Temporary trailer parks stir debate in New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS -- In a neighborhood that had not flooded, near orderly streets of dolled-up antebellum homes that now seem almost a fantasyland, a construction crew was chewing up a park the other day to install trailers for the legions of homeless people. And then abruptly, work halted.

Blocking the path of a dump truck was an older woman so infuriated by the trailers that she was mounting a personal protest and refusing to move. Only when the police arrived did she relent, according to several workers who were there. But the mayor and the City Council have stepped in, and now several politicians are trying to use their influence to block some of the trailer parks.

This beleaguered city has struggled for months to maintain a "we're all in this together" civility, to keep the high-ground haves from turning their backs on the lowland have-nots. But the issue of where to place trailer parks in New Orleans seems to have stirred tensions and rubbed people like little else.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency wants to set up more than 22,000 trailers in the city in an effort to house returning residents while they rebuild their homes. Many will go in private yards, but plans also call for 22 trailer parks, said Rachel C. Rodi, a FEMA spokeswoman.

The agency has also been encountering resistance to parks in the rest of the state, even as it fields complaints that there is not enough housing for evacuees. Only a handful of parishes are allowing them. Some, like Orleans Parish, are restricting them, while many are barring them altogether.

In New Orleans, several dozen trailers have already been installed, and others will be set up not far from some of the city's most exclusive neighborhoods. Annunciation Square, where the woman blocked the workers, is in the Lower Garden District, a mostly prosperous area overlooking the Mississippi River.

The juxtaposition has raised simmering issues of class, race and neighborhood loyalty in a city whose residents were far more rooted than those in almost any other in the nation.

Many of the flooded areas were poor and black, while those like the Lower Garden District that were spared tend to have significant white populations. The trailers in Annunciation Square might bring people from areas like the Lower 9th Ward into a neighborhood that they might never have afforded.

Much about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath has been unprecedented, yet this outcry is all too typical in cities throughout the nation. Everyone wants to help the less fortunate, but can't the city find another place for them?

"I don't know what kind of people we are going to be getting," said Mary Briggs, 52, who lives around the corner from Annunciation Square. "I don't want people coming into my house and taking what little I have left. I really hate to be that way, because everyone is in need, but you have to think about your own security."

A neighbor, Jennifer Langkopp, 58, bemoaned the loss of the green space. "I think that it's a shame that they took it away," she said. "There are so many other places where they could have put the trailers."

Views are by no means predictable -- Briggs is black, Langkopp is white.

Another neighbor, Chris Johnson, 26, who is white, seemed more ambivalent. Johnson just bought a house across from the park that was designed by James Gallier, a leading pre-Civil War New Orleans architect.

"If it's temporary, I'm fine with that," Johnson said. "These people need help."

He paused, looked across the way, then added, "Nobody wants to live across from a trailer park."

Copyright C 2005 Deseret News Publishing Co.
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.