When the U-Haul clerk quoted him a price for a one-way truck rental from Dallas to New Orleans, all Ajay Mallery could do was gulp.

Starting in the fall, with a vow from the contractor that their flooded home would be ready by New Year's, he and his wife, Neljuana Mallery, had planned every step of the move back home.

In December, as the moving date approached, they enrolled their two children in New Orleans schools, and Ajay, a drummer, started picking up brass-band gigs.

But then came the shocker from U-Haul. To rent a moving truck for the drive to New Orleans would cost these Katrina evacuees an estimated $1,439 one way.

After pondering the quote for a few minutes, an astounded Ajay Mallery picked up the phone and called U-Haul back. How much would it cost to drive the same truck from Dallas to Phoenix, he asked. "They told me $640," he said, less than half the price, despite the trip to Phoenix being twice as long as the drive to New Orleans.

He tried other cities-among them Detroit and Chicago, which are about 500 miles apart, the same distance as Dallas and New Orleans. The cost for a U-Haul rental? About $250. "I thought, 'This is ridiculous,' " Mallery said.

What made the price soar was the Mallerys' destination-New Orleans. Anyone driving a moving truck this way can expect to pay sky-high prices. That's because, over the past several months, thousands of evacuees have begun coming home. The result: truck- and trailer-rental parking lots overflowing, with rolling stock from places like Atlanta, Dallas and-more than anywhere else-Houston.

Truck-rental prices from many cities have doubled and tripled in the past few months. Some Houston evacuees have been flatly denied rental trucks if they plan to return them to New Orleans. U-Haul International spokeswoman Joanne Fried said that happens when "a stop" is put on trucks headed to certain destinations glutted with gear. "When that happened, it was because there was nowhere to park the trucks in New Orleans," she said.

A sign of return

Just as purple, green and gold signals the advent of another Carnival season, the orange cabs of U-Haul trucks in parking lots all over New Orleans are a sure sign that evacuees are returning. They even shed light on just who is returning-generally lower-income New Orleanians for whom hiring professional movers is out of the question. The trucks are also pawns in an unresolved fight between Louisiana state officials and the Federal Emergency Management Agency over possible federal financing for the moves back to the city where the federal levees failed so catastrophically.

"They're coming home. People didn't think they would, but they are. Slowly but surely," said Sidney Doyle, who lives on Banks Street in Mid City, a few blocks behind U-Haul's Tulane Avenue lot. His friend, Brandon Matthews, said the U-Haul lot on Tulane always seemed to be struggling before the storm. Would-be customers were routinely sent on to another location, he said, because the Tulane lot had so few trucks.

These days trucks are parked bumper to bumper, side to side, in the parking lot and spill out onto side streets, where there's orange as far as the eye can see. "Looks like business is booming," Matthews said.

Doyle bets that most of the trucks are coming from Houston because the people he knows can't get jobs there and because New Orleans residents are harassed, like his cousin who got a jaywalking ticket even though the Houston resident he was walking with didn't get one. Matthews said that he's also heard that Houston charities are picking up the tab for rental trucks that carry evacuees back to New Orleans.

Agencies are helping

It's true. While organizations in other cities like Dallas and Atlanta are financing a handful of families, Houston's program, primarily paid for by the Houston-Galveston Area Council, has its own U-Haul corporate account and is footing the bill for a steady stream of moving trucks headed to New Orleans.

Katrina case managers in Dallas, where the Mallerys lived, only pay for moving trucks on a limited, case-by-case basis, mostly for families that still qualify for FEMA aid. The Mallerys were on their own, and a $1,469 fee was beyond their budget, they decided.

So Ajay Mallery pulled out the Yellow Pages and started dialing. When he got to the Rs, a Ryder manager told him that the company had ceased one-way rentals altogether after a parked Ryder rental truck was used in the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. But, he said, Mallery could rent a Ryder truck with unlimited miles for $300. The catch? He had to drive the truck back to Dallas to return it.

No big deal, said Mallery, who got to New Orleans, unloaded the truck and then turned around and drove back. "If it saves me $1,000, I'd do that drive anytime," he said.

Of the major moving companies, U-Haul seems to have the most trucks in New Orleans, roughly 2,300, according to spokeswoman Fried.

The largest local U-Haul lot, on Chef Menteur Highway in eastern New Orleans, used to hold about 50 trucks; now it holds 10 times that number.

Most traffic from Houston

The logjam began in June, said Kimberly Cox, general manager of the Chef Menteur site. "It pretty much started after school let out," she said. She saw another surge in October, which she attributes to onset of the Saints winning streak. After that, there was another long push that continued into Christmas week—people determined to return home for the holidays, she said.

Conversations with employees at the U-Haul lots on St. Claude and Tulane avenues leave no doubt about where the trucks are coming from: a few from Atlanta, a goodly number from Dallas and other Texas cities, but most from Houston, said Darryl Williams, who works at the Tulane location. "Houston is the first one," he said. "It's overwhelming."

His observations are confirmed by U-Haul's official "migration reports," tracking moves, and inventory buildup.

Since May, according to the reports, Houston has been the top starting-point for trucks arriving in New Orleans. The precise number of trucks making those moves was unavailable, however, as it U-Haul corporate considers it proprietary information, Fried said.

Williams has a personal insight into the situation, having just driven to Houston to pick up his daughter, who was living there. "They weren't going to renew her lease," he said. "I'm hearing that more and more from people, as they come back."

While flocks of moving trucks are an indicator, they also raise questions. Who is coming back? Some evacuee case managers said that, more and more, those trying to return are the city's poor.

'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.