Storm shelter

Disaster | The mission changes for a post-hurricane homeless center | Jamie Dean

Tobey Pitman spent 28 years looking for ways to ease homelessness in New Orleans as director of the Brantley Baptist Center, a 240-bed homeless shelter one block from the French Quarter. Late last year, he got an unexpected hand from a hurricane. Today Mr. Pitman stands in the empty lobby of the seven-story shelter remembering the days before Hurricane Katrina flooded the Big Easy: "We were largely full every night."

Nearly every homeless shelter in New Orleans was full every night before Hurricane Katrina emptied the town, according to Martha Kegel, executive director of Unity of Greater New Orleans, a nonprofit collaborative battling homelessness. Unity estimates that before Katrina, some 1,100 people in New Orleans were "chronically homeless," or on the streets long-term. Most of the city's homeless took shelter in the Superdome during Katrina and were later evacuated to cities across the country. Ms. Kegel estimates the number of chronically homeless in New Orleans now stands somewhere around 300.