Rolling Stone: Welcome to FEMAville

[Gasping4Truth]

I found this article through this thread:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x5319006

But this story is so mind-boggling and infuriating, I think it deserves a thread of its own.

Originally, more than 500 indistinguishable white, furnished trailers -- seventy feet long and fourteen feet wide, with three bedrooms each -- were set up on cinder blocks, side by side, ten feet apart, in long rows. The deal: Occupants were invited to live rent-free, as long as they agreed to pick up the utility bills (including the option of satellite TV for seventy-five dollars per month) and to leave as soon as they found permanent accommodations. FEMA contractors erected red stop signs where the rows of trailers intersect and green signs to label the "streets" in between. Otherwise, FEMAville is virtually devoid of color -- no trees, no flowers, no parks. It has no school, no convenience store, no supermarket, no post office, no gas station, no hospital. The closest restaurants -- McDonald's, Arby's, Pizza Hut, Subway -- are found in truck stops five miles away. You can't live there without a car.

Oddly enough, this almost surreal deadness seems to have been specifically engineered by FEMA. The apparent logic: If residents became too comfortable in the trailer park, they'd never leave -- a major problem considering that according to federal rules, the park is mandated to be shut down after eighteen months, on February 13th, 2006. Last month's Hurricane Wilma, which did minor damage to the park, has done nothing to change this official deadline. "There's nothing in there that meets social needs," says Bob Hebert, director of recovery for Charlotte County. "There's no community center, not even a place to hold some kind of worship service. None of these provisions were made. The crime rate -- the level of juvenile delinquency and domestic violence -- bears a direct relationship to the fact that there's nothing out there for the kids to do with their free time. There's a sense of futility, that there's no light at the end of the tunnel."

Charlotte county has always been a region of wealthy senior citizens served by the working poor -- thirty-five percent of the population is over sixty-five, making this the most elderly county in the United States. Hurricane Charley has left it even more economically polarized. Now, about twenty-six percent of the population has no health insurance, one of the highest rates in Florida; eighty percent of the children in the school district come from families living below the federal poverty line.

Even as hurricane recovery continues, a potentially more devastating chapter in the story of Hurricane Charley is being written. Charlotte County is now experiencing urban renewal and gentrification by natural disaster. With most of the affordable housing smashed by the storm, owners and developers saw a chance to make a killing. Rents were jacked up twenty-five percent or far more; on oceanfront lots, where modest homes had been leveled, multimillion-dollar houses began going up, their prices swelled by the exorbitant costs of Class 5 hurricane fortification. "We're going to have a community where nobody can afford to live," says Klein, a New York native who has lived in the area for twenty-seven years.

More about the families living there, trapped in a downward spiral of which hurricane Charlie was only the very start:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/8719208?pageid=rs.Politics&pageregion=single1

Now why can't the state of Florida impose a disaster relief tax on all those wealthy retirees, to help out the hurricane victims? Jeb!

[hadrons]

1. "....disaster relief tax on all those wealthy retirees ...."

because the poor fundies who vote against their own finanical interest will be convinced this would hurt them