By Sylvia Moreno
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 30, 2006; A08
AUSTIN -- In the nine months since their New Orleans home was flooded with nine feet of water, Dianne Jeanpierre has worked hard to put her life and her daughters' lives back in order.
Their orderly apartment here is filled with gently worn donated furniture. The new routine for this Catholic family includes weekly inspirational services at a Baptist church.
Ashley, 17, attended her junior prom through the generosity of a department-store dress giveaway to children affected by Hurricane Katrina. Brittany, 14, had been enrolled in a high school for academically gifted students in New Orleans when the hurricane hit Aug. 29; she stayed focused and last week finished the school year with two citations for scholarship.
But the family's fragile stability is threatened. Jeanpierre has run out of unemployment insurance benefits from her former job as a security guard in New Orleans and cannot work because of debilitating asthma. Earlier this month, she got a notice that she would lose her housing benefits from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Soon thereafter, her car was repossessed.
"I tried to make a home," said Jeanpierre, 46. "Now they're trying to eat you up, I tell you. Everything is just going downhill."
Jeanpierre's family is among about 55,000 nationwide facing the end of a FEMA-funded rental assistance program, in which local governments issued 12-month housing and utility vouchers.
Last month, FEMA began issuing letters to thousands of evacuees telling them their aid would be terminated. The vouchers are to end Wednesday in most of the country and on June 30 in 11 Texas jurisdictions, including Austin, Dallas and Houston.
That decision, says a class-action lawsuit filed by the Houston law firm of Caddell & Chapman and a consortium of public interest law groups, will create "widespread homelessness" and violates FEMA's statutory obligations to provide temporary housing assistance to hurricane victims.
FEMA's decisions on which evacuees to move into a housing assistance program with more rigorous requirements are "arbitrary, inconsistent and inequitable," the lawsuit contends. "As a result, FEMA is creating an opportunity to discontinue its housing assistance for tens of thousands of people."
Sixty-two members of the House filed a brief last week supporting the suit. It says that FEMA "continues to engage in a process that is marked by inefficiency, a lack of discernable standards and seeming disregard for the plight of the vulnerable survivors who are depending on the aid that FEMA is statutorily obligated to provide."
U.S. District Judge David Hittner is expected to rule Tuesday on a request to stop FEMA temporarily from shutting down the housing assistance program and to hold a trial on the lawsuit's merits.
"This process is broken, and FEMA is not following its mandates," said John B. Scofield Jr. of Caddell & Chapman. "Some people have extensions [to June 30], but still there are multiple thousands that are being left in the dust."
Aaron Walker, a FEMA spokesman in Washington, declined to comment on the lawsuit, citing agency policy regarding pending litigation. But, Walker said, reviews of evacuees' cases -- appeals and application updates -- are being conducted continually.
"There's a number of reasons, reasonable and logical reasons, people are found ineligible" for continued housing assistance, Walker said. "We genuinely aren't in an effort to have people without housing."
FEMA officials say that about 50,000 households are in the housing assistance program and that 12,000 have been informed they are ineligible for continued aid. The lawsuit contends that about 55,000 households are in the program nationwide and that "at least 17,000 households or at least 50,000 people of all ages have been deemed ineligible for further housing assistance and/or have not received a final determination of eligibility."
Of the households deemed ineligible, 7,600 are in Houston, where the majority of displaced Katrina evacuees live, and 2,100 are in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, the suit says.
Many rulings of ineligibility were wrong, according to the lawsuit and officials working with evacuees. Some evacuees were told that their homes in New Orleans were not damaged enough to qualify them for continued assistance or that their old houses or apartments are habitable. Some were told that their paperwork was incomplete or that they did not meet certain requirements. Others were given no reason.
Those determinations, said LaTosha Brown, executive director of the Saving Our Selves Coalition in Atlanta, has displaced Louisianans panicked and landlords -- who were told by FEMA that it will no longer honor the housing vouchers -- sending eviction notices for next month.
"Instead of the government helping, it exacerbates the problem," said Brown, co-founder of the coalition, which is working with Katrina evacuees throughout the Gulf Coast and in Georgia. "There's an insensitivity to where people are emotionally. This is not business as usual. People are still damaged from the debacle."
Jeanpierre found out she was ineligible for continued rental assistance after her landlord received a notice from FEMA that it would stop paying her rent and utilities on Wednesday (an extension to June 30 was granted last week). The insurance settlement she received for her destroyed home in the Gentilly neighborhood went to the bank to pay off the mortgage.
She has applied for federal disability benefits through the Social Security Administration because of her health, but the case is pending. An urgent request to FEMA by a lawyer representing her asked the agency not to terminate her housing assistance until her case is settled. The request has not been answered.
"I'm just going to stay here until they send the police to put us out," Jeanpierre said. "There's nowhere for me to go."