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The Plan for Public Housing in New
Orleans
Abandoned Then Bulldozed
By Carl Dix
In late October,
the U.S. government, through HUD, gave the go ahead to
demolish four of the largest public housing projects in
New Orleans. On November 15, a federal judge refused to
block the demolitions – clearing the way for the
demolition of the BW Cooper, CJ Peete, Lafitte and St
Bernard developments.
These projects aren’t just structures. These were
people’s communities -- where 1000's of people grew up,
met, fell in love and raised families. These buildings
suffered less damage than other housing in the floods
because of their solid brick construction and could
house 4,700 families. But the government plans to
demolish them and build "mixed income" housing that will
include less than 750 units for people with low incomes.
Much of the Black population of this city has been
dispersed throughout the country since Katrina. By March
of 2007, it was estimated that 200,000 former residents
had still not returned to New Orleans and that more than
150,000 of them are Black. The demolition of public
housing is yet another way the government is
discouraging and preventing people from coming back to
New Orleans. In effect the message is: “You'll never be
able to come back home because there will be nowhere you
can live.”
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The number of homeless people in New
Orleans is double what it was before
Katrina. Lafitte, which could house almost
900 families but is now almost empty, sits
across the street from a homeless encampment
where dozens of people live under a freeway
overpass.
New Orleans desperately needs affordable
housing. Yet the authorities are determined
to destroy 1000's of housing units that
could be made suitable for people to live
in. Where's the logic in this? To anyone
concerned about the needs of the people,
this is insane. But the people who run this
system operate based on a cold capitalist
logic. For them what matters is keeping
their system in effect and as lean and mean
a profit-making machine as possible.
Florida projects |
To do this,
they will demolish public housing, no matter how this
impacts people's lives. For this system, a disaster that
killed 1,800 people and forced 200,000 out of the city
is an /opportunity/ to rebuild a New Orleans that's
smaller and whiter and rid of those who the system has
no need for.
What’s Behind the Drive to Demolish?
There's been a nationwide assault on public housing for
more than a decade that reflects the changing needs of
US imperialism. Many of the projects in the US were
built after World War 2 to house Black people who were
being drawn into the cities in large numbers to work in
factories. These projects were a way to enforce racial
segregation. In
New Orleans, three of the seven projects built in this
period were reserved for whites, while the others housed
Black people. By the 1960's the racial composition of
the projects had shifted, and the overwhelming majority
of residents were Black.
In the 1970's, as part of striving to remain competitive
with their imperialist rivals, US corporations began to
move factories from the inner cities to the suburbs and
to other countries. At the same time, immigrants from
Mexico and other countries began to be hired for many of
the jobs on the bottom of the work force that used to be
filled by Black
people.
Several factors drove these developments. Many
immigrants can be forced to work for super low wages and
in miserable conditions because they lack legal status.
At the same time, long experience with brutal
oppression, and the struggle against that oppression,
has led many Black people to develop an attitude of both
defiance and unwillingness to take shit jobs. This is a
very positive quality to anybody who wants to change the
world-but it's considered dangerous by the ruling class.
The result of all this is large numbers of Black people
have been pushed out of the work force. Jobs and
opportunity have been sucked out of the ghettos. And
residential segregation means the places Black people
live have become concentrations of poverty. So the very
operations of the system has created a situation where
the capitalists face the “problem” of millions of Black
people they can no longer profitably exploit.
From the point of view of this system, the masses of
Black people have become so much surplus population—in
the way and potentially explosive. When Katrina hit, in
places where many Black lived, like the Lower 9th Ward
and Central City half of all working age people were not
in the work force! A key part of the way the system has
been dealing with this is the warehousing of Black
people in prison. Between 1984 and 2004, the number of
Black people in jail in the US skyrocketed from 98,00 to
910,000! (For a full discussion of this, see "Crime and
Punishment . . . & Capitalism," Revolution #
106.)
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This was the context in
which government plans to demolish housing
projects have been developed. Between 1996
and 2002, 80,000 units of public housing
were demolished nationwide. In New Orleans
the number of public housing units was
reduced from 14,000 in 1988 to 6,000 in
2005. The Desire housing development was
demolished in the 1990's, and St Thomas was
demolished in 2001. Fisher was partly
demolished before Hurricane Katrina. The
mixed income developments that replaced
these projects has 75%-90% /fewer/ low
income housing units!
The authorities seized on Hurricane Katrina
to empty the projects. Everyone who came to
the emergency shelters was taken out of the
city.
Housing
to replace demolished projects |
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Some people who
lived in the projects stayed in their homes during
Katrina because they knew the projects usually suffered
less damage during storms. People who didn't live in the
project even came there to ride out the storm.
On September 6, 2005, the city issued an order
authorizing law enforcement to forcibly remove people
from their homes. People who refused to leave were taken
from their homes and forced to leave the city. And
people weren't allowed to return to the projects. The
city put a barb-wire fence around the St Bernard project
and part of BW Cooper. They put metal enclosures over
the doors and windows In Lafitte. They also shut down CJ
Peete and partially fenced it in, even though it had
suffered NO flood damage.
The authorities consider the replacement of St Thomas
with the mixed income River Gardens development a
success story which they promise to repeat with these
demolitions. St Thomas had 1,500 units of low income
housing. River Gardens has only 150 such units. Now, two
years after Katrina, less than 100 former residents of
St Thomas have gotten into River Gardens. Others who
applied to move back in were told they didn't make
enough money. As far as the ruling class is concerned,
these people can just go somewhere and die!
The Need for Resistance
The authorities plan to begin the demolitions before the
end of the year. Court cases, congressional legislation,
appeals to reason-all that is being shoved aside or
bottled up. If these demolitions aren't met with
determined resistance, the rulers will get away with
cleansing New Orleans of much of its Black population.
What's needed now is massive resistance.
Demolishing the
projects won't provide people with decent housing. It
will mean that 1000's more poor people will have nowhere
to live. It will mean that many of those currently
exiled from New Orleans will remain unable to return.
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These demolitions must be
stopped.
But the goal in this
fight isn't to get back to how the projects
used to be. Capitalism has made the projects
places where poor Black people live, in
miserable conditions with little hope for
the future.
The total inability of
this system to provide people with decent
housing is yet another sharp example of why
we need a whole new society where power is
in the hands of the people and is wielded in
their interests. And we need a revolution to
make this possible.
New
Orleans camp out protesting being shut out |
If the authorities are allowed to get away with this,
people's communities will be reduced to piles of rubble.
And the killing program the rulers are enforcing on
Black people will escalate.
But if people build a powerful political struggle
against this attack. If the justice of fighting these
demolitions is brought out to different kinds of people
throughout society and many of them join the fight. If
protest and resistance forces the system to stop their
bulldozers. This can create a whole new ball game. The
people must derail the rulers'
plans to drive out much of the Black population of New
Orleans and such resistance needs to become part of a
growing revolutionary movement.
This article appeared in Revolution Newspaper (www.revcom.us)
address comments to carldix@hotmail.com, and get
involved in stopping this attack. Office of Carl Dix,
Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, P.O. Box 941 Knickerbocker Station, New York NY 10002-0900, (866)
841-9139 x2670
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We Are All Victims of
the Katrina Housing Debacle—The masters
of capital enjoyed a windfall, literally,
when Hurricane Katrina and its official
enablers swept out half of Black New Orleans—now
ripe for gentrification. Black political
leadership has
collectively failed to respond to the
New Orleans catastrophe, just as they have
been impotent in the face of the general
tide of gentrification. But we have a few
heroes and heroines. Maxine Waters, the
Black Congresswoman from Los Angeles,
successfully pushed through the U.S. House
of Representatives a bill that would at
least conserve from demolition the city's
stock of public housing, and replace
some of the affordable housing that has been
lost, as an anchor for African American
return to their ancestral place. |
Color of
Change, the progressive Black organization that is using
the Internet to connect the cyber-world with the real
world of Black struggle, is pushing for Senate passage
of Maxine Water's bill. Go to
ColorofChange.com, and lend your signature. But
remember: the bell that tolls for New Orleans, tolls for
all of us.—Glen
Ford A Black Agenda Radio commentary.
Black Agenda Report
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Missing People in New Orleans—Its
figures paint a dramatic picture of jobs and
housing decline in the central city area.
During the storm's aftermath, thousands of
residents were evacuated from the city. Two
years later, one in three households have
still not returned, and the population has
dropped from 455,000 to 274,000. Poor
households with children are particularly
likely to have stayed away, with the number
of children in public schools at only 40% of
its pre-Katrina level. To some extent,
migrants from Mexico and Central America
have replaced Afro-Americans in New Orleans,
with an estimated additional 100,000
Hispanic people in the region. They have
been attracted by some of the relatively
well-paying jobs in construction and
tourism. Looking for jobs—But
overall, the News Orleasn metro area employs
113,000 fewer people than in August 2005,
and the pace of job creation has slowed to a
crawl. The biggest declines were in tourism
jobs (down 24,500), government jobs (down
29,000) and healthcare jobs (down 23,000).
And 4,000 smaller firms closed after the
storm. "We apparently are at a place where
the post-storm employment recovery is
peaking," said demographer Elliot
Stonecipher. "Those categorical drops in
jobs paint a picture of a devastated economy
and we have to stop acting like they didn't
happen."
Steve
Schifferes. Two years on, New Orleans stalls
News BBC
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new orleans--statement from the coalition to
stop demolition + updates
Dear comrades,
In the past two years, New Orleans has faced a series of
social crises that have struck a blow to our collective
vision for a more just and equitable city, not simply
one that is more inviting to elites. Yet none of these
crises has been so uniquely urgent as this. What is at
stake with the demolition of public housing in New
Orleans is more than just the loss of housing units: it
destroys any possibility for affordable housing in New
Orleans for the foreseeable future. Without access to
affordable housing, thousands of working class New
Orleanians will be denied their human right to return.
Although this situation is unique and urgent in the city
of New Orleans, it does not occur in isolation. The
plans for redevelopment here are part of a national
assault on public housing, in which tens of thousands of
homes have been demolished in the past decade.
Though we face this ongoing crisis together across this
country, in New Orleans the prospect of demolition is a
critical moment for the reconstruction movement itself.
It is a test of the strength and will of our movement: a
loss at this juncture would be a blow to the ability of
the movement to grow and sustain itself to fight on
other fronts.
In coming to New Orleans, you are helping us to draw
this line in the sand. You are taking part in a critical
piece of the ongoing fight against neo-liberal
incursions into our cities. Here in New Orleans, as the
bulldozers arrive to destroy any hope for the right of
return for thousands of families, you can help us push
back this agenda, and stand fast with us to promote a
more people-focused reconstruction: one that is based on
a vision of justice and rights for all people, and not
profits for corporations and the desires of those with
power.
We stand for a reconstruction that values and preserves
services and infrastructure for poor people who have
always lived, worked, and struggled to survive in New
Orleans, and who possess the right to return to the
homes from which they fled or were forcibly removed more
than two years ago.
Thank you for making the pledge to stand with us at this
time. May the love of justice, not power, guide our
actions.
In Unity and Struggle,
The Coalition to Stop Demolition
Organizations supporting:
Churches Supporting
Churches
Advocates for Environmental Human Rights
Peoples Institute for Survival and Beyond
Common Ground
Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund
Mennonite Central Committee
Louisiana Justice Institute
C3 and several others!
Demolition Update
11-29-07
Louisiana Housing
Finance Agency has reserved $35 million in tax credits
for HANO to "rehabilitate" six public housing
buildings—making up 1949 units. This is an extension of
the tax credit arrangement between HANO and the LHFA on
St. Bernard I, BW Cooper, Lafitte, CJPeete I/III and
Fisher. The extension is subject to the following
conditions: including: 1) HANO provides written
confirmation to LHFA no later than Dec. 18 that
demolition has begun on the six properties....
Source: Daily
Journal of Commerce, November 27, 2007
http://www.djcgulfcoast.com/pdf/nov27.pdf
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Demolition of St. Bernard December 15, 2007 / BW
Cooper I December 15, 2007
Lafitte - December 17, 2007 / CJ Peete III -
December 15, 2007
Fisher - December 15, 2007
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Gulf Watch: Take action to save NOLA public housing—Next
Monday, Dec. 10, is international
Human Rights Day. It's also the day when activists
in New Orleans are calling for actions opposing the U.S.
Department of Housing and Urban Development
plans to tear down more than 4,600 public housing
units in four complexes across the city -- while
replacing them with private, mixed-income developments
that will set aside only 744 apartments for low-income
people. The decision to demolish these public complexes,
which
suffered only relatively minor damage during
Hurricane Katrina, comes as rents across the city have
doubled since the storm -- as has the homeless
population. The activists are asking concerned citizens
across the country to join the actions in New Orleans or
to take action at home. According to a
statement from Kali Akuno, director of the Stop the
Demolition Coalition: What is at stake with the
demolition of public housing in New Orleans is more than
just the loss of housing units: it destroys any
possibility for affordable housing in New Orleans for
the foreseeable future. Without access to affordable
housing, thousands of working class New Orleanians will
be denied their human right to return.—
Southern Studies
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posted 21 November 2007
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