Disaster, Displacement, and Casework: Uncertainty and Assistance after Hurricane Katrina

• Date: 01 January 2015
• Author: Susan M. Sterett
• Published date: 01 January 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lapo.12029

Disaster, Displacement, and Casework:

Uncertainty and Assistance after

Hurricane Katrina

SUSAN M. STERETT

Casework in the United States in social welfare programs has been limited in what

caseworkers can do, as what they do has been tightly structured by rules.

Recently, scholars have argued that episodic assistance in disaster brings sympa-

thy in public policy more than restriction. The sympathy after disaster brings new

money, and individual assistance is in turn the subject of casework. This article

relies upon interviews, observations, and government documents to assess how

casework served displaced people after Hurricane Katrina. The article finds that

caseworkers after Katrina were caught in a program that would end at some

uncertain time, and with new and unclear rules that changed frequently, making

the sympathy difficult to enact for many of the poorest people. Casework after

disaster is episodic and convened by nonprofits and, after Katrina, paid for by a

large grant and then written into statute. Assistance for displaced people is likely

to continue, given the expectation of more disasters and rising sea levels. The

question of how it is like or unlike other forms of assistance and what sympathy in

policy means in helping displaced people is therefore likely to continue to matter.

INTRODUCTION

Lisa worked as a case manager with displaced people after Hurricane

Katrina in a metropolitan area more than a thousand miles from New

Orleans. She was a young, white woman, hard working and warm, with soft

brown eyes and shoulder-length brown hair. She had moved to take the job.

Six months into working on Katrina relief, almost a year after the hurricane,

I thank several anonymous reviewers as well as the editors of Law and Policy for comments on

earlier drafts of this article. I am especially grateful to all the people who shared experiences of

displacement and casework, including people who fled the storms, volunteers, government

officials, and caseworkers. In addition, I am grateful for comments I received when I presented

earlier versions of the article at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, University of Utah,

and Virginia Tech. I am also grateful to Saylor Breckenridge, Erik Herron, Felicia Kornbluh,

Kay Meyer, and Marjorie Zatz for comments and encouragement. Remaining errors are my own.

Finally, I am grateful to NSF for its support, including via CMMI-055117 and SES-1051408.

Address correspondence to Susan Sterett, Center for Public Administration and Policy,

Virginia Tech, 1021 Prince St., Alexandria, VA 22314. Telephone: (703) 706-8110; E-mail:

ssterett@vt.edu.

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LAW & POLICY, Vol. 37, Nos 1–2, January–April 2015 ISSN 0265–8240

© 2015 The Author

Law & Policy © 2015 The University of Denver/Colorado Seminary

doi: 10.1111/lapo.12029

she found the work terribly frustrating. She reflected on what she had learned

in working with some of the poorest people who needed rental assistance

after Katrina:

[W]e can go through the appeal process with people, but—and at first, I think

I was more hopeful of the appeal process, but as I’ve been going through the

appeal process I am beginning to think that, you know, if you’re stringing

people along on the appeal process it might stop them from actually—they

might be in a holding pattern and then all of a sudden when it comes to at the

end of where they can, you know, the landlord’s decided that he’s not gonna

wait any more, that’s where they get these eviction notices. If I had been a little

more proactive as far as explaining that the appeal process was definitely not a

certainty that they would get continued assistance, try to focus more, not so

much on the appeal process, but focus more on the actual piece that they need

to do. If FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] assistance is gonna

run out tomorrow, what’re you gonna do scenario. And I think that’s where

we’re at right now, but, you know, it’s almost a little too late.1

The only disaster-specific relief that Lisa had to work with for clients was

housing assistance. Those who received housing assistance the longest were

most likely to continue needing it, making her job also one of appealing

denial of benefits. Lisa was justifiably proud of the work she had done getting

some people into houses Fannie Mae2made available for a nominal rent for

eighteen months (Crowley 2006). Relieved that some people had found

housing, Lisa found the cases still in her workload difficult. People had been

denied assistance, appeals would take time, and those who needed the assis-

tance did not have jobs or other housing options.

Other caseworkers and volunteers tried to get identification,3bus tokens,

medical assistance, and cars while trying to bring people together for dinners

in a community center. Some volunteers saw it as central to provide com-

panionship as people tried to resettle; others did not. After Katrina, chari-

table donations did not always match what many people needed, and the

difficulty of working with the federal government’s individual assistance,

along with how central housing was to well being, made the demand for

housing crowd out other needs for those who could not get resettled.

Lisa’s difficulty in advising about appeals was just one part of the challenge

of casework in an entirely new setting. Caseworkers helped clients with rental

assistance that was profoundly uncertain; it changed frequently via directives

from FEMA that were not always known. Decision making by FEMA was

opaque. The legal environment changed as FEMA extended benefits and

rescinded policies that would have cut people off; policy changes were not

always clear to frontline workers in FEMA. Furthermore, FEMA is not a

housing agency or a social welfare agency. Much of what it does is muster

other’s resources, so explaining FEMA assistance quickly takes one to

Fannie Mae, or Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), or dis-

ability benefits; thus disaster assistance is difficult to contain in a statute.

Scholars of disaster politics routinely dismiss the expectation that FEMA can

62 LAW & POLICY January–April 2015

© 2015 The Author

Law & Policy © 2015 The University of Denver/Colorado Seminary

solve all problems by relying on a metaphor of the cavalry sweeping in to

rescue people. FEMA is not the cavalry, and simply stating the metaphor is

enough to see how silly the expectation would be (Roberts 2013). Zealously

appealing when a client has been wrongly cut off from housing assistance can

make a client hope the benefits will come when they might not. Alternatively,

not appealing means letting someone lose benefits the law seems to allow.

Either course could result in eviction. The time to appeal a denial of benefits

could itself run out the clock on assistance creating some ill-defined but not

long time frame. Maybe being an advocate requires not holding out hope,

rather than going for the most one can find.

This article argues that the open-ended recovery to be facilitated by case-

workers after Katrina became integrated into the system of rules and check-

lists, familiar from TANF (Watkins-Hayes 2011; Lens 2007). The article

draws upon the cases of people displaced after Hurricane Katrina, analyzing

the delivery of assistance outside of the most-stressed areas of the Gulf Coast,

Houston, and Atlanta.

In contrast with TANF and other programs, individual assistance was

provided in the context of frequent legal change and therefore uncertainty.

Still, as with other new programs with discretion, systems of legality and

bureaucratic accountability emerged (Kagan 1978). The hopeful story after

disaster is that raw need is politically appealing (Dauber 2013; Calhoun

2010), and moving allows people to make their lives anew; a skeptical turn

argues that people need more skills not tied to one place if they are to move

successfully (Vigdor 2007). The dark story of disaster points out that it allows

cities to shed poor people (Klein 2007; Jenkins 2006) and holds that any hope

in policy is deceptive because it misses what happens with assistance to the

people who flee. Casework linked the hope of renewal and aid to the end of

assistance, though many people who fled were often uncertain what they

would do next.

We know very little about how people have experienced administrative

justice in social spending programs.4In what we do know, the programs are

fixed, whether it is disability or TANF (Lens 2007; Soss 2000). Caseworkers

have limited discretion to meet needs rather than follow the rules (Maynard-

Moody and Musheno 2012; Watkins-Hayes 2011; Brodkin 1986), though

clients try to plead needs over rules (Lens 2007; White 1995). Resistance by

clients to a system in which they feel vulnerable is resistance to the casework-

ers’ and appeals systems’ definitions of rules and needs, whether the casework-

ers mean to help or not (Kornbluh 2007; Lens 2007; White 1995). We know

even less about what caseworkers can do or how they see their jobs when they

work with rapidly changing law or when they are responsible for the law and

are employees of nonprofits. Governing through casework is sometimes done

through nonprofits; they serve as contractors in refugee resettlement, and

provide advice and assistance intertwined with welfare state assistance

(Chandra and Acosta 2009; Coutin 2000). When caseworkers are employees of

nonprofits they can be mistaken for government workers who may be respon-

Sterett DISASTER, DISPLACEMENT, AND CASEWORK 63

© 2015 The Author

Law & Policy © 2015 The University of Denver/Colorado Seminary