News Roundup

Evacuees Face Urban-Dwellers’ Nightmare: Suburbia

Without cars they struggle to live in remote complexes

AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Monday, November 21, 2005
By Asher Price

Peering out from a white-fenced balcony that looks out on nothing much, Katrina evacuee Stephanie Gleason said, “To tell the truth, I don’t know where we live.”

There is no bus stop here. The nearest supermarket is a $20 cab ride away.

It’s a long haul with groceries for 8-year-old Tatyana Thompson. She and her parents take a $20 cab ride from their Eagles Landing apartment on Decker Lane to a Wal-Mart to stock up on food. Many evacuees landed in Austin without cars and are now far from services.

Gleason’s cookie-cutter apartment complex, Eagles Landing, feels more like a bird cage than a nest.

Flushed out of their city — one of the most dense and most vibrant in the country — many of the New Orleanians who came here car-less find themselves living amid Austin’s car-enabled sprawl.

Asmany as 7,300 hurricane evacuees are now in the Austin area, and many live along the city’s newest fringes in apartment complexes that, for the very reason of their remoteness, had vacancies before the evacuees came along.

Some of the greatest concentrations of evacuees can be found in Cedar Park, Pflugerville and in apartment complexes such as this, somewhere between Austin’s fringes and Manor

More or less trapped, their lives are a quick, sharp study of the isolation of suburbia.

“We’re stuck like chuck,” said John Vaughn, a 42-year-old man who sipped a Natural Ice beer and hovered in a sliver of shadow. The 2 p.m. sun beat down on the wide asphalt parking lot that acts as some sort of anchor to this muted complex.

There are the pluses of suburbia here: an elementary school nearby, a fitness center in the complex, wall-to-wall carpeting, patches of grass and even a swimming pool.

“So far they’re transisting good,” said Frances O’Brien, an evacuee herself who works for Eagles Landing, where 76 of the complex’s 240 apartments are rented to evacuees.

But even the comforts take on a sinister edge.

At night, it’s so dark, “you can’t see your hand before your face,” Vaughn said.

“It’s creepy,” Gleason said.

The New Orleanians by and large came from neighborhoods with deeply ensconced families, little mobility and long-established traditions.

They now find themselves in the opposite situation, in a development less than two years old, with none of the character that comes with history.

As time passes and the chances of returning to New Orleans dwindle, many of the residents here have grown restless, bored and homesick.

The apartments here, plopped down in the middle of nothing, might be called formless were it not for their relentless repetition.

Across Decker Lane, really a small highway, looms a power station, while the Travis County Expo Center lurks nearby. Cows graze on a plot of land just across from Bluebonnet Hill Golf Course, about a mile up the road.

Many of the hurricane victims at Eagles Landing came here through a housing fair at the convention center.

Apartment complexes typically waived the first month’s rent, and a combination of nonprofits such as the Red Cross and city and federal agencies are covering rent.

Housing authorities urged evacuees to examine Capital Metro service maps before signing up, and the transit agency ran a booth to give advice.

Wooed by the thought of regaining their own roof, a small complex pool and a shift to a clean, new apartment complex, the tenants here said they did not appreciate just how far out of town the apartment complex is or how long of a trek it would be to grab a bus.

“The first day, we loved the apartments,” said Gleason, a 31-year-old mother of three boys, the oldest of whom takes a taxi to McCallum High School at least 10 miles away. “Now I feel so isolated.”

The isolation hampers the evacuees’ access to the social services they may need and hinders their job-hunting prospects.

“We’re begging to get a bus out here,” said O’Brien, who said she is an awareness officer at Eagles Landing and reports needs to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Across the Williamson County line, evacuees living in the Polo Club off U.S. 183 North and just down the street from the Martha’s Vineyard apartments, find themselves in a similar situation, if not quite so isolated.

The bus into town is a harsh walk more than two miles away, past car dealerships, along roads without sidewalks and under a highway.

“New Orleans felt more like the city where you could walk to the store and buy nachos or pickles,” said Joyce Peters, an evacuee living with her husband, daughters and grandchildren.

At the Polo Club, she relies on one of the complex’s employees to give her a lift to the Fiesta supermarket, more than a dozen miles each way, so she can pick up some dirty rice and beans.

Dorothy Holmes, a 71-year-old evacuee, spends most of her day indoors talking on the phone and playing word puzzles.

Other than the convenience store at the corner, Holmes, who uses a walker, said, “I don’t go no further.”