Alan Gutierrez

This was an article I drafted, but forgot to post, so I’m posting it way late…

There was an article today in the Houston Chronicle about a neighborhood meeting where Residents urge White to send evacuees home. It is disconcerting. It is especially disconcerting to hear the Katrina Fatigue sentiment echoed by a Texan who otherwise writes about Tsunami recovery.

Is there something amiss with our message if we turn off a blogger such as this?

We are not OK. But then, neither is Houston. Much of the Gulf is in disarray.

Can you expect city handle an influx of a quarter of a million people who are homeless indefinitely? It’s good that 150,000 have returned, but we know that some folks have nothing to which they can return. Rents are high. Public housing is covered in those clever steel contraptions that make entry impossible. The Road Home has not yet been paved.

It’s fashionable to pick on Texas if you are not fond of the current administration. In the last year, I’ve heard Texas described as the “world’s most maligned sub-culture”.

I love Texas. Central Texas. I’ve lived in both San Antonio and Austin. It’s a another corner of the Union that has a mix of culture, and a strong cultural identity. Good food for cheap. Real tortillas. Real music. If there was any other place that I’d live it would be in Austin, San Antonio or the hills thereby.

FEMA didn’t last a week in New Orleans. They left us.

From Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security:

For Louisiana, the savior state was Texas, which by Wednesday had opened forty-seven evacuation shelters and was preparing the Houston Astrodome for a flood of evacuees from the Superdome. Texas had a thirty-five-man water rescue team with its own boats that by Wednesday had already saved 1,100 people in New Orleans. It had also sent eight Blackhawk helicopters to the city, along with two Chinook helicopters and five fixed-wing aircraft. It sent a satellite phone communication suite, fifty game wardens with boats and trucks, four tanker fuelers, and fifty ambulances, along with 135 paramedics, nurses, and doctors. It deployed 300 military police and 120 combat engineers from its National Guard. It sent five airboats. The list went on.

The real pull quote from Houston Chronicle article is from Mayor Bill White.

“If people want do so something unlawful, then we need to catch them, try them, convict them and lock them up,” White said.

“If they’re just trying to get on with their lives, then we ought to respect our fellow Americans, and there’s not much of a home to go to.”

That is not the voice of a populist. That is the voice of a leader.

Watch this episode of NewsHour: Shelter for Katrina Evacuees for a sense of the man.

[FEMA Director] DAVID PAULISON: We usually don’t even pay for things this far into the disaster. It’s for immediate lifesaving and health issues, is what it’s supposed to be. So normally it’s used for congregate sheltering when they move out of their homes, they evacuate out of the homes into a congregate shelter or even some very immediate step into a hotel or motel. Here we’re almost six months now, so the emergency is over.

LEE HOCHBERG: But Houston’s mayor says that’s absurd.

MAYOR BILL WHITE: Not for these families that don’t have a house, the emergency hasn’t ended.

…

MAYOR BILL WHITE: Usually, the situation has been that every day, every week, I’ll have to call somebody locally, call state, call nationally. The national person will agree to something. They’ll send a national team down here that will include some of the most senior people– the administrator of FEMA, the COO of FEMA. We’ll reach certain agreements in principle and then we’ll have to call and call and call and bug them and have members of Congress call and have senators call before they’re implemented.

Mayor White opened up Houston and accepted the poorest of New Orleans. He has housed the evacuees and seen that the City of Houston is reimbursed by FEMA. When our public housing remains sealed with steel barriers, when we have a single Road Home office in Orleans Parish, and in all the talk about neighborhood planning, little is said about re-population.

Perhaps it ugly things are said in west Houston. Even so, is not the silent indifference of New Orleans a more damning condemnation?