By CAIN BURDEAU, Associated Press Cain Burdeau, Associated Press
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_katrina_life_in_the_ruins
NEW ORLEANS – The dark blue rescue van pulls up in front of a sad shell of a house, a few blocks from the police station and criminal court. It's turning into a cold January night.
Slipping on gloves, social workers Mike Miller and Katy Quigley head in.
"Homeless outreach! Anybody home?" Miller shouts as he climbs over a balcony and up a flight of stairs.
No one's home. But the signs of life are disturbing: A slept-on mattress, bits of food, smells of urine and feces.
It's creepy: The upstairs apartment hasn't been touched since Hurricane Katrina. There's paperwork, letters, clothing, medicine bottles, a child's stuffed animal, a Star Wars X-Wing fighter plane on the carpeted stairs.
A business card they left on the fetid mattress during their last trip is gone. That's a good sign.
They move on.
At an abandoned 100-year-old factory, they find a few squatters. The factory has become a spot for day laborers working for temp services, restaurants, construction crews. The wages and tips, plus side tricks like collecting aluminum cans, aren't enough to get them into an apartment since rents skyrocketed after the storm.
Quigley pauses outside a room overlooking the factory floor. "On New Year's Day a guy was hit by a cab and killed on Claiborne and Gravier on his way to his temp job," she says. "He lived right here."
In a former workers' locker room, James Bragg, a 35-year-old out-of-work carny from Illinois, is buried under blankets with his girlfriend in the dark. His left eye doesn't blink; it's bruised and bloodshot from being hit with a pipe.
When the carnival season ended, he said, "We come down here with about $600." But he was robbed on Bourbon Street, and after they ate through savings living out of a hotel before they came across the factory in a downpour of rain a few months ago.
"It's better than sleeping on sidewalks," he says.
An ex-convict from New Orleans lives in the next room. He's arranged his living quarters like a prison cell — neat and tidy and cold. He's lined up hand sanitizer, hair lotion, a broken mirror to shave in, water jugs, stacked clothes — one stack for boxer shorts. A hole in the floor looks onto the ground floor, and he uses it as an outhouse.
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