Day 473: Road Home Paved With Potholes

Today’s Times Picayune blares the headline “Unhappy Endings” with respect to the paltry, insulting amounts of money received by a growing number of program participants.  Are Road Home Program accountants and managers such careless and heartless drones that they would meet $200,000 in damages, for example, with $500?  You simply do not treat anyone, especially tired, old and sick disaster victims, like this.  Thorougly disgusted and seething mad does not begin to describe how I feel – but what good does that do? 

Melanie Ehrlich of the Citizens Road Home Action Team (CHAT), which includes our very own Alan Gutierrez and Karen Gadbois, has seen 11 flawed letters out of 15 and this to say about them:

“I’m sure that a very large (number) of mistakes have been made because of the rush to get letters out quickly.”

If I were in my 90s, ailing or had kids whose academic and social lives I don’t wish to disrupt, I’d say, “That’s it. I’m wasted.  I’m not fighting the system any more.”  This sentiment is voiced well by the son of an aging couple flooded out of their home in Lakeview.

“My concern is, the people we need in this city are going to say, ‘Screw it,’ and leave,” … “If they don’t have time to do this thing right the first time, when are they going to find time to do it?”

LRA’s Walter Leger may not “see evidence of a pattern of mistakes in more than 10,000 final letters sent out” and may consider it a “good sign.”  But, I don’t.  Members of CHAT, please let us, the citizens of New Orleans, know how we can help you and the victims of such multiple tragedies rectify their applications and get their house funding in order.  The sad thing is that RHP is just the start of a rebuilding process – return, gutting, refurnishing, neighborhood planning, schools, hospitals, community – and many are still stuck in it fifteen months later.