Leadership Quote by Stephanie Tubbs Jones

Six months is an eternity in a crisis, and Stephanie Tubbs Jones knows exactly what she is doing by leading with that clock. The line reads like a plain complaint, but its real force is moral: time has passed, the emergency phase is over, and the failure is no longer understandable chaos. It is governance - or the lack of it.

Her phrasing is tellingly unvarnished: "they have not figured out" lands as a verdict on competence, while the awkward pivot of "how do we help" performs a kind of exasperated public thinking. It is politician-speak stripped down to the irreducible ask: people need housing. Not a program. Not a grant mechanism. A roof. By refusing to name "they", she makes the target expansive: federal agencies, state leadership, FEMA-style bureaucracy, even the political culture that treats displaced residents as logistical problems instead of constituents.

Jones, a Cleveland congresswoman and a prominent voice during post-Katrina oversight, is also doing coalition work in real time. "The people from the area" implicitly defends the right to return - an anxiety threaded through disaster recovery, where redevelopment can become displacement by another name. The subtext is a warning: when housing lags, everything else unravels - jobs, schooling, health, community ties. The quote works because it weaponizes the simplest metric of accountability: six months later, what do people have? If the answer is still uncertainty, the system isn't stalled; it's choosing winners.