NEWSBYSTEPHEN STETSON

Many homes in Trinity Gardens have simply been abandoned.

The tiny coastal hamlet of Coden is over 3 hours from the Alabama state capital, Montgomery. It’s nearly 1,000 miles from Washington D.C.

But highways are only one way to measure distance. Hurricane Katrina hit Coden over three years ago. For a lot of people, that feels like a lifetime ago.

The details of the policy world are difficult to explain to someone who once had a house on Alabama’s Gulf Coast, but now, three years after the storm, lives in a trailer with relatives. It’s hard to explain a footnoted response to a HUD memo to someone preoccupied with their medical bills or a crying baby. And it’s tough to articulate why the government continues to deny them assistance because they missed a one-week deadline for relief during the hectic days after the storm.

How does one explain the details of a possible Congressional breakthrough to someone who still, after over three years, has a frayed blue tarp on their leaking roof? After all this time, is there reason for Alabama’s Katrina victims to place faith in the work done by the Equity and Inclusion Campaign, the National Low Income Housing Coalition, Oxfam America and PolicyLink? We must believe that there is.

Alabamians are often “thanking God for Mississippi.” Were it not for our sister state, we would often be at the very bottom of national rankings of things like literacy, teen pregnancy, infant mortality, etc. Cynically, some point to our more-troubled neighbor state as a buffer that keeps us from being the nation’s worst in some embarrassing category.

However, there is one category where we must look to Mississippi and Louisiana with envy: the ability of those states to address the needs of people victimized by natural disasters.  After all, they didn't spend their Katrina funds on luxury condos for football fans.