The archived ramblings of my time as a world traveler up to my current life in Washington, D.C.FEMA trailers
A point I feel needs to be made:
The phrase "FEMA trailer," heard often on the post-Katrina news about New Orleans and Mississippi, conjured up an image in my head of the mobile-home type of trailer. The type which takes -wide as an adjective: single-wide, double-wide, triple-wide. The trailer of the trailer parks I know and make fun of.
No. The unfortunates who live in the FEMA trailers as a home of last resort have a trailer, a vehicular appendage which can actually be towed down the road.
It's a shocking sight to see streets lined with a FEMA trailer in every front yard. To see the lengths of PVC pipe on the outside forming a semi-permanent plumbing system, and to know in some cases this will be semi-permanent housing. Many of these trailers have been called home for more than a year and a half, and in what I assume is a weighty proportion of cases, the residents will have little option but to call them home for the foreseeable future.
At least when you see the FEMA trailers parked in the front yard of a flood-damaged house you know the residents have a chance of moving out of the front lawn and into the house at some point. Far more depressing are the FEMA trailer parks. Rows upon rows of the trailers parked on lots of white gravel, fenced in by green-mesh-covered chain link.
One day I watched a couple kids run along the row of gravel between the trailers and realized they probably have no home to hope to move into. Perhaps their house was washed away. Perhaps they were renting, and the post-Katrina housing crunch has priced them out of the market. Either way, they are likely to spend a lot more of their childhood playing on gravel and sleeping in a mid-level RV.
The phrase "FEMA trailer," heard often on the post-Katrina news about New Orleans and Mississippi, conjured up an image in my head of the mobile-home type of trailer. The type which takes -wide as an adjective: single-wide, double-wide, triple-wide. The trailer of the trailer parks I know and make fun of.
No. The unfortunates who live in the FEMA trailers as a home of last resort have a trailer, a vehicular appendage which can actually be towed down the road.
It's a shocking sight to see streets lined with a FEMA trailer in every front yard. To see the lengths of PVC pipe on the outside forming a semi-permanent plumbing system, and to know in some cases this will be semi-permanent housing. Many of these trailers have been called home for more than a year and a half, and in what I assume is a weighty proportion of cases, the residents will have little option but to call them home for the foreseeable future.
At least when you see the FEMA trailers parked in the front yard of a flood-damaged house you know the residents have a chance of moving out of the front lawn and into the house at some point. Far more depressing are the FEMA trailer parks. Rows upon rows of the trailers parked on lots of white gravel, fenced in by green-mesh-covered chain link.
One day I watched a couple kids run along the row of gravel between the trailers and realized they probably have no home to hope to move into. Perhaps their house was washed away. Perhaps they were renting, and the post-Katrina housing crunch has priced them out of the market. Either way, they are likely to spend a lot more of their childhood playing on gravel and sleeping in a mid-level RV.
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