Americans Open Hearts and Homes to Evacuees

Last week, Fiana-Rose Hopkins sat down with her 6-year-old son and explained the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina as simply as she could. She told him that families had lost everything, even their toothpaste. That children had been separated from their parents, that brothers could not find sisters, that babies no longer had cribs or toys.

Her son, DeVon, looked up at her, horrified, and said: “Just tell them to come here!”

So Hopkins did.

The 24-year-old single mother has joined tens of thousands of Americans across the country in opening their homes to hurricane victims, though many evacuees are uneasy about the prospect of relocating so far from home.

Some of the offers are humble: a spot on the floor of a tiny apartment, a futon in an unfinished basement.

Others are lavish: free use of a furnished house and car for a year, free airline tickets for a family of six.

Hopkins, who lives in west Denver, does not have much. Just last year, she had to put gifts donated by a local charity under the Christmas tree for her own son and daughter. But she is so eager to take in an orphaned or lost child that she checks her e-mail several times an hour, hoping that someone will deem her townhouse perfect for a little one in need.

“I don’t have too much money to donate -- not enough to make me feel I’ve done enough,” said Hopkins, a marketing coordinator. “But I have a job that’s steady. I have a place to stay. I have a car. I’m blessed, and I wanted to share that.”

In the week and a half since Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Americans have donated about $587 million to relief efforts. That’s an unprecedented pace -- more than double the amount donated in the first 10 days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and more than triple the amount contributed immediately after the tsunami in southeast Asia, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Many donors, however, say writing a check seems inadequate.

Jeannette Wild, 37, dissolves into tears when she remembers TV images of an old woman abandoned on the streets of New Orleans in a wheelchair, utterly alone. “It just breaks my heart,” she said, sobbing. “If anyone wants to come here, they could become part of my family right away.”

She has offered to take an elderly survivor into her two-bedroom house in Denver, and says she’ll even try to find the money to buy a plane ticket, if that would help.

Several websites have sprung up in recent days to let people post such offers.

HurricaneHousing.org -- sponsored by the liberal group MoveOn.org Civic Action -- lists more than 235,000 beds available, as far from the flooding as Anchorage, Honolulu and Brattleboro, Vt., and as close as Baton Rouge or Meridian, Miss.

“We have a couch. It was a no-brainer,” said Emily Sazfass, 29, who posted an offer to share her Los Angeles apartment with a displaced storm victim. “I would take anyone who wants to build a new life in L.A., who wants to get away -- and who won’t steal my stuff.”

TheOpenHouseProject.org, run by an investment firm in Nashville, has attracted about 5,000 listings in its four days online.

Craigslist.org is also bursting with offers, including two brand-new four-bedroom homes in suburban Charlotte, N.C., available free for a month and at “an extreme discount thereafter” for hurricane survivors.

David Reilly, who runs the Open House Project, said hundreds of people who fled Katrina had already been matched up with host families.

But it’s unclear whether most -- or even many -- of the online offers will ever be accepted. Not everyone is ready to move on.

Mary Griffin, 55, is sleeping in Houston’s Astrodome, focusing all her energy on finding her son, 16-year-old LaTray. They were separated in the chaotic evacuation from the New Orleans Superdome.

“After I find him,” she said, “then I’ll think about finding a house.”

Evacuees who are looking for housing, searching directories from computers set up in the Astrodome, tend to concentrate on local options.

More than 1,500 have settled in apartments in the Houston area; 200,000 are living in shelters and hotels statewide. Thousands of families have already enrolled their children in Texas public schools.

“I need housing here, not in some other state,” said Cowana Gaines, 32, who fled New Orleans with her two children.

“They said I could go to New York or Washington. Why do I want to go that far away?” asked Lisa Green, 39, a mother of five. “My family is in New Orleans. Or at least it used to be.”

Other hurricane survivors said they had looked into online offers -- but bristled when their potential host families said they would do background checks first.

“They treat people from New Orleans like criminals,” said Rhodesia Tureaud, 31. “You tell them you don’t have documents and they don’t believe you. I just walked away from one place because of that.”

To avoid such confrontations, some donors say they’re only willing to take single women or senior citizens into their homes; they’re leery about giving unknown men the key.

A few posts are more specific still:

“Gay and HIV+ friendly space available.”

“Christian home -- zero tolerance for drunks and drugs.”

“We have a dog of our own that rules the house and does not like having her space invaded ... so pets are not an option we want to consider.”

Oliver Korshin, 62, an eye doctor in Anchorage, has offered to fly two hurricane victims to Alaska, put them up in bunk beds and give them a clothing allowance. His only stipulation: He won’t take a teenager. (“Nothing against them, but they can be a source of friction,” he said.)

“There are no igloos in Anchorage. We have two Wal-Marts, two Costcos ... and latte stands just about everywhere,” his posting reassures potential transplants from the Mississippi Delta. “Winters are long (but we have skiing and the Northern Lights) and the summers are spectacular.”

Korshin said a sense of history motivated his offer: “During the blitz, Londoners sent their kids out of town, and there had to be people willing to take them in. You think of the Anne Frank family, who were sheltered at great personal risk during World War II. This is nothing like that, but it’s what we can do.”

Other donors said they had felt helpless after the Sept. 11 attacks and last year’s tsunami. They wrote checks to the American Red Cross; they contributed to clothing drives; they watched TV coverage until they felt numb. But they could find no way to connect one-on-one with the victims who needed so much.

Making up a spare bed and sharing a pot roast with a victim offers them that connection. As Stephine Funk, who wants to share her Hollywood apartment, put it: “If I can see at least one person get help, it will be my small part in making things better.”

Shirleen Edgley shares that goal -- but instead of bringing evacuees to her home, she has decided to take housing directly to them.

Edgley owns the Sports Unlimited RV dealership in the small town of Alpena, in northern Michigan. Last week, she donated nine trailer homes off her lot to storm survivors. She filled them with food, water and toiletries -- “no use sending them empty,” she explained -- and rounded up volunteers to tow them 1,100 miles to the shattered Mississippi coast.

The conservative advocacy group American Family Assn., which is based in Tupelo, Miss., picked up the idea and put out a call for similar donations. Ten more mobile homes are on their way, with others to follow.

“It’s overwhelming,” said Dick Lankford, the group’s vice president of development. “I’ve always said this is the way God works, through ordinary people like us.”

Meanwhile, in his Denver townhouse, 6-year-old DeVon Hopkins waits for his chance to help. He has set aside a pile of action figures for the young evacuee he hopes will soon share his bedroom. And he and his little sister, Desiray, have made a card for their guest. Decorated with stickers and puffy hearts, it says in a rainbow of colors: “Welcome to You. We Open Our House.”

Times staff writers Catherine Saillant in Ventura and Tony Perry in Houston contributed to this report.