TUESDAY NEWS LINKS:

Nearly Four Years After Hurricane Ike, Shoreacres Sees Signs of Recovery

(Lomi Kriel, Houston Chronicle)
Every spring, Karen Littlejohn boxes up her family’s winter clothes in their FEMA trailer, shuttles them to a tiny, dank room at church, places them beside the other contents of her life, and thinks, “Next winter we’ll have a house. If we can just make it through the spring.”

Meanwhile her son, Stevie Ray, to whom she gave birth in a trailer two months after Hurricane Ike, inches closer to his fourth birthday without ever having known a real home. Seasons come and go in this tiny Galveston Bay city of Shoreacres – once a middle class retirement enclave – and though many beautiful homes remain, so do the Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers, vacant lots and trash in formerly neat front yards.

For much of greater Houston, the 2008 hurricane is a distant memory. But for Shoreacres, a community of about 1,500 people nestled between the Port of Houston and La Porte, it’s a daily conversation topic that inspires heated emails and leaves residents in tears.

Eighty-three percent of the homes were flooded and one in seven destroyed, making this city Ike’s worst victim in Harris County. According to officials, 60 percent of the population didn’t return until a year later; nearly one in three never did. While the rest of Houston was moving on, residents here didn’t even have electricity. (Read more at Houston Chronicle)

OTHER HEADLINES:

• STAAR Testing Comes to HISD  (Houston Chronicle)
• First Big Ozone Wave of 2012 Hits Houston (KUHF Public Radio)
• Custody Hearing To Be Held for Child Whose Throat Was Slashed (KPRC 2 News)
• On Camera: Great-Grandmother Tries to Abandon Kids (KRIV 26 News)
• Cheating the Organ Donation System: Is It Possible?(KRIV 26 News)
• Sunset Report Cites Issues With Student Loan Program (Texas Tribune)
• Today At The Supreme Court: ‘The Heart Of Health Care Arguments’ (KUHF Public Radio)

OPINIONS ON THE NEWS:
Health Care Reform & the Individual Mandate

• Why the Individual Mandate Holds The Key to Health-Care Reform
  (Editorial, Washington Post)
  The mandate is an indispensable tool for achieving the government’s compelling goals of universal coverage and lower costs.
• Step to the Center (David Brooks, New York Times)
  Universal coverage is a worthy goal. Decentralized competition is the way to make it affordable.