hurricane housing

I don’t know that it would do much good, seeing as how we’re a thousand miles away from the area impacted by the hurricane, but Linette and I are talking about maybe clearing out a room and putting the word out through our friends in the New Orleans alternative press that we have a place if someone needs it for a few months. From what I hear, a lot of people are offering rooms, mostly using Craigslist as a means to connect with Gulf Coast refugees. Given the fact that Craigslist is set up on a community-by-community basis, though, it doesn’t seem as though it would be that effective. What seems better to me, if it takes off, is the Hurricane Housing site just launched by MoveOn. It’s searchable across the entire U.S., so that people can just put in a zip-code and find things within a certain number of miles from where they are… or where they’d like to ultimately be. If you’re thinking of opening up your home, it might be a good way to go.

My friend Dave tells me that the opportunist scumbags are already coming out of the woodwork, using the disaster as tool to help them ensnare desperate (and hot!) women… Guys, like this guy, are essentially offering warm, dry places to sleep in exchange for the promise of sex on demand. I suspect we’ll see more of that as the days go on, along with all kinds of fake emails soliciting donations for the survivors. And I’m sure there are also some scam-artists out there who, wanting a nice place to stay, free of charge, will claim to have lost everything in the hurricane, even if they were five states away when it hit and didn’t lose a damned thing… Most people, in case you didn’t know it already, are scum… And, these kinds of things, unfortunately, tend to bring out the best and worst in people.