By afternoon, however, water from broken levees began swallowing Huntley's home eight blocks south of the New Orleans Country Club -- a house occupied by four generations of her family.
"First it was at the steps. I'd just purchased a car. And that was soon underwater, too," Huntley recalls. "This is a two-story house. And soon that's underwater, too. Thankfully, some volunteers got us on boats."
During the next few days, Huntley and her children made their way west. Huntley suffered a brief panic when she was separated for a short time from one of her children. Police in a small town on the way to Baton Rouge chased them away with guns, she says. Between Baton Rouge and Houston, Huntley and her children reunited serendipitously with her brother and his family, and in Mamou, La., the nine of them boarded a bus for San Francisco.
The ride was the happiest leg of Huntley's journey, because she believed her family's ordeal would soon end: After all, this city's mayor had made a promise to welcome Katrina victims, to provide housing, health care, and other services in a coordinated, generous way.
A month ago, Mayor Gavin Newsom made public pronouncements, issued press releases, and described a program branded "SF Gives" on the home page of his official mayoral Web site. "Managed by the Office of Emergency Services and Homeland Security and the Mayor's Office of Neighborhood Services, SF Gives is the Mayor's Directive to all City agencies to be responsive to requests for assistance" from Katrina victims, the message at the top of Newsom's home page said at the time.
Things didn't turn out that way, however.
A month after boarding the bus, Huntley sits in a Tenderloin drop-in center for homeless women, recounting a tale of how San Francisco government failed to follow through on its pledge to welcome those displaced by the hurricane.
In an account offered by Huntley -- and echoed by social assistance workers, church leaders, homeless activists, and a member of the Board of Supervisors who has monitored the city's Katrina response effort -- the mayor touted a coordinated safety net of city services for Gulf State refugees that has not materialized, leaving some victims to rely on private aid-givers such as churches.
"My office and other offices were besieged with people who wanted to provide housing," says Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi. "But there was no coordinated effort or repository in the city to provide for that. You could see a great disconnect between nonprofit agencies and local government, and it was brutal to watch.
"I think it was well-known what the federal government was and was not willing to do. And the city went ahead with the message of open arms. We should have taken the next step of due diligence and prepared accordingly. Not invite, or tacitly invite, people and not be ready for them. It bespeaks of an empty promise," Mirkarimi adds. "The Mayor's Office is extremely savvy at spin and public relations. This was an incident where they saw an opportunity and ran with it from a PR perspective, and it got a lot of people excited. Where it left off was in its ability to plug people in so something good could come to fruition."
Deneen Jones, a case worker at Oshun Center, the drop-in shelter, says she spent several days attempting to find housing for the Huntleys and other Katrina victims, after the San Francisco Housing Authority either turned victims away or failed to provide housing swiftly to families faced with living on the street.
"We don't understand why Gavin told them to come here. [San Francisco city agencies] don't seem to have the housing," Jones says. "It's unfair to relocate the families out here and put them into a bad situation. If you're going to invite other people here, you should uphold your contract with them."
The Rev. J. Edgar Boyd, senior pastor of Bethel African Episcopal Methodist Church, says his congregation has provided apartments for five families who could not rapidly find lodging with the city's Housing Authority or with the help of the Mayor's Office of Housing.
"The Housing Authority operates through a great bureaucracy, and nothing can get done without consulting several areas of responsibility and accountability," Boyd notes. "We did not have to deal with the red tape and bureaucratic process that other conglomerates might."
It bears noting that the Byzantine and incomplete network of Katrina relief programs offered by the U.S. government through the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and widely chronicled failures by aid providers such as the Red Cross, have compounded the problem of San Francisco's lack of a coherent strategy to care for Katrina refugees in this city. But it's nonetheless appalling that our local response to the crisis would play out as a textbook confirmation of the right-wing Republican belief that the private sector is better-suited than government to address social problems.
In Louisiana and in Washington, D.C., the Katrina aftermath laid bare government disarray due to negligence and corruption.
In San Francisco, the faraway Gulf storm has played a similar role.
During the Willie Brown and Gavin Newsom eras, leaders seem to have lost sight of the notion that city bureaucracies should exist not as employment programs for people who work there, but rather to provide services to people living here. Newsom's penchant for public-relations grandstanding has done nothing to improve city departments' ability to get things done.
Last Thursday, a spokeswoman at the mayor's press office referred me to Laura Adleman, supposedly the coordinator for city services offered Katrina victims under SF Gives. I asked her what coordinating the city had done.
"I don't know what you mean by 'coordinating.' No, there is not a single person. I'm not sure of the Housing Authority's role, but I'm sure the Mayor's Office of Housing, the Department of Public Health are providing services," Adleman explained.
According to Housing Authority spokesman Mike Roetzer, just one person displaced by Hurricane Katrina has found housing in San Francisco with the assistance of S.F. city government. Prior to the hurricane, that person had been a recipient of a federal Section 8 housing voucher, under a HUD program providing rent subsidies for private or government apartments. That person is one of five who have requested their federal subsidy be transferred from the hurricane region to San Francisco.
"Presumably, the other four are still looking," Roetzer says.
Meanwhile, of the 22 additional Katrina evacuees who have asked for units in the public housing complexes, "We would expect to make one offer of housing this week. And that process will continue as long as we're able to finish up the screening," Roetzer adds.
Adleman, for her part, left me a message two hours after our conversation saying that I would receive a call from Matt Franklin, director of the Mayor's Office of Housing. I hadn't heard from him by press time, though I left two messages at his office.
Despite the official silence, my inquiries did receive a form of apparent follow-up. By last Friday morning, the SF Gives Katrina-victim-assistance announcement that had dominated Newsom's home page as late as the night before had been removed. Could eliminating the SF Gives advertisement, after the supposed program didn't amount to much, be the mayor's idea of integrity?
When her family arrived in San Francisco, Huntley explains, she received a federal cash stipend of a couple thousand dollars and was placed by the Red Cross in a room at the Mission Hotel, a flophouse on Van Ness Avenue.
"The area is, oh my God, filled with drug users, prostitutes, and what have you. Everything you can think of was in that area. Man. After a while we asked, 'What are we going to do after the 14 days? It's me and my four kids, and my brother and his wife and his two kids,'" Huntley says.
According to HUD spokesman Brian Sullivan, federal assistance programs for Katrina victims created an unusual situation of social engineering in which the first were made last, and the last, first.
HUD "clients" -- that is to say, people living in federally subsidized housing before the hurricane hit -- were made eligible for federally subsidized apartments such as those run by San Francisco's Housing Authority. Under a revised program introduced in mid-October, people who had already been eligible for HUD assistance before the August hurricane could apply for federal vouchers to cover 18 months of the average rent in any city in which they chose to live. For San Francisco, the HUD subsidy is $1,536 for a two-bedroom apartment.
However, people like Huntley who hadn't been poverty-stricken prior to the storm aren't so fortunate. They're in particular trouble if they're lured to an expensive city like ours. Because Huntley and other privately housed folks weren't previous HUD "clients," they don't get HUD aid. Instead, they're eligible for a far stingier FEMA housing assistance program, which provides a cash stipend for only three months' rent equal to a nationwide rent average. For a two-bedroom apartment, that's $785 per month. In this city it takes four to five times that amount to pay first and last month's rent plus the deposit typically required to lay stakes here. For families such as Huntley's, the alternatives were either to obtain help from the local government or spend a month facing the prospect of imminent homelessness with children while crammed into a skid-row flophouse room.
"If you've got $2,300 from FEMA and you're in San Francisco, you're in trouble," notes HUD spokesman Sullivan.
Adds Linda Couch, deputy director of the National Low Income Housing Coalition in Washington, D.C., "It's haphazard; it's piecemeal; it's an insufficient program for the federal government to be relying on small community groups and well-meaning churches. This is a wealthy country with lots of resources and a very sophisticated housing industry, but the solutions that FEMA and HUD have put on the streets are insufficient."
Even given the federal failures, however, San Francisco's pledge to provide housing to Katrina victims might have supplied a safety net, had Newsom launched a serious effort to follow through on his promise. Huntley says she decided to take her family to San Francisco after a Red Cross worker in Mamou relayed news that the city's government had opened its arms to refugees. Indeed, San Francisco was one of the first American cities to announce its willingness to welcome displaced families, "and our Housing Authority Commission was quick to pass a resolution," Roetzer says.
Huntley was shown a unit last month by the S.F. Housing Authority, which had announced that it would set aside units for Katrina victims. But a city background check turned up a criminal assault conviction that Huntley says she earned fending off, with a knife, some women who had attacked her daughter; as a result, she was turned down for housing. Her brother, Tyrone, who has no such record, simply hasn't heard back from the agency after contacting it last month.
"They go through the normal process that anybody going into public housing goes through. We're not making exceptions for Katrina people," Roetzer says.
Jones, the caseworker aiding Huntley, says the Housing Authority employee she spoke to seemed unclear whether Huntley might appeal this decision, or whether Katrina victims could qualify for an exception to public housing screening rules.
"You should have the right to appeal it. I had four Katrina-victim clients who were denied housing because of their background, because of a criminal history in Louisiana," Jones says. "They were sent here with a check card from the Red Cross. There are families with one parent and four kids, and they are in some of the worst possible hotels in the Tenderloin."
Huntley made repeated rounds of various government and nonprofit agencies, only to receive vague promises, recorded answering-machine messages, and lots of disappointment.
"Basically, everybody's been handing out [business] cards and saying, 'Contact me. Contact me.' And then I can't get through to anybody. I've been handed so many cards that I could make a house with them."
With Jones' help Huntley finally connected with Bethel AME Church, which has for three decades operated a subsidized housing program for local poor people.
"To date we have been able to provide housing for five families," the Rev. Boyd says. "Members of the congregation have provided elements for housekeeping -- linen, towels, bathroom implements, and the like. They've provided clothing. They've taken a delight in responding to them, because that's what churches do."
Boyd also says that he's cooperating with KIPP, a charter school chain financed by Gap Inc. founder Don Fisher, to place Katrina evacuee children. By last week, the chain's Bayview school had placed a fifth- and a sixth-grader, says KIPP Foundation spokesman Steve Mancini. Meanwhile, an S.F. Unified School District spokeswoman explains that the SFUSD has enrolled 41 students across 21 different schools, all of them victims of Hurricane Katrina.
I applaud the efforts of Boyd and retired magnate Fisher. But I don't believe it was necessary for families such as the Huntleys to sit for weeks in a flophouse room wondering if they would end up on the street. I think it was wrong for our mayor to falsely suggest that the city had launched a coordinated effort to help Katrina victims. I'm saddened that San Francisco -- the city that opinion polls show most values government's role in protecting citizens from disaster, children from homelessness, and the disadvantaged from despair -- would so totally fail at aiding Katrina victims as to put those values in doubt.
