It looks like things will get a lot worse on the coast before they get better. The Washington Post is reporting that tenants, their jobs destroyed and their income cut off, are now being evicted in large numbers.

... this politically conservative state has a threadbare safety net. Two weeks ago, county officials lifted an informal moratorium on evictions. Tenants cannot claim rent breaks for water-damaged apartments. One can sit now in housing courts in Gulfport and Biloxi and watch judges order the evictions of hundreds of tenants, often with a speed that startles the tenants.

"There's a hanging judge mentality and, my God, it's going to create a social crisis," said John C. Jopling, a lawyer with the Mississippi Center for Justice, which represented a few tenants.

The mayor of Gulfport, Mississippi's second largest city, recently removed a tent city of contract workers from a golf course. And under pressure from developers, he balked at signing off on emergency trailer parks, even though the inhabitants would be displaced city residents. "It creates an environment people don't want to live around," Gulfport developer Don Hall told the Harrison County Board of Supervisors recently, according to news reports.

Apparently FEMA is strapped for funds, unable to help and unlikely to have its budget increased by the Republican Congress, which obviously regards tax cuts and overseas military adventures of higher priority than the suffering of one of the reddest congressional districts in the nation. I suppose this is an example of tough love.

And, as always, the land developers are calling the shots. Get the riff-raff off the golf course. First things first.