Hurricane Shelters Drowning in Debt

Since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, charities and churches have worked to help evacuees remain in shelters until they can return home. But as the months go by and evacuees still aren’t returning home, the financial toll is adding up.

According to an article by Mario Villafuerte in the Longview, Texas News-Journal, a coalition of six pastors initially invested $50,000 to renovate a Louisiana hotel, vacant before the hurricane, into a hurricane shelter. That investment is long gone, he says, “and the original half-dozen pastors has dwindled to three men. What remains is the mounting debt and the flow of evacuees through the [shelter’s] doors.”

And it’s not getting better, Villafuerte says. “The enormous generosity of the pastors’ hearts could not equal the small size of their wallets: They have incurred personal debts into the thousands of dollars to keep the doors open. Some 700 evacuees have come through the Haven within the past 120 days.”

Villafuerte says that part of the problem is that the list of private and public organizations waiting for FEMA funds is extremely long, and shelters are at the end of that list.

Most of the residents at the shelter, he says, are looking for employment to resettle in Northwest Louisiana, but “placing families in housing and garnering jobs for most of them is an ever-challenging task,” he says.