by David Stout, The New York Times
Dec. 16, 2005
President George W. Bush asked Congress on Thursday for an additional $1.5 billion to fortify New Orleans against future hurricanes and floods like the disaster that ravaged the Mississippi Delta city in August.
"The president believes deeply in New Orleans and is deeply committed to its future," Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security secretary, said. The new money will help assure "the rebirth of this great American city," he added.
The $1.5 billion will be devoted to improving the city's much-criticized levees, which were breached in the floods accompanying Hurricane Katrina, allowing water from Lake Pontchartrain to inundate vast sections of low-lying territory, killing hundreds of people and triggering an exodus of hundreds of thousands.
The money requested will "armor the levee system with concrete and stone," Donald Powell, the top federal official for New Orleans reconstruction, said at the White House announcement. In addition, he said, it will be used to close three interior canals and to provide modern pumping systems to enable water to flow from the remaining canals into the lake.
The improvements will make the levee system "better and stronger than it has ever been," Powell said.
The funding is in addition to $1.6 billion already committed to repair the city's flood-protection system.
Powell was a bit vague when he was asked whether the stronger levee system, which is to be in place by mid-2006, would be able to withstand a Category 5 hurricane, the strongest in terms of wind speed. He said that, if a storm like Katrina strikes again, there will be "some flooding, but no catastrophic flooding."
Powell said that, rather than focus on wind speed alone, engineers rightly focus on factors like tides, storm surges and the like. Katrina was a Category 4 hurricane, one notch below the most powerful, but was accompanied by devastating flooding and surges.
Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans, a Democrat who had previously been highly critical of the federal response to the destruction in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast, said he was pleased. "This is a great day to be in D.C.," he said.
Leslie Eaton and Ron Nixon of The Times reported earlier:
Hundreds of thousands of Gulf Coast families, hoping to rebuild their homes after last summer's hurricanes using low-interest government loans, are facing high rejection rates and widespread delays at the federal agency that administers the program.
The Small Business Administration, which runs the federal government's main disaster recovery program for businesses and homeowners, has processed only a third of the 276,000 home-loan applications it has received.
And it has rejected 82 percent of the applications it has reviewed, a higher percentage than in most previous disasters, saying that many would-be borrowers did not have high enough incomes, or high enough credit ratings, to qualify. The rejections came even though the Federal Emergency Management Agency has referred more than two million people to the SBA to get the loans, many of whom had low incomes.
Agency officials say that the SBA loan program cannot risk taxpayer money by lending it to people with low incomes or poor credit. "We're just dealing with the demographics in the area," said Herbert Mitchell, the associate administrator who runs the agency's disaster assistance program.
To a large degree, that high rejection rate appears to reflect a mismatch between existing government aid programs and the large number of low-income people affected by the hurricanes. Despite the widespread poverty in the most damaged regions, the Small Business Administration has not adjusted its creditworthiness standards, which are roughly comparable to a bank's.
In fact, the loans that have been approved so far appear to be flowing to affluent neighborhoods in New Orleans rather than poor ones, according to a list of loans released by the government and mapped by The New York Times.
Under the disaster loan program, homeowners can borrow up to $200,000 to repair houses. Owners and renters can borrow up to $40,000 to replaced damaged furnishings.
As of Dec. 13, the agency had approved 17,463 home loans, for almost $1.2 billion, although only $62 million had been disbursed to homeowners. More than 77,000 applications have been rejected.
As originally published
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There's much more than this at Unknown News.
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Commentary by Helen & Harry Highwater:
The Small Business Administration, which runs the federal government's main disaster recovery program for businesses and homeowners ... has rejected 82 percent of the applications it has reviewed, a higher percentage than in most previous disasters, saying that many would-be borrowers did not have high enough incomes, or high enough credit ratings, to qualify. ...
Despite the widespread poverty in the most damaged regions, the Small Business Administration has not adjusted its creditworthiness standards, which are roughly comparable to a bank's. |
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Kanye West was right, of course.
The Bush administration's intent is to see New Orleans and the Gulf Coast rebuilt as a whiter, wealthier place than it was before. The strategy really couldn't be any more obvious, unless the White House used the word 'niggers' in official press releases.
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In fact, the loans that have been approved so far appear to be flowing to affluent neighborhoods in New Orleans rather than poor ones, according to a list of loans released by the government and mapped by The New York Times.
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Can you say "Duh"?
If the only federal program to help hurricane victims recover is a program built on banking standards, then poor people are screwed. A program that can't help poor people, because they're poor, is a program that's obviously heartless and unfair -- and possibly unConstitutional.
=Helen & Harry Highwater= |
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