Holding On in Houston

Charities continue to help displaced Katrina victims secure homes and jobs as the city struggles to adjust

From makeshift office space in Houston’s East End, 22 caseworkers — all of whom fled to this

city after Hurricane Katrina — reach out once a week to fellow victims of the hurricane who are in worse shape than they are.

The workers, mostly women, operate side by side at long banks of desks in Ripley House, a large social-services building. Each has a laptop equipped to keep track of how clients are doing, and a phone to stay in touch with his or her 40 assigned families.

The workers help clients navigate the often-baffling reasons that rental-assistance payments from the Federal Emergency Management Agency may have stopped. They dole out small amounts of money to help people displaced by Katrina pay for food and gas. And they nod empathetically when a fellow evacuee relates a snub by a Houstonian.

But the workers in the program, called Stay Connected, ring the office cowbell for only one reason: when a hurricane victim gets a job.

“It’s something to celebrate around here,” says Rashida Jackson, a program supervisor who, before Katrina, worked as a teacher while she took courses to obtain a master’s degree in public health at the University of New Orleans. “You hear clients say, ‘If I can just get a job, I won’t need help from anybody.’”

Still Seeking Work

Nearly one year after Houston took in an estimated 150,000 people displaced by Katrina — more than any other city — the situation for thousands of them is nearly as precarious as when the New Orleans levees broke. Many of the hurricane survivors haven’t found jobs, lack skills prized by Houston’s economy, and are being kept afloat largely by the rental assistance provided by the federal government.

Houston residents, foundations, and corporations have given generously to help out, and the United Way of the Texas Gulf Coast has raised $7-million for a special fund to aid those displaced by the hurricane. But even with more money available, some charities are staggering under increased workloads, and their budget problems may become more severe when the federal disaster-relief dollars go away.

For more than 3,000 Houston households, federal aid to cover rent and utilities will stop at the end of this month. Another 22,000 have qualified for a longer-term program, but under federal law, all such payments must cease 18 months after President Bush declared New Orleans a federal disaster area. That means that by the end of February, Katrina victims here and elsewhere will largely be on their own.

What happens then is anyone’s guess, but the worst-case scenario involves hundreds of people who used to live in New Orleans turning to Houston homeless shelters that are already at capacity.

“I compare it to the big black cloud you see in the sky,” says Anthony Love, president of the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston/Harris County. “It could drizzle, it could storm, or it could dissipate. You try to prepare for it the best you can, but you really don’t know what’s going to happen.”

The vast majority of people displaced by Katrina want to become self-sufficient. Shirley Chambliss, who had lived in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, contacted the Stay Connected program in June to see if they could help her fiancée, Edgar Ned, find a job.

Ms. Chambliss’s large extended family was split up following the hurricane, but most of her relatives landed at shelters in Houston or San Antonio. One week after the storm, five generations of the family reconnected at the shelter at Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center — a story so heartwarming that a picture of the reunion was published by the Houston Chronicle.

Neighborhood Centers, the large social-services organization that started the Stay Connected program, helped the two oldest generations of the family — Shirley and Edgar, and Shirley’s parents — get into a subsidized apartment complex for retired people, where the rent is less than $400 per month.

Home Visits

On an afternoon in early July, Trishawn Lewis — a single mother from New Orleans who received help from Stay Connected before going to work for the program — drives over to meet with Edgar, Shirley, and her parents, Delphine and James Lindsey, in the elder couple’s small apartment at the Pleasant Hill Village Retirement Community. A large 1970s-era photo of the family hangs in the living room, one of the Lindseys’ few framed photographs spared by floods.

Although the Lindseys receive Social Security, Ms. Chambliss and Mr. Ned are not old enough to get such aid, and don’t have a safety net to fall back on when the federal emergency aid ends.

For several months, Mr. Ned has regularly made the 350-mile drive back to New Orleans, where he crashes at his sister’s house and finds work hanging sheetrock or painting. Jobs are available in New Orleans, and they pay well, but he is tired of the commute and wants a stable, full-time job here in Houston.

“I probably won’t make the money I’ve been making, but the benefits will weigh it out,” he says.

Mr. Ned promises Ms. Lewis that he will stop by the Stay Connected office, where he can work with a job-placement expert to assemble a résumé. Ms. Lewis gives the younger couple $25 debit cards for food and gas.

The Lindseys tell her they need some assistance, too, as their medical bills are spiraling out of control. Together, they take 10 types of prescription drugs, and a recent bill for a month’s supply of just three of the drugs was $125.

The family’s troubles haven’t marred Mr. Lindsey’s sense of humor, and the 79-year-old’s teasing elicits chuckles from Ms. Lewis.

“I had a wonderful time with you people,” Ms. Lewis says as she gets up to leave.

“Just don’t you forget about us, OK?” Ms. Lindsey responds.

It’s a question that many of the people displaced by the hurricane may want to ask their Houston hosts. Houston, a sprawling metropolitan area with more than five million people, opened its arms to those who fled their homes immediately after Hurricane Katrina, but in recent months the attitude of city residents has hardened, amid rising crime and concern about the costs of caring for the newcomers.

In the Houston Area Survey, an annual poll of local opinion that was conducted six months after Katrina struck, 74 percent of respondents said that helping the evacuees had put a considerable strain on the city. Sixty-six percent blamed the city’s recent increase in violent crime on the people who escaped Katrina.

“It’s been fascinating to watch these two faces,” says Stephen L. Klineberg, director of the survey and a sociology professor at Rice University. “It’s unmistakable. There’s the initial outpouring of support, and then the growing sense of, ‘OK, it’s time to go home now.’”

‘Roller-Coaster Ride’

Many hurricane victims direct their ire at the federal government, rather than at Houstonians. The initial cutoff date for emergency-shelter payments from FEMA was the end of May in most of the country. But Katrina victims in Houston received extensions through June, then July, and now August.

Dave Detcher, director of the Stay Connected program, says many evacuees are in apartments that they would not have been able to afford on their own, so intermittent fears that they may lose their homes are raising stress levels.

“It just causes the clients and the service providers who are working with them to be on this roller-coaster ride,” Mr. Detcher says. “Some of them call and they’re panicking because they don’t know what they’re going to do.”

Robert Sohns, general counsel for Lone Star Legal Aid, which has 14 offices in eastern Texas, including Houston, says his nonprofit organization has provided free legal assistance to a few thousand evacuees.

In Houston alone, nine lawyers — nearly half of the charity’s staff — are focusing on hurricane-related cases. People with less-pressing problems are getting phone advice rather than representation. Federal support, which provides 70 percent of the budget, has declined in recent years, but the state has provided additional money to aid the hurricane victims, enabling Lone Star Legal Aid to add a few staff members.

Lately, the organization has provided free legal clinics to advise hurricane victims about their rights — and help submit appeals — when letters from the federal government arrive telling them their rental assistance will end.

“A lot of times you’ll get three letters from FEMA telling you three different reasons why you’re ineligible,” Mr. Sohns says. “It’s just a bureaucratic mess. Some people aren’t eligible and they need to be kicked off, but the vast majority of people we’ve seen have a good reason why they should stay on.”

FEMA officials admit that they have not communicated with displaced hurricane victims very clearly. But they also say that many of the more than 3,000 Houston households that will lose rental assistance at the end of this month are losing their aid for good reasons.

“There are some we’ve never been able to contact,” says Franceska Ramos, a FEMA spokeswoman in Texas. “Some may have moved on, and others might not require the assistance any longer.”

Ms. Ramos says FEMA has looked at many of the cases multiple times, but will take another look at those involving people scheduled to lose assistance at the end of this month if new information is provided.

Concerned About the Homeless

So far, Katrina’s impact on Houston’s homeless shelters has been slight. Roughly 700 of the 14,000 people now counted among Houston’s homeless are hurricane evacuees, according to Mr. Love, the president of the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston/Harris County. But that number is expected to rise when federal rental assistance ends.

“They’ll eventually run out of time,” Mr. Love says. “Our concern is whether there will be a system in place to prevent them from trickling down into the homeless-service system.”

HomeAid Houston, a charity that gets most of its labor, supplies, and financial support from the Greater Houston Builders Association, is erecting two new facilities by the end of the year for local charities that will provide transitional housing for roughly 100 women and children who fled Katrina.

HomeAid Houston received $1-million for the projects from a $3-million fund that Ameriquest Mortgage, based in Orange, Calif., established with HomeAid America, an umbrella organization that includes Houston and 16 other chapters. Most of the shelters in Houston are already at capacity.

“We should be able to fill every bed,” says Bette Moser, HomeAid Houston’s executive director.

By many measures, people displaced by Katrina are still struggling.

Among the 90,000 evacuees who initially enrolled in Houston’s housing-voucher program, only 15 percent had found employment by March, a survey commissioned by the city found. Seventy percent of them had been employed in Louisiana before the storms, but more than half earned less than $15,000 per year. Many had worked at hotels or at hospitality jobs in New Orleans; the portion of Houston’s economy dedicated to tourism is much smaller.

Some charity leaders here have been pushing the idea of a resettlement program for Katrina victims, similar to programs the United States has for refugees from war-torn countries. Such programs typically last about 18 months.

Anna M. Babin, president of the United Way of the Texas Gulf Coast, which coordinated the local charity response in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, says she has talked with staff members of U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, about the idea. No legislation is in the works.

“They want to be self-sufficient,” Ms. Babin says. “We just need to bridge a gap that’s there right now.”

Meanwhile, several local charities are working hard to help those who have had to relocate to this city find jobs. The Stay Connected program has held two “resource fairs,” where it brings together a few hundred of its clients who are seeking work and local employers like AutoZone, Hilton hotels, and Kroger supermarkets.

“For two weeks after each event, we notice a big increase in our bell ringing,” says Mr. Detcher, director of the Stay Connected program, referring to the program’s way of celebrating a client who finds work.

Even so, more than 60 percent of the 1,030 families the program is currently helping have at least one member who is still seeking a job.

Women Helping Women, a local nonprofit group, received a federal contract this summer to train 100 female hurricane victims in nontraditional careers that tend to pay well, such as construction, plumbing, and carpentry.

Such training is crucial if Katrina victims are going to make it on their own, says Don McCullough, a supervisor of the disaster-recovery program at Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Galveston/Houston. The program has worked intensively with 650 families, helping more than 500 get to the point where they no longer need help.

“Minimum-wage jobs aren’t going to do much,” Mr. McCullough says. “If these people are going to be independent, they need some more help.”

Child-Care Needs

While the industries in Houston and New Orleans are obviously quite different, more-subtle differences in the two cities are also hurting employment prospects for hurricane victims. New Orleans was a tight city with convenient public transportation. The Houston metropolitan area sprawls over eight counties that combined are as big as Massachusetts, and a small downtown rail line is used mostly by tourists.

In the neighborhoods of New Orleans, many residents had large extended families to whom they could turn for child care. Now, many of those families are spread out around the country, and some hurricane victims are being forced to pay for child care at a time when they are most financially vulnerable.

To be sure, many of the people displaced by Katrina who have chosen to make Houston home are thriving, considering the trials of the past year.

Deidra Sampson, a supervisor at the Stay Connected program, is buying a house in East Houston with four other evacuees — her two sisters, her mother, and a niece. “We were brought together by the hurricane, and we want to stay together because Houston is so unfamiliar,” Ms. Sampson says.

Herbert Del Rio, who had been renting in Kenner, La., when Katrina struck, moved his family to Katy, a Houston suburb, to live with his brother. He considered moving back to Louisiana, but thought the upheaval in New Orleans wouldn’t be healthy for his two young daughters.

His wife was able to shift her job to the Houston area, and Mr. Del Rio has turned to WorkSource, the city’s employment-assistance program, for help in getting his career on track. He did maintenance work at apartment complexes in the New Orleans area, but has been unable to find similar work in Houston.

WorkSource, which has received $19-million in federal funds to assist hurricane victims, helped Mr. Del Rio pay for training to learn how to install and service air-conditioning units. He’s now working the night shift at a Home Depot while he finishes up his specialized training.

Mr. Del Rio and his wife recently bought their own house in Katy. “We’ve transitioned into a nice little situation,” Mr. Del Rio says. “Now, we’re just trying to get ahead in life.”

Some Katrina evacuees have complained that they are being discriminated against in the hiring process, due to either negative stereotypes that all hurricane victims are lazy and looking for a handout, or a fear on the part of employers that they will head back to New Orleans at the first opportunity.

Many have complained that their job-prospecting calls go unanswered when they use a New Orleans cellphone, which is identifiable by its 504 area code. The Stay Connected program and other charities have urged people to use the free voice-mail system provided by the Coalition for the Homeless, so that employers won’t know about their status as Katrina victims until they get to a face-to-face interview.

When contacted by a reporter in early July, Mr. Ned, the evacuee who had been traveling back to New Orleans to find work, wouldn’t use that excuse for his lack of a Houston job.

“Maybe they think I’m too old, but I’m not going to put it on discrimination,” said Mr. Ned, who is 58. “Sometimes, it just takes a little time.”

In late July, the cowbell finally rang for Edgar Ned. He got a job as a pipe fitter in Houston, making $7.50 an hour.