City Moves to Broaden Its Relief Efforts

The city of Los Angeles is broadening its response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster with two proposals to improve the lives of evacuees near and far.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s office announced Wednesday that the city has offered to help create after-school programs in the Louisiana capital, Baton Rouge, which has been overwhelmed with thousands of new residents and their school-age children.

And today, Los Angeles’ Community Redevelopment Agency is scheduled to consider a plan to set aside $300,000 to fund housing for as many as 5,000 evacuees who may eventually make their way to L.A.

That help would come as a relief to the American Red Cross of Greater Los Angeles. About 1,500 Katrina evacuees have sought help from the local Red Cross. Spokesman H.T. Linke said that the group is still putting evacuees up in hotel rooms but that affordable accommodations are beginning to dry up.

“We’re having a harder and harder time finding hotels,” he said.

During the 20th century, Los Angeles absorbed many migrants from the Gulf states, especially African Americans who came seeking economic opportunities and relief from segregationist Jim Crow laws. Now many of their displaced Southern relatives have also come west.

Although Los Angeles is nearly 2,000 miles from the devastation, the city already has made a number of contributions to the rescue effort in and around New Orleans. About 100 members of the L.A. Fire Department’s urban search and rescue and swift-water rescue groups have helped rescue more than 525 residents in New Orleans. L.A. has also offered to send 1,000 city employees to help with the rebuilding process in coming months.

Closer to home, the city has set up a processing center in Westchester where new arrivals can register with the Red Cross, register children in public schools and seek temporary housing. Villaraigosa recently offered free passes giving evacuees unlimited access to buses and trains operated by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

The redevelopment agency’s proposed housing fund is just one piece of a housing puzzle that officials are working to solve as evacuees trickle in. L.A. officials have identified millions of dollars in housing grants that could help the city deal with large influxes of evacuees. But thus far, the city hasn’t seen the crush of homeless people that officials were expecting.

“We had planned for the worst,” said Maurice Suh, deputy mayor for homeland security and public safety. “That has not yet come to pass.”

The details of the housing fund have not been worked out, but redevelopment officials say the $300,000 could be used for hotel vouchers, rent on available apartments -- even installing mobile homes on agency-owned vacant lots.

The money comes from a reserve fund to pay the debt service on bonds used for downtown redevelopment projects. Redevelopment officials say they can afford to use the $300,000 elsewhere. The Baton Rouge after-school program would be modeled after LA’s BEST, a program that serves 23,000 schoolchildren in Los Angeles.

Villaraigosa has offered to send rotating teams of educators from LA’s BEST to Baton Rouge. They would take books, games, CDs, pencils and paper, but also train evacuees to run the programs themselves.

Baton Rouge has historically been New Orleans’ smaller, sleepier cousin. Since the hurricane, however, city officials say the population of East Baton Rouge Parish may have doubled, with hundreds of newly arrived children enrolled in local schools.

Spokesmen for the city of Baton Rouge and its mayor’s office did not return calls Wednesday.

Spokesmen from the local school district were also unavailable.