The government’s worst landlord is FEMA. After placing thousands of Hurricane Katrina survivors, mostly poor and low income people, in cheap trailers that were supposed to be temporary housing, FEMA and HUD, with the cooperation of local and state politicians appear to have abandoned them in favor of an economic development scheme aimed at creating long term solutions to a short term disaster.
Look at it like this. If your car has a flat tire, you need to replace the tire with a new one, or at least a tire that will get your car on the road so you can get to work every day. What you don’t need is the government to build a tire production facility somewhere just to make more tires that someone will sell you sometime in the future. But that’s how the government thinks your problem should be solved. Don’t help the survivors of our national disaster survive by helping with the construction of low cost affordable housing today, instead just dump a few billion into port development in order to create jobs sometime down the road.
FEMA is not equipped to handle low-income housing, and HUD …… Well what can you say about a government agency with a long record of corruption and scandal? The survivors of Hurricane Katrina will need government help for years to come. How long can a human survive in a mold, insect, and vermin infected government trailer that is environmentally hazardous to begin with? Is this a new form of social engineering in our country? We should be paying attention to this, because another hurricane season is about to begin.
Here are ten simple Landlord Rules that the nation’s worst landlords, FEMA and HUD could learn a lesson from.
