Public housing teardown held up in New Orleans
A New Orleans city committee yesterday refused to approve demolition of one of the four public housing complexes as part of a redevelopment plan being pushed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Times-Picayune reports. Though the Housing Conservation District Review Committee approved demolition of the C.J. Peete and B.W. Cooper complexes, it deadlocked over the demolition of the Lafitte development, which means the matter now goes before the City Council. The St. Bernard development is also slated for demolition.More than 100 people crowded into a City Hall conference room for the meeting, with protesters holding a banner that said "Housing is a human right." Illustrating the intense emotions surrounding the demolition plans, posters have been appearing around the city threatening, "For every public housing unit destroyed, a condo will be destroyed." They are signed by "the angry and the powerless."
Meanwhile, HUD officials are blaming public housing defenders for the severe shortage of affordable housing in New Orleans, where rents in some neighborhoods have doubled since Hurricane Katrina, as has the city's homeless population. According to the Times-Picayune, HUD released a two-page statement Monday that said if the lawsuit seeking to halt the demolitions never occurred, "more housing could have already been built." The suit was brought by Loyola law professor and occasional Facing South contributor Bill Quigley.
For more information about the planned teardowns and the actions taking place this week to protest them, visit Defend New Orleans Public Housing, Justice for New Orleans and the People's Hurricane Relief Fund.
(Photo by Craig Morse courtesy of survivorsvillage.com.)
Labels: Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch, housing, human rights, new orleans
1 Comments:
The second link -- to justiceforneworleans.org -- is very helpful. It provides convincing evidence that a systematic class war is being conducted in New Orleans. People facing down bulldozers sent to raze their former homes on the basis of an abrupt HUD fiat should be the lead news item at every broadcast and print outlet. Instead, this story is routinely bumped by such things as baseball's steroid report, a sports item. It is an offense against journalistic standards and basic human morality.
In New Orleans, class war is being waged on the ground in fact, not theory. In New Orleans, where the fight is physical, not abstract, we see that there are indeed two Americas.
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