GALVESTON — Turned away at the shelter gate, Monique Day stormed across the road. Four children wearing school uniforms trailed behind her. She clutched a piece of white paper so tightly that the edges crumpled.
After Hurricane Ike flooded her apartment at one of Galveston’s federally subsidized housing projects, Day moved her son and three grandchildren to a tent city behind Alamo Elementary School, 5200 Ave. N1/2. After three weeks, Day was weary of sleeping in a tent with hundreds of strangers.
When a friend offered a place to stay for a while, Day and family left. That was three days before the shelter closed.
The decision cost Day and the children cots when a new state-funded shelter opened at Scholes International Airport.
Shelter officials wouldn’t let them inside Tuesday night because they weren’t at the original tent city Oct. 26 when residents moved. She can’t go home because Oleander Homes, an island housing project, is condemned. She tried to find a hotel but was told she needed to put down a $600 deposit, she said. She was approved for Federal Emergency Management Agency rental assistance but doesn’t know where she will live because low-income housing on the island is scarce.
The rumpled piece of paper, handed to her by officials at the shelter gate, was a flier advertising a homeless shelter for families.
“I guess we’re on our own, huh?” she said.
‘A Mess’
Hurricane Ike didn’t discriminate when it roared ashore Sept. 13. The Category 2 storm destroyed million-dollar beach houses and the island’s housing projects and homeless shelters.
Advocates for Galveston’s low-income and homeless population say those struggling before the storm — the indigent, working poor, homeless, elderly and disabled — will have the hardest time rebuilding their lives because Ike wiped out not only their homes, but the resources they relied on to survive. The same scenario played out in New Orleans — where poverty was just as prevalent — after Hurricane Katrina, advocates there say.
“It’s a mess,” said Eliza Quigley, vice president for community relations for The Children’s Center, which housed abused, neglected, homeless and runaway children before Hurricane Ike destroyed most of the organization’s buildings. “Galveston had a large indigent population before the storm — now those families are even harder hit.”
More than a third of the island’s 57,000 residents lived in poverty, according to Galveston Housing Authority documents.
According to Census estimates, 18 percent of islanders earned less than $10,000 a year.
About 2,200 Galveston families lived in public housing projects or in Section 8 homes — another 1,676 were on a waiting list to be placed in public housing, according to Galveston Housing Authority records. Almost two-thirds of the people who lived in public housing were elderly, handicapped or disabled.
The island’s pre-storm economic demographics almost mirror those of New Orleans, before Hurricane Katrina.
Before the storm, 28 percent of New Orleans’ residents lived in poverty and 21 percent earned less than $10,000 a year, according to Census estimates. While 2.3 percent of New Orleans residents lived in public housing before Katrina, 3.8 percent of Galveston residents lived in public housing before Ike. In New Orleans, about 6,000 people lived on the street before Katrina; in Galveston, more than 1,000 were homeless before Ike, said Ted Hanley, executive director of The Jesse Tree, a social services organization.
“We’re Victims, Too”
After Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, the city’s homeless population doubled as the Federal Emergency Management Agency denied housing assistance to people whose names weren’t on leases or who lived in homeless shelters before the storm, said Mike Miller, a social worker at Unity of Greater New Orleans, a homeless advocacy organization. After the storm, 300 people gathered in a makeshift homeless camp outside city hall, Miller said.
All but one of the city’s housing projects, where more than 5,100 people lived, were bulldozed. Not one has been rebuilt three years after Hurricane Katrina struck.
Hospitals that once cared for everyone from “the king of Mardi Gras to the bum on the street” were shut down, Miller said. Mental health care was nonexistent. The middle class became poor, and the poor became homeless, he said.
“You guys are at the very start of the process,” he said.
More than a month after the hurricane, Galveston’s poorest residents are living in hotels, with relatives and friends or in the state-run tent city at Scholes International Airport.
“We are hurricane victims, too,” said Kenny Harris, who has stayed in three shelters since Ike forced him from the Galveston Island Family Crisis Center — a homeless shelter for families — where he was staying with his wife and four children before the storm. “But we’re being treated like we’re not wanting to get our lives together — like we’re lazy, slothful and drug addicts.”
Harris and his family were originally denied FEMA help, but later, after Harris’ story appeared in the newspaper, FEMA reversed course and approved the family for rental assistance in an apartment. Most won’t be so lucky. FEMA routinely denies assistance to people who don’t have valid addresses, officials have said.
Shelter caseworkers are trying to find homes for everyone before the new tent city closes, as soon as two weeks, some say, and the family crisis center is willing to accept up to 57 people, Quigley said.
But the Salvation Army, where an average of 100 homeless people spent each night before Ike, will likely remain closed until January as crews work to rebuild its flooded first floor, said Maj. Elda Flores, director.
Low-income housing on the island is scarce, and there is nothing available in Texas City or La Marque, housing authority officials said.
“We’re full,” said George Fuller, director of the Texas City Housing Authority. “It’s a horrible time. Families don’t have a roof over their head or a clean decent place to sleep that’s dry and warm. It’s been a terrible upset to our families.”
No Answers
Even if the island’s poor and homeless can find a place to lay their heads for a night, they won’t find the same social services that helped them before the storm.
The 20,000-square-foot building occupied by The Jesse Tree, a social services organization that provides transportation, English classes and food, was destroyed by floodwaters. Caseworkers, working from laptops, are looking for the homeless to help them find a safe place outside of Galveston, Hanley said.
“There is not a safe place for a homeless person to live on the island,” he said.
The organization purchased bus tickets to take 40 of the island’s homeless people to live with friends or relatives.
Although the organization continues to provide food, hygiene items, medicines and counseling to the island’s neediest people, Hanley said he is concerned that the social service agencies and social workers, also hurt by Hurricane Ike, can’t provide the help people were accustomed to before the storm.
“We just lost so much,” he said.
The Children’s Center lost half its staff and most of its facilities filled with equipment, toys, books, furniture, computers and beds. The buildings were uninsured.
St. Vincent’s House, a nonprofit social agency that provided food, transportation, health care and child care, was flooded. It has reopened its clinic with fewer hours and limited capability because its source of medicine — The University of Texas Medical Branch pharmacy — remains closed, said Michael Jackson, executive director.
While he’s bracing for an increase in clients if the medical branch, the city or the school district begin layoffs, he’s also prepared to accept he’s seen some of clients for the last time. They have left the island and won’t return because of the lack of affordable housing.
“I really wish I had answers for what will happen to the island’s poor,” Jackson said. “But the only answers that seem to come are what happened after Katrina and other natural disasters when the most vulnerable population was, disproportionately, the most affected.”
