BAKER, LA. — Curtis Westbrook cut a lonely figure as he sat outside his trailer this week, chain-smoking as workmen hauled another empty trailer away.
He had already loaded all of his belongings -- a television and some dishes and clothes -- into his white Jeep Cherokee. But he was not sure how far the old Jeep would make it. With the motor mounts broken, he had rigged the engine on wooden sticks.
In any case, he was not sure where to go. He had barely a day to meet the deadline to vacate the Renaissance Village trailer park, and he didn't know whether he could pay $400 a month for an apartment in nearby Baton Rouge. So he just sat there, waiting.
Westbrook, 53, is one of hundreds of residents across the Gulf Coast struggling to leave trailer parks by today. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, pressed by reports of potentially hazardous formaldehyde levels in trailers, is rushing to close its last six emergency trailer parks by the first day of hurricane season.
FEMA says that no one will be kicked out of their trailer parks if they haven't found a place to stay. With 27 of the 575 units at Renaissance Village in Baker still occupied Saturday, an agency spokesman acknowledged it might take a few more days to empty the park.
Yet critics accuse the agency of pressing residents to leave before they have found permanent housing. With affordable apartments in short supply, some are relocating to motels -- they can stay there for up to 30 days while they hunt for a new residence. Even those who have found rental apartments and houses do not necessarily have a plan for paying the rent when the government's emergency subsidies run out.
"I'm under more stress now than in the hurricane," said Ghulam Nasim, 79, a retired doctor who had wrapped his clothes up in sheets but remained in his trailer poring over a stack of letters he had written to FEMA's director requesting an extension.
"They don't even do me the courtesy of responding," he said. "It's just, 'When are you going to leave? When are you going to leave?' They don't seem to care where we end up."
Life is still precarious for many who were displaced after Hurricane Katrina, especially those who remain in the government trailer parks. The parks were emergency shelters, but they also served as mass halfway homes where thousands of low-income residents, mostly from New Orleans, could adjust to the soaring rents and fractured social networks of post-Katrina life.
