Private security officers patrol the trailer park's wide gravel roads on golf carts, but few people feel safe.
#Renaine trailer free
A free bus service ferries residents lacking cars to a bus stop, but the trailer park is isolated in rural East Baton Rouge Parish.
Many residents are poor, their children displaced and still going to schools far from home.
Not needing to pay rent, more than a few folks have wired their trailers for DirecTV.īut life at Renaissance Village is hardly easy. The only thing residents have to buy is the propane that powers their stoves, and that has lifted a huge financial burden for many. Trailer follows trailer in a tidy 62-acre grid of gravel and grass, and many people feel blessed to have it. The Renaissance Village trailer park - or ``group site," as FEMA calls it - is 90 miles northwest of New Orleans, a short drive from Baton Rouge, near the dilapidated strip malls outside a town called Baker. The trailer is the great equalizer: Rich, poor, or middle class, people who live in one desperately want out, and this desperation is especially palpable at Renaissance Village, home to roughly 1,500 people, 437 occupied trailers, and 136 vacant ones. Louis, Miss., Charles Gray parks his 1964 Rolls-Royce next to his FEMA trailer, a stark contrast of good Southern living, then and now. The trailers - typically 8 feet wide and 30 feet long - sit in trailer parks as well as in driveways and yards and next to swimming pools. One year removed from Hurricane Katrina, and coming up on the anniversary of the often-overlooked Hurricane Rita, an estimated 298,000 people are still living in trailers on the Gulf Coast, according to FEMA. ``This is hell right here," said Hilton, 42.
But unable to stand the heat for long, they quickly return to their air-conditioned FEMA trailers, and they wait.Īt the ironically named Renaissance Village, the largest Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer park in Louisiana, minutes can pass like hours, hours like days. In Janet Hooker's trailer, there are six family members. They live in neat rows, cooped up, planning their escape.
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