AP
NEW ORLEANS - They have huddled in abandoned buildings, been chased from the doorstep of City Hall, and, if lucky, spent a night in one of the few shelters that Hurricane Katrina spared.
Now, many of the homeless of New Orleans are freezing under a stretch of interstate that is their latest encampment in the city.
Uncommonly frigid temperatures prompted emergency officials to enact a “freeze plan” on New Year’s Eve, allowing the remaining facilities for the homeless to set up as many cots as they can safely hold. Similar action was taken on Christmas Eve. The current plan is expected to continue through tomorrow.
But despite the emergency measure, about 70 people have remained under an elevated stretch known as the Claiborne Avenue bridge, cocooned in blankets, sleeping bags and the pup-tents that have become the calling card of a homeless epidemic in the New Orleans area.
Six shelters responded to the city’s freeze plan, which temporarily allows them to exceed their fire capacity. But the 700 temporary cots, boosting the post-Katrina capacity of about 400 shelter beds citywide, are not enough to keep pace with a doubling of the homeless population—from 63-hundred to about 12,000—since the storm.