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Are they here to stay?

Katrina evacuees in New York face difficult decision

BY TINA SUSMAN | STAFF WRITER

October 9, 2005

Robin LaPresle worked her bartender's shift in New Orleans the night of Aug. 28, then put her cat in the car and floored it, heading east as Hurricane Katrina closed in.

Charles Erickson took his girlfriend, infant son and the family's poodle and drove west. Charles Allen and his wife caught a bus north.

They thought they would be away a few days at most, so they packed lightly. "It happens every year - you leave, then you go back in," said Erickson, describing past hurricane drills.

They could not have imagined that a month after outrunning Katrina, wind and rain whipping at their rear bumpers, the storm would follow them at an airport hotel 2,000 miles away, where their temporary stay is looking far from that.

LaPresle, Erickson and Allen are as diverse as three people could be, from their race to their family sizes. Since Katrina, though, they share more similarities than differences, not just with each other but with hundreds of thousands of people whose lives were upended by the storm and who now live in hotels, shelters and guestrooms across the country.

Nationwide, the Red Cross is renting 156,000 hotel rooms for 480,000 Katrina survivors, and it is housing 30,000 people in Red Cross shelters, said spokesman Larry Geiger. In metropolitan New York, it has filled 393 rooms in 16 hotels, among them the Radisson Hotel at Kennedy Airport, where LaPresle, Erickson and Allen are staying.

The Red Cross pays for their rooms - as of Monday, the agency had paid $91 million in hotel bills - while the evacuees restart their lives, a system that on paper makes sense.

In practice, though, taking people from balmy and relatively inexpensive environs and dropping them into cities like New York, with chilly climates, sky-high housing costs and befuddling transportation systems is fraught with complications.

The onset of fall is worrying evacuees, who are used to the year-round warmth of the Gulf Coast. The pocket money the Red Cross provides - about $360 per adult - doesn't go far. Everything from finding a parking space to finding an apartment is a challenge.

"Now I know why they call it the Big Easy," LaPresle said of her hometown, New Orleans, comparing life there to life in the nation's largest city. There, she paid $350 rent for a spacious one-bedroom apartment, and the lifestyle was far more sedate.

Like other New York evacuees, LaPresle, 30, arrived here on her own, not as part of a government-run airlift. Those took people, most with no means of transport, to Houston, Baton Rouge, or other places along the Gulf Coast, which were quickly overwhelmed by the needy crowds. Others, mainly those able to travel on their own, went elsewhere.

"People started to realize that the farther you got away from the disaster, the better the assistance was," said LaPresle, who spent the storm in North Carolina.

LaPresle returned to New Orleans briefly to salvage what she could from her apartment and to gauge whether she and her mother, staying with a friend in California, should go back. The decision was made when LaPresle walked into her mother's house in Metaire, looked up and saw blue sky through a giant hole in the ceiling.

She pushed on to New York.

"It's the only city besides home where I wanted to live. I think it's got a heart, like New Orleans has a heart," LaPresle said recently as she browsed a consignment room - a hotel room full of free toiletries and clothing, donations from nearby churches.

Down the hall, a man rolled a cart loaded with boxes into a stuffy conference room, where the whiff of day-old meat sauce hung in the air. He put five boxes onto a long table, shoved the remnants of that morning's breakfast and the previous night's dinner to one end of it, and left.

Lunch was served.

Three times a day, a catering company delivers cartons of boxed meals, an improvement over the first three weeks after Katrina, when evacuees had to feed themselves. That was difficult in a hotel with no in-room kitchens and a restaurant that charges double-digits for a hamburger.

Even with the meal deliveries, some people complain. They say the breakfast sandwiches are dry, that there is little suitable for small children and that the food is nothing like their usual southern fare.

They have asked for grits, in particular, for breakfast.