A Rush to Set Up U.S. Housing for Storm Survivors
By ERIC LIPTON
Published: September 13, 2005
SLIDELL, La., Sept. 12 - One team of men is bent over drills, driving mobile home anchors deep into the moist earth. Others are lifting cinder blocks that will be used to hold up the next set of identical beige homes that trucks, one after another, are bringing here.
A building boom is under way in this city at the edge of Lake Pontchartrain, where one-third of the houses have been damaged or destroyed....
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The government is beginning what urban planners are calling one of the biggest bursts of federal housing development in United States history. Last year in Florida, the Federal Emergency Management Agency set a record by installing 15,000 homes in the aftermath of four hurricanes there. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, they hope to open 30,000 homes every two weeks, reaching 300,000 within months....
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The numbers might drop if the demand does not meet expectations. But more than 140,000 people are now packed into emergency shelters, while hundreds of thousands of others fill hotels, homes of friends or relatives or are temporarily relocated across the United States. The building blitz is intended to bring as many people as possible back to Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama....
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The families moving into the first of these new trailers and mobile homes, the use of which are provided at no cost, seem almost startled to be inside a structure that is not flooded or stiflingly hot and overstuffed with people....
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/13/national/nationalspecial/13build.html 
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