As shelters close, trailer towns open for storm evacuees

David Tidwell III heaves his two boxes of belongings into the trailer and looks around his sterile new home. "This is all I need," he says finally, his voice choked with emotion.

It's been a long road from rooftop rescue to Superdome ordeal to restless nights at shelters in Texas and Louisiana. This will be the first time in six weeks that Mr. Tidwell will sleep in a real bed - and his first glimmer of hope since Katrina.

"A lot of people are worried about coming here. They think it's going to be like a prison camp," he says. But "it's a lot better than where we were."

This trailer-park village in the small town of Baker, La., is the first to be opened by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Many others like it will spring up as the agency closes emergency shelters across the country. FEMA has ordered 125,000 campers and mobile homes for the villages.

The agency missed its self-imposed deadline to have the quarter-million-plus evacuees in shelters relocated by last weekend, but it says 95 percent of them are now in more permanent housing.

While those coming to the trailer towns are elated to have a little more permanency and a lot more privacy, some critics wonder if these villages are the best way to spend federal resources and help evacuees get back on their feet.

"I don't think this is the most effective way of dealing with the situation," says Ronald Utt, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington and a former US Housing and Urban Development official. "The much more cost-effective way for the American taxpayer and socially effective way for the evacuees is to use the existing HUD voucher program."

That program would put evacuees - who are overwhelmingly city dwellers - into apartments instead of hotels and trailer parks, giving them better access to neighborhoods, public transportation, and jobs.

But FEMA officials say the sheer number of people needing homes - roughly 400,000 - has made housing them extremely difficult. All options are being employed, the agency says.

At the FEMA village in Baker, which is just north of Baton Rouge, most of the 573 trailers were filled in the first week of its Oct. 6 opening. Most have three to four people per unit, and everything is provided - from three meals a day and laundry service to medical care and transportation to the local Wal-Mart twice a day.

After sending their children off to school, evacuees chat with neighbors or wander down white gravel streets on the 62-acre site, which just two weeks ago was a cow pasture.

A bus pulls up from the largest shelter in the state, the River Center in downtown Baton Rouge, which closed late last week.

"The check-in process is relatively simple. Getting here is the complicated part," says Bobbie Harris, a displaced social worker from New Orleans who is under a tent answering the new arrivals' questions. She is a member of a five-person council that first represented the 300 evacuees at the Baker municipal shelter, most of whom relocated here.

Their group came up with the name Renaissance Village for the instant subdivision, and it seems to be sticking, says operations manager Ben Hu.

"We chose the word 'Renaissance' because this is a new beginning," says Ms. Harris. "It's a whole new world, and it's up to us to make it what we want."

In an air-conditioned trailer nearby is Shannon Brown, another member of the council. She already has her home neatly appointed with knickknacks, china, and a green doormat with a yellow plastic flower.

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