Crawling through a hole in a fence and walking through an open doorway, Shamus Rohn and Mike Miller lead the way into an abandoned mid-city hospital.
They are outreach workers for the New Orleans organisation Unity for the Homeless, and they do this all day long - searching empty houses and buildings for homeless people so they can offer services and support.
"We joke about having turned criminal trespass into a full-time job," says Rohn.
Up a darkened stairway and through the detritus of a building that looks like it's been scavenged for anything of value to sell, Rohn and Miller enter a sun-drenched room.
Inside is Michael Palmer, a 57-year-old white former construction worker and merchant seaman who has made a home here.
Palmer is in some ways lucky. He found a room with a door that locks.
He salvaged some furniture from other parts of the hospital, so he has a bed, a couch and a rug. Best of all, he has a fourth-floor room with a balcony.
"Of all the homeless," he says, "I probably have the best view."
Mickey has lived here for six months. He's been homeless since shortly after Katrina and this is by far the best place he's stayed in that time.
"I've lived on the street," he says. "I've slept in a cardboard box."
He is a proud man, thin and muscular with a fresh shave, clean clothes and a trim moustache. He credits a nearby church which lets him shave and shower.
But Palmer would like to be able to pay rent again.
"My apartment was around $450. I could afford $450. I can't afford $700 or $800 and that's what the places have gone up to."
Palmer is one of thousands of homeless people living in New Orleans's storm-damaged and abandoned homes and buildings.
Four years after Katrina, recovery and rebuilding has come slow to this city and there are many boarded-up homes to choose from.
The Greater New Orleans Community Data Centre counts 65,888 abandoned residential addresses in New Orleans and this number doesn't include any of the many non-residential buildings like the hospital Mickey stays in.
Overall, about a third of the addresses in the city are vacant or abandoned, the highest rate in the nation. Unity for the Homeless is the only organisation surveying these spaces, and Miller and Rohn are the only full-time staff on the project.
They have surveyed 1,330 buildings - a small fraction of the total number of empty structures. Of those, 564 were unsecured. Nearly 40 per cent of them showed signs of use, including a total of 270 bedrolls or mattresses.
Using conservative estimates, Unity estimates that there are at least 6,000 squatters and a total of about 11,000 homeless individuals in the city.
Unity workers have also found that not all people living in New Orleans's abandoned homes are squatters. In the last three months alone, they have found nine homeowners living in their own toxic, flood-damaged, often completely unrepaired homes.
These are people living in buildings - identified as abandoned and not fit for human habitation - that they, or extended family members, actually own.
The abandoned building-dwellers they've found are generally older than the overall homeless population, with high rates of disability and illness.
The average age of the people they have found is 45 and the oldest was 90. Over 70 per cent report or show signs of psychiatric disorders and 42 per cent show signs of disabling medical illnesses and problems.
Disabling means "people that are facing death if not treated properly," clarifies Rohn.
"We're not talking about something like high blood pressure."
Naomi Burkhalter, an elderly black woman in a wheelchair, sitting outside of the abandoned house she lives in gestures to her badly twisted leg.
"This leg here bent backwards and the muscle came up."
She was injured during Katrina and can't walk. She stays in a flood-damaged house in New Orleans's Gert Town neighbourhood with no electricity or running water.
She says the owner - who cannot afford to repair the home - knows she lives there, along with two other women.
When she needs to get in and out of her house, she crawls, very slowly dragging herself up and down the steps with her hands, leaving her wheelchair outside and hoping no-one takes it.
Burkhalter worked at a shrimp company and rented an apartment before Katrina. Now, between her injury and higher rents, she can no longer afford her former home.
"My rent was $350," she explains. "But when I came back, my rent was up to $1,200."
Burkhalter has been homeless since then.
Unity has received funding from the federal government for 752 housing vouchers specifically to help house the city's homeless population.
They have put people on a list, with those in the most danger of dying if they don't get help at the top of the list.
However, the vouchers still have not arrived and at least 16 people from the list have already died while waiting.
This problem was exacerbated by the demolition of thousands of units of public housing, an act which not only took away the community that many people found brought them comfort and safety but has also made affordable rentals for poor New Orleanians even harder to find.
The subsidised housing programme known as Section 8 has been offered as a solution for those displaced from public housing and other poor renters, but a new study from Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Centre shows that discrimination keeps many people from finding quality housing through the programme.
According to the report, 82 per cent of landlords in the city either refused to accept Section 8 vouchers or added insurmountable requirements.
The study found that both discrimination on the part of landlords - 99 per cent of Section 8 voucher holders in Orleans parish are black - and mismanagement on the part of the housing agency were barriers.
One prospective landlord told a tester for the Fair Housing Action Centre that he wouldn't rent to Section 8 holders "until black ministers ... start teaching morals and ethics to their own, so they don't have litters of pups like animals and they're not milking the system."
The mismanagement from the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) is also a big problem for prospective landlords.
"I faxed HANO the needed information 12 times for the rent I was never paid," says one landlord.
Another housing provider says: "I called every day for a month and never got a call back."
Last month, more than 100 members of Stand for Dignity, a grass-roots membership project of the New Orleans Workers Centre for Racial Justice, protested outside the offices of HANO, decrying its lack of action.
A single mother named Ayesha told the crowd that she had been on the Section 8 waiting list for eight years and still hasn't received any help.
She is paying 80 per cent of her income on rent and has been forced to go months at a time without water, gas or lights.
George Tucker, another member of Stand, told the assembled crowd his story of being evicted from his apartment because HANO had lost his paperwork. Because of bureaucratic carelessness, he was homeless for 13 months.
"This governmental crookedness is not new," he says. "But it cannot continue without consequences."
Last week, at least partly in response to criticism from folks like the members of Stand, HANO announced that it would accept new applications for Section 8 vouchers, for the first time in six years. The period that they will accept applications in is only a week long - from September 6 to 12.
For people like Palmer, caught in a city with few well-paid jobs, much more expensive housing and ever-decreasing social services, there are not many options.
"At one time we were part of the city and part of the workforce," he says. "But people cannot afford the housing in New Orleans any more. I find most of the people I know, my friends, they can't afford the rent."
Despite the size and scope of this problem, help has been hard to come by, from either the city, state or federal government. "I'm not a politician and I'm not politically savvy," says Palmer. "But I don't think they care."
Morning Star - 25.08.09
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