The specter of homelessness has again raised its ugly head in New Orleans.
“We had reduced homelessness to about 30 people on the street,” says Martha Kegel, the director of Unity of Greater New Orleans, a homeless shelter and advocacy agency.
“But just in the last couple months we’ve seen a big spike again and it’s predominantly due to people newly becoming homeless.”
Kegel points to near exponential rise: “That’s very alarming to us, that the numbers have gone from around 30 to 212 total for Orleans and Jefferson Parishes.”
Kegel says the numbers are made up of “…people who’ve lost their jobs and can’t afford to pay rent.”
But Kegel is optimistic what worked once, can work again.
“The massive effort from the state and city to take people off the street and place them in hotels and from the hotels into apartments.”
Kegel says any effort has to begin with immediate shelter—to get the homeless off the street and put them at ease and get them ready to start anew.
However, complicating the issue is New Orleans hotels are now full of a different kind of homeless, evacuees from Hurricane Laura.
“For those people who are only in the hotels waiting for the power to come back on that’s one thing,” Kegel says. “But if their housing was destroyed, that’s another thing entirely as we all know from Hurricane Katrina. That could take years to resolve.”
Right now everything is in a holding pattern, with housing numbers continuing to rise and advocacy groups and missions scrambling to help out the needy.
Kegel hopes a new round of public relief, stimulus or enhanced unemployment can get through the halls of Congress soon before the matter gets much worse.
