine.org, a bootstrap nonprofit that has rebuilt 89 houses for pre-Katrina residents since 2012.

Paul said she still fields calls from people seeking help getting back. She argues that private and non-profit builders are sacrificing the neighborhood and its legacy by providing cheap rentals, buttressed in some cases by low-income housing tax credits on one end, and guaranteed market rental rates on the other.

“The reason that it’s owned by NORA at all is because of a discriminatory federally funded program,” she said.

Paul is particularly critical of New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity, one of four steady contractors participating in a long-running plan with NORA to build scores of new homes in the neighborhood.

“It can’t just be, ‘Let’s get this property back into commerce.’ It has to be meaningful and mindful and respectful of the community, and none of this is respectful of the community,” Paul said.

“How can you talk about affordable housing as a priority while you are keeping Black families in poverty?”

A ‘conscious decision’

Habitat, the nonprofit homebuilder, is more than a year into a five-year plan to build 16 doubles and 48 single-family homes in the neighborhood on lots in NORA’s inventory. The goal is a mix of owner housing and rentals, not unlike what existed before the storm, said executive director Marguerite Oestreicher.

“We made a conscious decision when we started working on this to frontload with rentals. It’s a faster way to build density. We need families, need children for schools, enough people to support stores,” she said. “I think everybody thought it would happen faster.”

Oestreicher said there’s interest in buying into the Lower 9th Ward, though the invitation elicits strong reactions from prospective low-income “partners” at Habitat outreach events.

“Some, they grew up there and want to come back,” said Oestreicher. Others take a quick pass.

“I think we’ve all learned to have a fresh appreciation for the power of water,” she said, “and it’s hard to escape those ghosts.”

Quiet, open space and ample parking are among the draws now across the Claiborne Avenue bridge, where new gardens have popped up on some lots left empty since Katrina.

“If you go back in the history of the Lower 9th, if you go way back, people had gardens and there were small farmers who filled their produce for food businesses in the French Quarter,” Oestreicher said. “People like the spirit of community, the folks who know it.”

‘That’s the ballgame’

Social and land use policies dating to the Industrial Canal’s creation a century ago, splitting the 9th Ward in two, came to haunt the neighborhood, said Tulane University history professor Andy Horowitz.

Horowitz pointed to the more robust though still uneven rebound across the border in largely white St. Bernard Parish, which suffered no less devastation in Katrina, overwhelmed by water.

At the parish border, “flood vulnerability doesn’t change, but vulnerability to punitive social policies does,” said Horowitz, author of the recently published book, “Katrina: A History, 1915-2015.”

“If you have two people waiting two or three years for their Road Home grant, and one person has the money in the bank to start rebuilding, that’s the ballgame, folks.”

Such policies nurtured what had long been a defining trait of the Lower 9th Ward: A strong sense of otherness, the bond forged by neglect from a city that moated it off. Hurricane Betsy in 1965 flooded 6,000 homes there, said Horowitz — at least 1,000 more homes than Katrina.

“Basic amenities, civic services, muddy roads and streetlights that never turned on. The big structural problems, not just traffic,” Horowitz said of the neighborhood’s formative years. “There was a long list of things they justifiably complained about for generations.”

Horowitz also described “the extraordinary sense of possibility that circulated among people that were usually the first in their families that were ever to own their own home in America.”

Moving on

The push to meet citywide demand for affordable rental housing isn’t only occurring on NORA’s land in the Lower 9th Ward.

The neglected apartment house on North Derbigny Street where Montgomery slept on a cot, for instance, has won conditional city approval to house seniors, the disabled and disabled veterans in 15 units, said Victoria Lewandrowski, Nguyen’s economic development liaison.

The application was waiting on approval by the Housing Authority of New Orleans for “project-based” housing vouchers. Rob Marks, who owns Reed Real Estate, the building’s listed owner, said he took over the property three years ago.

“It’s an investment for me, but I’m not looking to hurt the community so I can make some money,” he said, adding that the project depended on HANO’s commitment of the vouchers, 20 years of steady funding he could take to the bank.

Marks appeared at the property recently with an associate to board up the front entrance and broken-out windows, at the request of Nguyen’s office. He said the building was renovated right before Katrina. Vandals had since ripped out the metal stairwell and balcony railings.

As Marks sized plywood, Montgomery rolled through the courtyard to the front. He praised Marks for his investment, then pondered his own options. He’d spent weeks in the husk of a rear apartment, but his days there appeared to be numbered.

“They need to put me in a location somewhere. I’d rather be alone. It works out better for me,” Montgomery said of his preference for permanent housing, and his need for help.

He said he’d been evicted from his last apartment in New Orleans East over a housing violation involving a weapon, but that he’d cleared it up and had a new Section 8 voucher approved. The pandemic had stalled his efforts to claim it, he said.

“Gotta find another location,” he said, pushing off toward Tupelo Street with a cup for change and a cell phone on his lap. “Too many bees around.”

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Report on Misuse of Funds by the Sewerage & Water Board

A month ago, the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General released its audit of S&WB spending and tracking of all the FEMA dollars it has received for damages from hurricanes Katrina, Gustav, and Isaac. The audit was begun in the wake of the August 5, 2017 flooding. The findings were devastating, and confirmed much of what New Orleanians have suspected for years: S&WB has no idea how to manage the hundreds of millions of dollars that have come its way, and will likely have to return a very large chunk of it.

OIG-20-21-Mar20

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Take Back Sewerage & Water Board of New Orleans

Take Back SWBNO Packet Download for your Church, Organization or Small Business

Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans continues to abuse average New Orleanians with high rates and an inequitable rate structure that places undue hardship on the poor and elderly, inadequate infrastructure repairs and maintenance, increased flooding risk, lead in our drinking water and an appeal process that is impossible to navigate.

Unfortunately, the structure of the SWBNO was set up by the state legislature. It is impossible to make changes while it is under the legislature.

With SWBNO run like any other city department, we the people would have a chance to have a more accountable and transparent SWB that would work for the people instead of against them.

Some of the changes the Take Back SWBNO is advocating for are as follows:

  • A fair rate structure with reduced rates for elderly, disabled and others who meet the poverty guidelines.
  • A fair billing dispute system with a separate 3rd party arbitrator
  • A calendarized plan to remove all lead lines, including SOLID lead whip lines to homes.
  • A program for residents to have certified filters that remove lead and other harmful matter for kitchen faucets, at no charge to the elderly, disabled or poor people.
  • An employment program – END all privatized work and directly hire residents of New Orleans.
  • Place SWB under Citizen Control, under the city council, as a more accountable governance body. Establish a community participation program to develop transparency, accountability, community benefits, healthy water and infrastructure that serves the community.

Please join with the Take Back SWBNO Coalition by filling out the enclosed registration form and returning it to us as soon as possible.  We are looking forward to working with you and your members for a positive change in our community.

On behalf of low/moderate income people,

Debra Campbell

Rev. Richard Bell

Jo Jackson

A Community Voice

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Rally for More Democratic and Local Control of the Sewerage and Water Board – Many Issues

Rally for More Democratic and Local Control of the Sewerage and Water Board – Many Issues

 

Saturday Jan 25th

11am

City Hall

1300 Perdido

 

Citing issues including a recently filed lawsuit against SWB, necessary to obtain a list of where solid lead water pipes are placed in Orleans Parish, A Community Voice (ACV) members kick off a campaign to gain local control over SWBNO.  Meeting at City Hall, 11:00 a.m. Saturday, Jan. 25, 2020, where the group demands the SWBNO be headquartered, they will proceed to the Hyatt Hotel, recipient of discounted water rates,  to demand that they pay their fair share and use certified water filters in their kitchen and food preparation facilities.

 

Issues are extensive and diverse that they include but are not limited to:

 

  • Failure to properly analyze or eliminate local flooding due to drainage issues.
  • Refusal to turn over lists of addresses with sold lead water lines, despite FOIA and lawsuit. The hearing is set for Feb. 5th in Judge Hazeur’s courtroom.
  • A rate structure that benefits large commercial/industrial users, but forces residential and small businesses to pay a higher rate and more of their share of repairs, because large users place a greater demand on the systems. Large commercial users also benefit from a tax structure that allows all businesses to be deducted from their tax payments, unlike residents.  A lower rate structure for seniors, disabled and poor residents should be implemented immediately.
  • Misuse of public funds, including over $40 million in legal fees to fight Broadmoor residents’ claims against the project that broke their foundations with pile driving, and SWB had a $37 million liability insurance policy to pay them, lost the suit and then filed an appeal.
  • Unfair process for appeal of water bill issues, that also creates a harmful environment for those who can’t pay the thousands that they are billed.
  • Failure to address Lead in the drinking water as a serious issue. Over 90% of homes tested by LSU had high lead levels in their water. ACV believes that nearly every residence built before the 1980s, and some after that, have solid lead whip lines from the meter to the owner’s line. SWB has not given out this list after nearly a year of requests by ACV for the list.

 

ACV plans to kick off the campaign to restore control over SWB at a press event this Saturday, January 25, 11:00 a.m. at City Hall at 1300 Perdido and a march to the Hyatt Hotel to demand that they pay their fair share of the water costs.  All religious and other leaders and groups, along with small businesses are encouraged to join the campaign, and all elected officials are asked to support and work for the return of SWB to local control.  For more information acommunityvoice.org and 800-239-7379 info@acommunityvoice.org

Twitter @ACommunityVoice       FB: A Community Voice Louisiana

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