Biloxi, Miss. Suspiciously Evicts Katrina Relief Center

The Community Center was founded in the days following Hurricane Katrina by David Romero, who came from Indiana to Southern Mississippi with three truckloads of donated food and water. The chaos he saw among aid workers inspired the former firefighter and US Air Force veteran to take matters into his own hands, organizing volunteers and distributing food and water. City police were so impressed with his work that they offered to let him set up a distribution point in one of the few vacant buildings still standing.

Soon, the Center was running its own medical clinic, and receiving 10 to 15 pallets of new clothes three times a week from US Customs and Border Protection. The agency had seized the clothes for violations of trademark laws.

Romero has set up a nonprofit organization called "Midwest Help" to collect donations to help fund the Center, which serves a mostly Vietnamese and African-American neighborhood.

...

Since November, the city has repeatedly threatened eviction, insisting the Center was no longer needed. Romero says that the initial deadline of December 1 was staved off by the White House, after a visit and photo opportunity by First Lady Laura Bush.

Biloxi then gave the Center a January 1 date to move out, but according to Romero, it was put off again a few hours after the wife of state Senator Thomas Gallot told Romero she would call the mayor to have the eviction delayed once more.

But on February 4, Midwest Help finally closed its doors. The volunteers moved all the food, clothes and medical supplies to a nearby warehouse.

...

Romero believes the city was being opportunistic in evicting the Community Center, because the services he provided were keeping people in the city "that otherwise would have left." He says that many people who came to the Center for help are fixing up homes that had originally been condemned, on land desired by developers only blocks from the Gulf of Mexico.

While it is hard to say if Romero's identification of the reason why his team has been evicted is correct it would certainly not be out of line with many of the stories I have heard while in the area and elsewhere, as well as many other stories I have read ever since Katrina hit. Consider, for instance, this October 25, 2005 account ("Gentrifying Disaster" by Mike Davis):

In the meantime more than two-thirds of FEMA contracts (according to Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco) has gone to out-of-state firms, with a blatant bias toward Halliburton and other Texas-based investors in Bush Inc. Simultaneously, unscrupulous employers have saturated Latino neighborhoods in Houston and other southwestern cities with fliers advertising a cornucopia of jobs in New Orleans and Gulfport.

With Davis-Bacon and affirmative-action requirements suspended by executive order, immigrant workers—housed in tents and working under appalling conditions—have flocked to jobs sites in the city, largely unaware that tens of thousands of blue-collar evacuees who would relish these jobs are unable to return for lack of family housing and federal support. Ethnic tensions are artificially inflamed by speculations about a “population swap” and impending ‘Latinization” of the workforce.

New barriers, meanwhile, are being erected against the return of evacuees. In Mississippi’s ruined coastal cities, as well as in metro New Orleans, Landlords—galvanized by rumors of gentrification and soaring land values—are beginning to institute mass evictions. (Although the oft-cited Lower Ninth Ward is actually a bastion of blue-collar homeownership, most poor New Orleanians are renters.)

Civil-rights lawyer Bill Quigley has described how renters have returned “to find furniture on the street and strangers living in their apartments at higher rents, despite an order by the Governor that no one can be evicted before October 25. Rents in the dry areas have doubled and tripled.”

tags: relief  wealth  victims  oil  katrina  business  law  biloxi