No place called home

In two weeks the Katrina evacuees will be displaced again as shelters and the Red Cross hotel program shuts down. A month later, no one in our government has figured out where to house them. FEMA spent a fortune on housing trailers, currently gathering dust in some federal parking lot but can't find a place to put them. All those "kind Chrisitans" in the South don't want them in their towns. The towns that have them now don't want them to stay and sully up their demographics with a lot of poor people.

The government plans to give the famililes a couple of thousand bucks and tell them to find an apartment. Maybe they haven't looked at the rental rates lately. Even if they could find someone willing to rent to them, with that kind of money they can maybe afford a studio apartment. Meanwhile all those trailers will be unused. One wonders why no one has thought of putting the trailers on the military bases that are being shut down. The bases have a built in infrastructure and other permanent buildings that could also be employed as housing at little additional cost to the taxpayer.

Meanwhile, FEMA wants to turn control of the whole housing mess to HUD. I guess with all the auditing of FEMA's accounts going on, they can't figure out how to skim enough money from the contracts for their donor capitalists, so they want to give control of the funds to an agency top heavy with crony appointments that has been lengendary over decades for its fraud and corruption, spanning many administrations. But hey, they rarely get caught.