Every limbo boy and girl
All around the limbo world
Gonna do the limbo rock
All around the limbo clock …
Although it’s impossible to gauge how many Katrina and Rita evacuees’ brains responded to the latest housing aid news from the Federal Emergency Management Agency by repeating a cacophony of lyrics from Chubby Checker’s “Limbo Rock,” one thing is certain: FEMA’s newest housing assistance extensions buy Texas’ more than 100,000 hurricane evacuee households a little more time. FEMA issued a press release Friday, July 28, announcing that it has postponed until Oct. 31 the recertification deadline for the agency’s 408 Individual Assistance Program – the one evacuees transitioned to from the agency’s 403 Emergency Sheltering Program, where federal aid for rent and utility payments went indirectly to landlords via the city’s Neighborhood Housing and Community Development Office. Also last week, FEMA sent a memo to local and state officials nationwide announcing that the remaining evacuees receiving indirect, emergency assistance – which was slated to end at the end of July – get one more month of aid.
The individual assistance deadline extension affects roughly 1,500 evacuee families in the Austin area, said Denise Worhach, a senior official with FEMA’s Austin field office. “Approximately 16,000 evacuee households in Houston and 2,500 households in other areas of the state received rent checks to cover May, June, and July rents,” according to a FEMA press release, which also notes that an estimated 30,000 evacuees nationwide whose individual assistance was slated to end July 31 “were sent letters asking them to return forms necessary to keep their housing assistance checks coming. Only about 10% did so.”
“We’re starting everyone over. … They now have 90 days to get us the information they need in order to get them a rent check for November, December, and January,” said FEMA spokesman Don Jacks, who made a plea to evacuees for expediency. “If they are part of this 408 universe, it’s vital that they not put this off, that they not decide, ‘Well, I’ll just wait until the first of October.'” The Individual Assistance Program is currently slated to end in February.
The one-month indirect assistance extension, which, according to NHCD, affects an estimated 593 families living in Austin, is merely the latest in an ongoing series of such extensions. “We obviously don’t know how many months that will go forward,” said NHCD Director Paul Hilgers of the latest news. As Amy Elder, executive director of Texas Interfaith/Interagency Disaster Response, put it, “Our response has been one that kind of stops [and] starts, lurches. … We didn’t have a plan” for a disaster of Katrina’s magnitude.
This article appears in August 4 • 2006.