“Homesick” by Nicholas Shapiro Book Summary | Entertainment/Life

“Homesick” by Nicholas Shapiro, Duke University Press, 256 pages.

The holiday season is a time for homecomings and family gatherings, staying in, snuggling down and enjoying the comforts of home — which makes Nicholas Shapiro’s “Homesick” an apt but unconventional read to end the year on.

“Homesick” is, at the surface, a biography of the emergency housing provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: the infamous FEMA trailer. Along the way, Shapiro, a professor and environmental researcher at UCLA who spent 15 years interviewing and advocating for trailer residents, presents a crucial story about the homes we inhabit and how they’re killing us.

In the months immediately following Katrina, the federal government awarded trailer manufacturers over $2 billion in no-bid contracts to churn out over 120,000 mobile homes. Distributed across the Gulf Coast, and centered in and around New Orleans, FEMA trailers provided housing for over 300,000 residents.

“Long before they became a symbol of protracted and painful recovery,” Shapiro concedes, “FEMA trailers were cornerstones of the infrastructure of hope.”

Despite their cramped quarters, most often 250 square feet, and thin walls, the trailers performed their utilitarian tasks: to be cheap, temporary and portable.

“It was all the space I could handle,” a New Orleanian told the author.

“It’s like living in a Swiss Army knife,” a Plaquemines Parish resident boasted. “What more could you ask for?”

The biggest ask, it turns out, was for homes that didn’t make inhabitants sick.

“From the engineered wood that gave form to most surfaces in these trailers,” Shapiro writes, “toxic chemicals, most notably formaldehyde, were continuously wriggling free of their bonds and into breathing space in a process known as ‘off-gassing.’”

Because off-gassing is temperature and moisture-dependent, as the heat and humidity rise throughout the day, season to season, all those surfaces — walls, floors, ceilings, cabinetry and doors — leach increased levels of formaldehyde into a trailer’s enclosed atmosphere.

Made from methane, and used in home construction materials since the 1950s, formaldehyde is the most common and most understood indoor-air pollutant. This naturally occurring gas responsible for so much of our modern housing is also “an irritant, an allergen, a neurotoxin and a known human carcinogen.” Formaldehyde causes more cancer than any known air pollutant, by far.

FEMA trailers represent the largest formaldehyde exposure in human history, with many residents experiencing levels of toxicity two to three times higher than the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s recommended limits.

Jeremy, a New Orleans pastor in Mid-City, lived in a trailer with his family going on five years when Shapiro interviewed him.

“You could really feel the formaldehyde,” he said.

Over time, his family members suffered from bronchitis, chronic fatigue, nasal congestion, insomnia and eye irritation.

Another New Orleanian, Marquisha, was 13 when she moved into a trailer and was soon diagnosed with asthma and pneumonia.

“Every time I went up in there, my head would hurt a lot,” she told Shapiro.

“It burns my eyes and I am getting headaches every day,” someone wrote on the website of Gulf Stream, the leading FEMA trailer manufacturer. “I have tried many things, but nothing seems to work. PLEASE, PLEASE HELP ME!!”

Never stepped foot in a FEMA trailer? Shapiro says don’t count your blessings.

“Nine out of every ten breaths in your life,” he writes, “will take place in enclosed spaces where the air is suffused with chemicals that are off-gassing from construction materials and the myriad commodities that fill our daily lives.”

Over the course of a day, the average American gulps down 18 pounds of “industrially textured air.” Our homes are literally making us homesick.

This is a tough read, in terms of subject matter and Shapiro’s occasional descent into academese, one in which levity only comes in the form of absurdity. Formaldehyde was only one of many problems for trailer residents, including crumbling pipes, moldy siding and electrical outlets that spontaneously combusted. Keys provided by FEMA could often unlock multiple trailers, resulting in simple and frequent break-ins.

Shapiro profiles Frank Renda, a senior environmental scientist working for the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, who raised alarms over a 2007 report that downplayed the long-term health risks of inhabiting a FEMA trailer. Punished for insubordination, Renda was reassigned to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In his new office, in a new building, he soon started developing rashes.

The CDC ran tests, discovering that the office’s formaldehyde levels were double the recommended limit.

Some 90,000 residents would join litigation against the trailer manufacturers. (The Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama state courts let FEMA off the hook, declaring the agency not liable for providing housing to needy Americans.) In this continuing black comedy of fatal errors, many litigants received checks with their names misspelled.

Not that the meager settlements helped much. Debra of Gentilly collected $32.02. Mac of Mid-City received a settlement check totaling $228.07, then promptly died.

“I’m concerned at this point now the formaldehyde trailer has brought me to the point of almost killing me,” he told Shapiro after filing his lawsuit. “I want to find a detox. I want to get this … out of me. It ain’t out. I can feel it. I’m still contaminated.”

After a brief moratorium due to the lawsuits, FEMA offloaded the trailers on the secondary market, reselling upward of 150,000 units at fire-sale prices. (The government had ordered many thousands more trailers than they ever deployed). Additionally, the government donated at least 1,000 units to Indigenous tribal governments hard up for housing.

Twenty years later, people are still living in FEMA trailers scattered throughout the nation. Sometimes the residents are unaware of their home’s history; often it’s their only opportunity for secure, though not safe, shelter.

The trailers can be easy to spot. Look for the government signs pasted on windows, with bold, red lettering that reads: “NOT TO BE USED AS HOUSING.”

Rien Fertel is the author of four books, including, most recently, “Brown Pelican.”