Nonprofit law center is helping displaced Gulf Coast residents navigate the recovery maze
When Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, Stanley R. Smith considered himself among the lucky ones.
While the storm surge that accompanied the hurricane shifted Mr. Smith’s East Biloxi home off its foundation, he and his wife were able within just a few months to buy a prefabricated craftsman-style cottage and hire a contractor to build it.
Roughly two years later, however, Mr. Smith and his wife are still living in a trailer that sits in their front yard alongside the unfinished house. Their contractor stopped returning phone calls about six months ago, after city inspectors started to find problems that needed to be fixed before work could continue, first with the home’s wiring and then with the way the heating and air-conditioning units were installed.
Last month Mr. Smith finally turned to the Mississippi Center for Justice for help.
“I thought he was a good guy,” Mr. Smith told the lawyer he met with at a legal clinic run by the center, frustration evident in his voice. “I hate to be here, but they’re just not going to let me go forward, and I don’t know what else to do.”
Disagreements with contractors and outright contractor fraud are the most recent wave of problems the lawyers at the Mississippi Center for Justice are seeing at the legal clinics the group runs across the southern part of the state for storm survivors. In all, the group has held 55 such clinics since Katrina hit.
Help from lawyers across the country who have donated their time — worth twice as much as the center’s $1.5-million annual budget — has enabled the organization to keep up with the constant demand for services.
At a clinic last month, the small waiting room of the center’s Biloxi office had standing room only, half an hour before the lawyers were scheduled to start seeing clients.
“You would think that maybe by now the turnout for these clinics would start to diminish, but it really has not,” says Martha Bergmark, chief executive officer of the Mississippi Center for Justice. “People still show up with their bags full of papers.”
Forms and Appeals
Right after the storm struck, people needed help applying for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Many had to file appeals when their requests for assistance were denied. Residents continue to struggle with insurance companies, title issues that need to be cleared before homeowners can qualify for rebuilding grants, eviction proceedings, and other legal problems.
Navigating the maze of recovery is daunting, especially for people with low or moderate incomes, says Reilly Morse, a senior lawyer at the center’s Katrina recovery office in Biloxi.
“Even the people who are wealthy, who are politically sophisticated, who are financially literate, are stymied,” he says. “Imagine what it’s like for a teacher’s assistant or a shift manager at a fast-food restaurant or a guy working as a dealer in a casino.”
‘Outpouring of Offers’
At the legal clinics, lawyers who volunteer their time listen to people’s stories and ask questions to get as many details as possible. Lawyers who work for the Mississippi Center for Justice, which is based in Jackson, will take some of the cases themselves. Other cases will be assigned to lawyers from the state’s two legal-aid programs, but many more will be pursued by lawyers in other parts of the country who have volunteered to work on cases remotely.
“When the hurricane first happened, we just were hit with this outpouring of offers of assistance,” says Ms. Bergmark. “I realized that our biggest job was how do we say yes to these offers of assistance.”
In 2006 lawyers from 20 national firms — recruited by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a legal organization in Washington that works closely with the center — contributed more than 10,000 pro bono hours. Volunteers are on track to meet or exceed that mark again this year. The volunteer time is the equivalent of adding five full-time lawyers to the organization’s small staff.
O’Melveny & Myers, an international law firm with headquarters in Los Angeles, and Bank of America each sent two lawyers to Biloxi to work at last month’s legal clinic. They were joined by three law students and four lawyers from the Mississippi Center for Justice.
Stephanie Lloyd Brill, an associate at O’Melveny & Myers, was making her first trip to Mississippi, but she had been working on Federal Emergency Management Agency appeals from her New York office for about a year and a half.
In one of those cases, she and a colleague were able to help a single mother, who with her three children had been living in an apartment in Gulfport, Miss., before the storm, obtain $18,500 in assistance from the federal disaster agency to replace clothing, furniture, and other household items that were destroyed by the storm surge that followed the hurricane.
Ms. Brill says that when they started working on the case, it wasn’t immediately clear why the agency had at first denied the woman’s claim.
With some digging, she and her colleague found out that the FEMA inspector didn’t visit the woman’s apartment until several weeks after the storm. By then, the landlord had already cleaned out the apartment and had started to gut it. And the color photographs the woman sent with her claim had been scanned in black and white, a process that obscured the water line in the pictures.
After talking to the lawyers, the federal agency offered to send a second inspector to the site. Because the client had relocated her family to Texas, John Jopling, a senior lawyer at the center, dropped everything to meet the inspector when he called to say he was on his way to the apartment.
There, Mr. Jopling gave the inspector a package of materials the lawyers had prepared, including a letter from the landlord describing the damage to the items in the apartment, color copies of the photographs, and a letter written by the lawyers arguing why they thought their client was entitled to assistance.
Ms. Brill says she felt enormous relief for her client when the federal agency finally agreed to reimburse the woman for her losses.
“She had been so frustrated by the whole process, and she had lost so much,” Ms. Brill says of her client. “For us to be able to help her even just a little bit was truly rewarding.”
Ms. Brill has a harder time when she tries to explain what it meant to the case for lawyers to get involved. She stops and starts several times, seeming to fear sounding boastful or taking too much credit.
“You can sometimes get things done just by virtue of the fact that you’re a lawyer, just because there’s a certain amount of power that comes with that position,” Ms. Brill says eventually. “And this is one of those instances where you can really use that power in a way that will greatly, greatly benefit someone.”
Advocacy Role
While the Mississippi Center for Justice has worked hard to offer legal assistance to individuals, the organization has also been active in trying to influence government policies — pursuing lawsuits on behalf of low-income hurricane survivors, and advocating for their needs.
Last year the Department of Housing and Urban Development gave the Mississippi Regional Housing Authority permission to sell or transfer three public-housing complexes along the coast. Together with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and a coalition of local grass-roots groups, the center has been negotiating with the housing authority to ensure that as few residents as possible are displaced during renovations and that all will have the right to return.
Lawyers at the center are also part of a legal team suing FEMA in an effort to prohibit the agency from terminating housing assistance to hurricane survivors or asking them to repay benefits they already received, unless a formal appeals process is in place.
The center weighed the possibility of a lawsuit when the first phase of Mississippi’s program to distribute $5-billion in federal aid to homeowners was announced, says Ms. Bergmark, the organization’s chief executive officer.
The first phase of the program offered grants of up to $150,000 apiece to homeowners who had insurance and whose homes were damaged or destroyed even though they were outside the flood plain. As a result, people in the hardest-hit areas, the flood plains, didn’t qualify, and of the people who did qualify, most were middle or upper-income earners.
“Phase one was just horrifying,” says Ms. Bergmark, “because it really was not at all targeted on the people who most needed assistance.”
But, she says, the first phase of the grant program used only a modest part of the money, so the center and its allies decided that getting involved in the process, to try to make sure subsequent phases were better, made more sense than a lawsuit.
When the state started discussing the second phase of the program, which seeks to aid low-income homeowners, the original proposal recommended that no one get more than $50,000. With one of its lawyers serving on the housing committee of the governor’s Office of Recovery and Renewal, the center and other housing advocates were able to persuade the state to raise that figure to $100,000.
Advocates were also successful in getting the commission to respond to the needs of renters. A new program will make grants to help the owners of small rental properties repair their buildings if they agree to maintain them as low-cost housing for at least five years.
The grant money could be an important tool for increasing the number of rental properties in the region, says Ms. Bergmark.
“To build an apartment complex is a years-long process,” she says. “If you could let a landlord who owns the house next door get a house back in shape quickly, that’s going to be a family out of a FEMA trailer.”
That ability to think systematically and to translate the needs of individuals into public-policy recommendations is what separates the Mississippi Center for Justice from many other legal-services groups, says David Stern, chief executive officer of Equal Justice Works, a Washington charity that seeks to promote a public-service ethic among lawyers.
“Whenever you can move upstream, where you can attack the root of the problem, rather than dealing with the consequences of that problem, you can be infinitely more effective,” he says. “The number of people you can serve multiplies dramatically.”
After Hurricane Katrina, Equal Justice Works raised $2-million to help provide legal services to storm survivors.
The money is paying for nine experienced lawyers to work as fellows at legal-services groups on the Gulf Coast for two years, and another 10 lawyers to work as AmeriCorps members matching lawyers and law students with pro bono opportunities in the region. One of the fellows and one of the AmeriCorps members work on the center’s hurricane-relief efforts.
The money for those positions will be exhausted by May. And despite what Mr. Stern calls the “heartbreaking” need for legal assistance in the region, Equal Justice Works has had very little luck raising money to extend the lawyers’ positions.
He says that it takes an extraordinary event, like Katrina, to convince law firms to give outside the cities where they are located, and that foundations’ interest in the disaster has waned.
“We were successful right in the aftermath,” says Mr. Stern. “We raised $1-million from the JEHT Foundation and then $1-million from law firms within four months, and since then, it’s almost been nothing.”
The Mississippi Center for Justice expects that hurricane survivors will continue to face legal problems related to the storm for years to come.
Lynda G. Bell, a widow from Moss Point, Miss., recently sought help because her mortgage lender was threatening to foreclose on the home she shares with her four grandchildren. Crystal Utley, the organization’s AmeriCorps lawyer, calmly explained that the state had declared a moratorium on foreclosures for hurricane survivors.
Ms. Utley gave Mrs. Bell step-by-step instructions on how to file for an injunction against her lender, and warned her that some lenders don’t give up, even after one had been granted.
Sometimes, said Ms. Utley, “it takes a phone call from me to say, ‘I just want to make sure that you’re aware that this has been filed, and if you continue, you’ll be in contempt of court.’”
Then she reminded Mrs. Bell that the state moratorium was set to expire at the beginning of October.
Barring an extension by the governor, the Mississippi Center for Justice is bracing for a rush of people facing foreclosure proceedings in the fall.
