No Road Home

Today's Times-Picayune story, "Road Home has money to pay grants expected to be issued this year," provides us with a mixed message fitting for its topic.

The title heralds good news, stability. Read down a bit and you'll find this nugget, "Counting on a bailout ... the Road Home is short anywhere from $5.6 billion to $6.6 billion..." Apparently the program has the money to pay as long as Congress bails out the program with somewhere between $3.5 and $4.5 billion in additional federal aid. I wonder how I could apply that sort of logic to my own finances.

As you'll see in the comments left for today's story, Louisiana residents are nothing short of outraged over the program many call No Road Home.

The Road Home program is meant to help mostly homeowners, leaving renters to fend for themselves. This is particularly unhelpful for a city like New Orleans, where more than half of residents rented before the storm.

The program's administration was outsourced to ICF, a private company in Virginia. They seem to have done their best to ensure that homeowners not be helped by the program they run, at least not in this decade.

And today's story tells of the challenges homeowners face in navigating ICF's processes, saying that "...applicants often complain about some part of the grant calculation and are never put into ICF's resolution process, and, if they are, the company may decide their dispute is resolved without ever informing them." The article also notes that "clients have been consistently denied access to their own files, making it impossible for them to figure out where the dispute lies."

I sit at my desk today trying to imagine how many people are sitting at their desks at ICF just not helping people. Not filing claims. Not communicating with clients. Refusing requests. Have they forgotten that these are real people? Real families, with real homes? That megacorporation is made up of individual workers, each with the power to do something.

So here's my challenge to each of them. Do something. Do something now. Ask yourself what's more important: your company's profit margin or the estimated six thousand homeowners depending on you to help them rebuild?