'How do I know?'

Since most of the moving trucks seem to be from Houston, that may mean that more people driving them will require some sort of assistance. A Texas Health and Human Services Commission report released in August found that 62 percent of evacuee households in Houston made less than $1,000 a month. Nearly 40 percent received food stamps, pre-Katrina. More than half of the households with children were enrolled in Medicaid, another sign of low incomes.

The study also found that 44 percent of evacuees living in Houston planned to leave the state within the next two years. But the question—"How long will you stay here?"—is so difficult that no one should plan anything based on the response, said Kai Erikson, a retired Yale University sociologist who has been part of a group looking at evacuees. "We ask them questions they can't answer," Erikson said. "If they were impolite enough, they would say, 'How the hell do I know?' "

The organizations financing the return of evacuees to New Orleans are a mixed blessing, according to social workers. Sending evacuees home is premature, said Wendy Hellinger, who works with disaster relief for Catholic Community Services in Baton Rouge. "If someone can't afford a moving truck, they really ought not to be going back to New Orleans," she said.

Travelers Aid in Atlanta has paid for only a handful of moving trucks so far. But the agency is working with about 20 evacuee families from New Orleans to get "verifiable plans"-about housing, employment, schooling for their kids—before helping them return to the city later this month.

The cost? "U-Haul isn't charging anyone under $2,000 from Atlanta right now," case manager Tracey Nolley said. That's far beyond the means of the typical household trying to return to New Orleans at this point. "The ones trying to get there now have no money and very few resources," she said.

Nolley watched, months ago, as evacuees with more means rented their own moving trucks and left town. But now, the people who are leaving have less success with jobs and fewer skills to find one. "They claim, 'Atlanta's too big for me,' and don't see any hope of surviving here," she said. "So they want to go back to what's familiar."

That need for the familiar is powerful, Nolley said. If some couldn't afford moving trucks, they went without. "Those families left here, taking only what they could carry," she said. Those same families will arrive in New Orleans with lots of immediate needs.

Solid plans needed

Don McCollough is seeing the same thing in Houston, especially for people facing FEMA rental-assistance deadlines. "Once people start struggling, they look for what they know, they move closer to friends and family," said McCollough, supervisor of disaster-recovery programs for Catholic Charities in Houston. Since midsummer, the regional program, administered partly by Catholic Charities, has paid for about 400 moving trucks for families returning to New Orleans who meet certain criteria: above all, solid plans for housing, schooling, and jobs.

Houston's program took a hit when moving-truck rates began skyrocketing. Agencies have tried to negotiate better rates with the biggest companies, but so far, haven't had any luck, said McCullough, who has watched his program's capacity shrink in just a few months' time, even though his phones are still "ringing off the hook" with requests for moving assistance.

"Earlier this year, we could move someone to New Orleans for $300. It's four times that now," he said.

In every city, evacuee case managers are holding their breath, waiting for a big pot of money, FEMA's "transportation assistance," which could finance return flights or moving trucks for thousands of evacuees, as long as they're "FEMA eligible."

"We've been hearing about this since September, but the state of Louisiana is dragging its feet," one frustrated case manager said.

Col. Thomas Kirkpatrick, Louisiana's coordinating officer for the Governor's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, confirmed that the state has been in negotiations with FEMA since September. He doesn't like the delay, he said, but the two parties haven't been able to agree on several significant issues. One is FEMA's proposed 75-25 federal-state split. Louisiana believes that FEMA should foot the entire bill, as it would have if residents had been able to return within days or weeks of the disaster.

FEMA, state at odds

One of the biggest points of contention is that FEMA can't give the state any definite costs. "Roughly 200,000 to 210,000 evacuees still remain outside the state," Kirkpatrick said, "and we don't know how many of those will come home." They also can't agree how much to reimburse. Will, say, $2,000 per household be enough to pay for moving-van costs, utility deposits and the first month's rent? And should the program require solid plans from participants, so that it's not helping people go back to no housing, no jobs and no schools?

The state was trying to push FEMA for hard numbers in December, Kirkpatrick said, so the governor could make a request before the recent special legislative session. "But we couldn't to get a good handle on an amount," he said, and so the request wasn't made.

Kirkpatrick said state agencies, like city agencies, are also trying to plan for the upcoming year. How many nursing-home beds and hospital beds will these returning evacuees require? How many will need child care? Dialysis? Transportation to doctors' appointments? "Everyone wants U-Haul trucks," he said. "But this is about a lot more than just trucks."

And yet, for families who can't afford to hire moving vans, the need for rental trucks can't be overstated, said Nolley, from Travelers Aid in Atlanta. "I get calls every single day, asking for help," she said.

Originally published on January 7, 2007, in The Times-Picayune. © 2007 The Times-Picayune, L.L.C. All rights reserved. Used with permission of The Times-Picayune and NOLA.com.