The federal government is now offering Katrina and Rita hurricane victims still living in FEMA trailers the opportunity to buy those homes for $1. (Begging the question why they don’t just give them away?). The L.A. Times reports:
The assistance comes just days after the official start of the 2009 hurricane season and one month after FEMA announced that it was ending the temporary housing program it started in the aftermath of Katrina.
The more than 3,400 people still living in FEMA trailers in Louisiana and Mississippi had faced eviction.
“We were going to have another homeless crisis on our hands,” said Laura Tuggle of Southeast Louisiana Legal Services, a free legal aid program in New Orleans. “The fear among people was that one day they were going to come back to the trailer they had been living in and it would just be gone. There was so much anxiety. People worried they would have to buys tents.”
The sale of the trailers will end the most expensive emergency housing program in FEMA’s history. The agency provided more than 143,000 households with temporary housing units, mostly mobile homes and trailers, after the two major hurricanes.
FEMA typically provides emergency housing for no longer than 18 months, but officials repeatedly extended the deadline. May 1 was the final deadline to vacate, but many people did not leave.