[News] Tightening the Noose Around New Orleans

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/

September 25, 2007


HUD's Wrecking Ball


Tightening the Noose Around New Orleans

By BILL QUIGLEY

Odessa Lewis is 62 years old. When I saw her last week, she was 
crying because she is being evicted. A long-time resident of the 
Lafitte public housing apartments, since Katrina she has been locked 
out of her apartment and forced to live in a 240 square foot FEMA 
trailer. Ms. Lewis has asked repeatedly to be allowed to return to 
her apartment to clean and fix it up so she can move back in. She 
even offered to do all the work herself and with friends at no cost. 
The government continually refused to allow her to return. Now she is 
being evicted from her trailer and fears she will become homeless 
because there is no place for working people, especially African 
American working and poor people, to live in New Orleans. Ms. Lewis 
is a strong woman who has worked her whole life. But the stress of 
being locked out of her apartment, living in a FEMA trailer and the 
possibility of being homeless brought out the tears. Thousands of 
other mothers and grandmothers are in the same situation.

Renting is so hard in part because there is a noose closing around 
the housing opportunities of New Orleans African American renters 
displaced by Katrina. They have been openly and directly targeted by 
public and private actions designed to keep them away. The U.S. 
Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) just added their 
weight to the attack by approving the demolition of 2966 apartments 
in New Orleans.

Despite telling a federal judge for the last year and a half that 
approvals of public housing demolition applications take about 100 
working days to evaluate, HUD approved the plan to demolish nearly 
3000 apartments one day after the complete application was filed. HUD 
says the 3000 apartments are scheduled to be replaced in a few years 
with up to 744 public housing eligible apartments and a few hundred 
subsidized apartments.

Unfortunately, HUD's actions are consistent with other governmental 
attacks on African American renters.

After Katrina, St. Bernard Parish, a 93% white adjoining suburb, 
enacted a law prohibiting home owners from renting their property to 
anyone who is not a blood relative. Jefferson Parish, another 
majority white adjoining suburb, unanimously passed an ordinance 
prohibiting the construction of any subsidized housing. The 
sponsoring legislator condemned poor people as "lazy," "ignorant" and 
"leeches on society"--specifically hoping to guard against former 
residents of New Orleans public housing. Across Lake Ponchartrain 
from New Orleans, the chief law enforcement officer of St. Tammany 
Parish, Sheriff Jack Strain, complained openly about the post-Katrina 
presence of "thugs and trash from New Orleans" and announced that 
people with dreadlocks or "chee wee hairstyles" could "expect to be 
getting a visit from a sheriff's deputy."

HUD's actions are also bolstered by pervasive racial discrimination 
in the private market as well. The Greater New Orleans Fair Housing 
Action Center has documented widespread racial discrimination in the 
metro New Orleans rental market and in the states surrounding the gulf coast.

HUD told a federal judge a few days "the average time [for the 
process of reviewing applications for demolition] is 100 days." They 
did suggest that the process could be expedited in the case of New 
Orleans. So it was. Instead of reviewing the details of demolishing 
3000 apartments and considering the law and facts and the 
administrative record for 100 days, HUD expedited the process to one day.

HUD and the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO, which HUD has 
been running for years) argued passionately that residents displaced 
from public housing (referred to once in their argument as 
'refugees') are financially "better off" than they were before. This 
echoes the Barbara Bush comment of September 5, 2005 when she said, 
viewing the overwhelmingly African American crowd of thousands of 
people living on cots in the Astrodome, "And so many of the people in 
the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this - (she 
chuckles slightly) this is working very well for them."

HUD announced approval of demolition of 2966 units of public housing 
in New Orleans - 896 apartments at Lafitte, 521 at C.J. Peete, 1158 
at B.W. Cooper, and 1391 at St. Bernard. A few buildings on each site 
will be retained for historical preservation purposes.

New Orleans had a severe affordable housing crisis before Katrina 
when HANO housed over 5000 families. There was a waiting list of 8000 
families trying to get in. HUD and HANO together did such a poor job 
of administering the agency that there were about 2000 more empty 
apartments that had been scheduled for major repairs for years.

The continuing deceptions by HUD and HANO have been shameless. Since 
Katrina, HUD has continued to act out both sides of a charade that 
the local housing authority is making decisions and HUD is waiting on 
local actions. Yet, the decision to demolish was announced by the 
Secretary of HUD in DC over a year ago. But in the year since then, 
HUD has continued to tell a federal judge that any legal challenge to 
demolitions was premature because HANO had not even submitted an 
application to HUD for their careful 100 day evaluation. This is 
while a HUD employee runs the agency, commuting back and forth to DC 
each week. HANO even announced they would have 2000 apartments ready 
for people in August of 2006--a deadline not met even in September 
2007. HANO later announced to the public that they had a list of 250 
apartments ready for people to return only to admit in writing weeks 
later that no such list existed--nor were the phantom apartments ready.

The list of untruths goes on.

HUD would not agree to delay the demolition of the 3000 apartments 
until Congress finished reviewing legislation that would give 
residents the right to return and participate in the process of 
determining what kind of affordable housing should be in place in New Orleans.

And so HUD's actions help further restrict the opportunities for 
African American renters in New Orleans. Adjoining white suburbs do 
not want African American renters back. HUD does not want them back. 
The local federal judge has refused to stop the demolitions.

But the mothers and grandmothers and their families and friends are 
still determined to return and resist demolition. One sign at a 
recent public housing rally summed it up. "We will not allow the 
community we built to be rebuilt without us."

Odessa Lewis, despite her tears, said she is not giving up. She and 
other public housing residents promise "we did not come this far to 
be turned back now. We will do whatever is necessary to protect our 
homes." Thousands of African American mothers and grandmothers are 
the ones directly targeted by HUD's actions.

Forty years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr., said "We as a nation must 
undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the 
shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" 
societyWhen profit motives and property rights are considered more 
important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and 
militarism are incapable of being conquered." We can add sexism to 
the list, particularly in the fight for the right of public housing 
residents to return.

The fight of Ms. Lewis and others on the gulf coast shows how much we 
need a radical revolution of values.

Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola 
University New Orleans. He can be reached at 
<mailto:Quigley at loyno.edu>Quigley at loyno.edu.




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