John Moreno Gonzales / Associated Press Writer / Thursday, February 28, 2008
New Orleans advocates who've clamored for recognition of alleged human rights violations in the Hurricane Katrina recovery claimed victory Thursday, after United Nations' experts said thousands of black families would continue to suffer displacement and homelessness if the demolition of 4,500 public housing units is not halted.
"I think this is vindication of what public housing advocates have been saying from day one," said Monique Harden, co-director of the public interest law firm Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, who testified before Geneva-based U.N. experts.
"Recovery must mean the end of displacement for the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast," added Harden, who returned to New Orleans last week. "What we have instead is recovery that demolishes affordable housing."
U.N.-appointed experts Miloon Kothari, the U.N. Human Rights Council's investigator for housing, and Gay McDougall, an expert on minority issues, urged U.S. and local government leaders to further include current and former residents in discussions that would help them return home.
"The spiraling costs of private housing and rental units, and in particular the demolition of public housing, puts these communities in further distress, increasing poverty and homelessness," said a joint statement by the men. "We therefore call on the Federal Government and State and local authorities to immediately halt the demolitions of public housing in New Orleans."
But local officials said the U.N. experts were too detached from the complexities of the post-Katrina city to claim razing of the buildings was racist. City officials were riled, but mostly planned to ignore the finding.
"The past model of public housing in New Orleans has been a failed one - years of neglect and mismanagement left our public housing developments in ruin," said a joint statement issued by the city council Thursday. "These are critical times in our city's history - we can choose to continue on the path of progress and positive change or we can choose to maintain the status quo."
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development also weighed in, calling the U.N. expert findings "misinformed."
"We do not want to relegate thousands of minority and low-income families back into the sub-standard conditions of New Orleans' public housing - conditions only made worse by Hurricane Katrina," said a statement issued by HUD's press offices.
The expert comments did not entail an official U.N. resolution, but came a day before a larger U.N. racism panel planned to discuss Katrina recovery efforts and public housing in New Orleans. Neither opinion carries legal or regulatory power.
The demolition of the housing projects appears all but assured, early stages have begun at some developments only demolition permits remain for others. The council voted unanimously in December to raze the units. Still, critics say it was the council's first major action after the election of a white majority that reflected demographic shifts caused by Katrina.
"After the disaster there was a desire for a clean slate on the part of local leaders," said Robert Tannen, a local urban planner and housing advocate. "And that clean slate mostly displaces poor and minority residents."
Since the storm in August 2005, the city's black population has plummeted by 57 percent, while the white population fell 36 percent, according to U.S. Census data. Blacks now make up roughly 58 percent of New Orleans compared to 67 percent before the storm. Blacks have been in the majority for about three decades.
New Orleans has seen 65 percent of its total population return, according to a local demographer who uses utility hookups to offer the most detailed figures. But some black enclaves are a fraction of what they were, and others see their very existence threatened.
According to demographer Greg Rigamer, the Lower 9th Ward has seen only 9.9 percent of its population return. A traditionally mixed-race neighborhood within the Lower 9th, Holy Cross, has fared better with a 37 percent return, benefiting from the work of preservationists who seek to restore the federally declared historic district. Eastern New Orleans, a sprawling area that includes the black upper middle-class enclave of Eastover, has nearly kept pace with the overall return, with about 60 percent of its residents home.
But Rigamer's numbers bear out the racial and economic underpinnings of the recovery. Affluent and mostly white areas not only have all their residents back, but are growing. The Garden District has seen 107 percent of its population return, the French Quarter 103 percent, and an adjacent neighborhood called Faubourg Marigny has a 100.3 percent return rate.
Tannen, who has advocated for the housing to be improved but not destroyed, said while the focus on public housing is symbolically powerful, the loss of working-class rental units to Katrina is more significant.
According to the Oakland, Calif., think tank PolicyLink, hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed 41,000 apartments affordable to people earning less than the area's median income, and only 43 percent will be rebuilt under federal programs. Prospects are bleakest for those earning less-than $26,150. According to the think tank, only 16 percent of housing affordable to them is scheduled for federally funded redevelopment.
(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
Showing posts with label Post-Katrina New Orleans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Post-Katrina New Orleans. Show all posts
Monday, July 28, 2008
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Resources Scarce, Homelessness Persists in New Orleans
By SHAILA DEWAN - The New York Times - Published: May 28, 2008
NEW ORLEANS — Mayor C. Ray Nagin recently suggested a way to reduce this city’s post-Katrina homeless population: give them one-way bus tickets out of town.
Patrick Pugh and Clara Gomez outside their tent at a homeless encampment under a highway overpass in New Orleans.
Mr. Nagin later insisted the off-the-cuff proposal was just a joke. But he has portrayed the dozens of people camped in a tent city under a freeway overpass near Canal Street as recalcitrant drug and alcohol abusers who refuse shelter, give passers-by the finger and, worst of all, hail from somewhere else.
While many of the homeless do have addiction problems or mental illness, a survey by advocacy groups in February showed that 86 percent were from the New Orleans area. Sixty percent said they were homeless because of Hurricane Katrina, and about 30 percent said they had received rental assistance at one time from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Not far from the French Quarter, flanking Canal Street on Claiborne Avenue, they are living inside a long corridor formed not of walls and a roof but of the thick stench of human waste and sweat tinged with alcohol, crack and desperation.
The inhabitants are natives like Ronald Gardner, 54, an H.I.V.-positive man who said he had never before slept on the streets until Katrina. Or Ronald Berry, 57, who despite being a paranoid schizophrenic said he had lived on his own, in a rented house in the Lower Ninth Ward, for a dozen years before the storm. Both men receive disability checks of $637 a month, not nearly enough to cover post-hurricane rents.
“If I could just get a warm room,” Mr. Gardner said, sitting on the cot under which all his belongings are stored, “I could take it from there.”
Lurlene Newell, 54, said the Federal Emergency Management Agency had paid her rent in Texas after the storm, but when she moved back to New Orleans, she could not find a place to live.
By one very rough estimate, the number of homeless people in New Orleans has doubled since Katrina struck in 2005. Homelessness has also become a much more visible problem — late last year, Unity of Greater New Orleans, a network of agencies that help the homeless, cleared an encampment of 300 people that had sprung up in Duncan Plaza, in full view of City Hall. About 280 of those people are now in apartments, but others have flocked to fill several blocks of Claiborne Avenue at Canal, near enough to the French Quarter to regularly encounter tourists.
Unity workers are hoping that Congress will include $76 million in the supplemental appropriation for Iraq to pay for vouchers that would give rent subsidies and services to 3,000 disabled homeless people.
On Thursday, the Senate passed a version of the bill that included the vouchers; the current House version, not yet approved, does not include them. Without the vouchers, said Martha J. Kegel, Unity’s executive director, even those people already in apartments will be in jeopardy. Their current vouchers, issued under a “rapid rehousing” program, expire at the end of 2008.
New Orleans had 2,800 beds for the homeless before the storm; now it has 2,000, Ms. Kegel said. Those beds are full, but even if they were not, many of the people living on Canal Street are not the sort who can stay in a group shelter. According to the survey, which was conducted before dawn one morning so that only those who actually sleep in the camp would be counted, 80 percent have at least one physical disability, 58 percent have had some kind of addiction, 40 percent are mentally ill, and 19 percent were “tri-morbid” — they had a disability, an addiction and mental illness.
For these difficult cases, permanent housing with supportive services, like counseling, has become a preferred method. But it takes time, patience, money and one thing New Orleans is short of: apartments. Many apartment developers who applied for tax credits after Hurricane Katrina were required to set aside 5 percent of their units for supportive housing, but because of high construction costs and other factors, far fewer units than expected are in the pipeline. And without the vouchers, even those units will not be affordable.
Unity has already moved 60 of the most vulnerable people from the camp to hotel rooms, paid for with a city health department grant, including a woman who is eight months pregnant and a paranoid schizophrenic who is diabetic and a double amputee. In the filth of the camp, the amputee’s stumps had become infected.
Outreach workers have found clients with cancer and colostomy bags, and one so disabled that he was unable to talk. On average, people have stayed in hotels for six weeks before Unity finds an apartment and cobbles together the necessary funds.
Mike Miller, the director of supportive housing placement at Unity, said the camp had become a public health hazard since the city removed some portable toilets in February.
“Two outreach workers have tested positive for tuberculosis,” Mr. Miller said. “There’s hepatitis C, there’s AIDS, there’s H.I.V. Everyone out there’s had an eye infection of some sort. I got one.”
On Thursday, Herman Moore Jr. was hanging out with a friend in the camp. Mr. Moore had lived in a Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer, then a FEMA-financed hotel room, but had not realized that he was eligible for further assistance after the 30-day hotel stay ended last fall. Tipped off by his brother, Mr. Moore had only recently rented a house under the emergency management agency’s program, but had yet to pay the deposit or turn on the utilities because he had no money.
“If I had a TV and some electricity, you all wouldn’t even see me,” he said.
Clara Gomez, 45, told an outreach worker that she had just discovered she was pregnant. Like about 14 percent of the homeless people under the bridge, Ms. Gomez had come to New Orleans to work as a builder, but acknowledged that she had problems with drug and alcohol abuse.
After getting fired from one job, she wound up under the bridge, where she met Patrick Pugh, 36, a New Orleanian who said he had been in drug rehabilitation, turning his life around, when the storm hit. Their IDs had been stolen, they said, making it difficult to get jobs or food stamps.
Seated on a mattress, Ms. Gomez shifted nervously, changing positions every few seconds, all the while keeping her arms anchored around Mr. Pugh’s neck.
“We’re ready,” she said. “We’re ready to get out of here.”
NEW ORLEANS — Mayor C. Ray Nagin recently suggested a way to reduce this city’s post-Katrina homeless population: give them one-way bus tickets out of town.
Patrick Pugh and Clara Gomez outside their tent at a homeless encampment under a highway overpass in New Orleans.
Mr. Nagin later insisted the off-the-cuff proposal was just a joke. But he has portrayed the dozens of people camped in a tent city under a freeway overpass near Canal Street as recalcitrant drug and alcohol abusers who refuse shelter, give passers-by the finger and, worst of all, hail from somewhere else.
While many of the homeless do have addiction problems or mental illness, a survey by advocacy groups in February showed that 86 percent were from the New Orleans area. Sixty percent said they were homeless because of Hurricane Katrina, and about 30 percent said they had received rental assistance at one time from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Not far from the French Quarter, flanking Canal Street on Claiborne Avenue, they are living inside a long corridor formed not of walls and a roof but of the thick stench of human waste and sweat tinged with alcohol, crack and desperation.
The inhabitants are natives like Ronald Gardner, 54, an H.I.V.-positive man who said he had never before slept on the streets until Katrina. Or Ronald Berry, 57, who despite being a paranoid schizophrenic said he had lived on his own, in a rented house in the Lower Ninth Ward, for a dozen years before the storm. Both men receive disability checks of $637 a month, not nearly enough to cover post-hurricane rents.
“If I could just get a warm room,” Mr. Gardner said, sitting on the cot under which all his belongings are stored, “I could take it from there.”
Lurlene Newell, 54, said the Federal Emergency Management Agency had paid her rent in Texas after the storm, but when she moved back to New Orleans, she could not find a place to live.
By one very rough estimate, the number of homeless people in New Orleans has doubled since Katrina struck in 2005. Homelessness has also become a much more visible problem — late last year, Unity of Greater New Orleans, a network of agencies that help the homeless, cleared an encampment of 300 people that had sprung up in Duncan Plaza, in full view of City Hall. About 280 of those people are now in apartments, but others have flocked to fill several blocks of Claiborne Avenue at Canal, near enough to the French Quarter to regularly encounter tourists.
Unity workers are hoping that Congress will include $76 million in the supplemental appropriation for Iraq to pay for vouchers that would give rent subsidies and services to 3,000 disabled homeless people.
On Thursday, the Senate passed a version of the bill that included the vouchers; the current House version, not yet approved, does not include them. Without the vouchers, said Martha J. Kegel, Unity’s executive director, even those people already in apartments will be in jeopardy. Their current vouchers, issued under a “rapid rehousing” program, expire at the end of 2008.
New Orleans had 2,800 beds for the homeless before the storm; now it has 2,000, Ms. Kegel said. Those beds are full, but even if they were not, many of the people living on Canal Street are not the sort who can stay in a group shelter. According to the survey, which was conducted before dawn one morning so that only those who actually sleep in the camp would be counted, 80 percent have at least one physical disability, 58 percent have had some kind of addiction, 40 percent are mentally ill, and 19 percent were “tri-morbid” — they had a disability, an addiction and mental illness.
For these difficult cases, permanent housing with supportive services, like counseling, has become a preferred method. But it takes time, patience, money and one thing New Orleans is short of: apartments. Many apartment developers who applied for tax credits after Hurricane Katrina were required to set aside 5 percent of their units for supportive housing, but because of high construction costs and other factors, far fewer units than expected are in the pipeline. And without the vouchers, even those units will not be affordable.
Unity has already moved 60 of the most vulnerable people from the camp to hotel rooms, paid for with a city health department grant, including a woman who is eight months pregnant and a paranoid schizophrenic who is diabetic and a double amputee. In the filth of the camp, the amputee’s stumps had become infected.
Outreach workers have found clients with cancer and colostomy bags, and one so disabled that he was unable to talk. On average, people have stayed in hotels for six weeks before Unity finds an apartment and cobbles together the necessary funds.
Mike Miller, the director of supportive housing placement at Unity, said the camp had become a public health hazard since the city removed some portable toilets in February.
“Two outreach workers have tested positive for tuberculosis,” Mr. Miller said. “There’s hepatitis C, there’s AIDS, there’s H.I.V. Everyone out there’s had an eye infection of some sort. I got one.”
On Thursday, Herman Moore Jr. was hanging out with a friend in the camp. Mr. Moore had lived in a Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer, then a FEMA-financed hotel room, but had not realized that he was eligible for further assistance after the 30-day hotel stay ended last fall. Tipped off by his brother, Mr. Moore had only recently rented a house under the emergency management agency’s program, but had yet to pay the deposit or turn on the utilities because he had no money.
“If I had a TV and some electricity, you all wouldn’t even see me,” he said.
Clara Gomez, 45, told an outreach worker that she had just discovered she was pregnant. Like about 14 percent of the homeless people under the bridge, Ms. Gomez had come to New Orleans to work as a builder, but acknowledged that she had problems with drug and alcohol abuse.
After getting fired from one job, she wound up under the bridge, where she met Patrick Pugh, 36, a New Orleanian who said he had been in drug rehabilitation, turning his life around, when the storm hit. Their IDs had been stolen, they said, making it difficult to get jobs or food stamps.
Seated on a mattress, Ms. Gomez shifted nervously, changing positions every few seconds, all the while keeping her arms anchored around Mr. Pugh’s neck.
“We’re ready,” she said. “We’re ready to get out of here.”
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
So Many Places to Live, but So Far Out of Reach
By LESLIE EATON - New York Times - Published: January 27, 2008
NEW ORLEANS — Thousands of people are looking for a place to live in this city. Many thousands of houses are vacant or for sale, and acres of land sit empty.
A new three-story home stands next to abandoned houses and empty lots, a situation residents call the jack-o’-lantern effect.
But turning potential housing into inhabited homes is proving to be a major challenge, even for a city that survived the fury of Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the levees. For those who need shelter the most, these houses are out of reach.
More than 8,800 houses are for sale in the New Orleans metropolitan area — almost as many as were sold in the last 12 months, according to one of the city’s leading real estate brokerage firms. High insurance costs and the crash in the mortgage market nationwide have slowed sales here, whether people are moving out of town or opting to relocate to a different neighborhood.
Thousands more damaged houses — probably 6,000 within the city limits — are being bought by the State of Louisiana through its Road Home program, which compensates homeowners for their losses in the 2005 hurricanes. These properties will be turned over to local governments for redevelopment or resale. (By one estimate, as many as 20,000 buildings in the city are derelict.)
Meanwhile, 27,500 families, mostly from New Orleans, are still living in tiny, tinny government-issued travel trailers across the state, waiting for their homes to be repaired or for some kind of affordable housing to become available. Many other people remain in faraway cities. And hundreds — by some accounts, thousands — live on the city streets.
The housing situation in New Orleans varies almost block by block. Some areas are hotter than before the storm; others are wastelands. In some neighborhoods, new or rebuilt houses are scattered among empty lots and boarded-up homes, a phenomenon known here as the jack-o’-lantern effect.
By Lake Pontchartrain, in a middle-class neighborhood called Vista Park, a resident, K. C. King, can see a little of everything: new houses raised 10 feet above sea level to surpass new flood regulations, abandoned ranch houses with moldy furniture inside, bald lots, for-sale signs, travel trailers and one renovated house — not popular with the neighbors — that has been turned into a rental. There is even a swimming pool still full of what people living nearby say is filthy floodwater.
“In this neighborhood,” Mr. King said, “the jack-o’-lantern effect is in 3-D.”
Many reasons figure into the mismatch between the need and availability of housing, including history, geography, lingering storm damage and the impact of government programs, intended and unintended. The factor most obvious to economists is price.
“At the very low end of the income strata, we do have a shortage of housing,” said Ivan J. Miestchovich, director of the Center for Economic Development and Real Estate at the University of New Orleans.
Demand for expensive property, however, is low. “On houses more than $350,000 in price, your marketing time is 18 months,” Dr. Miestchovich said. “Over $1 million, it’s two years and more.”
Housing prices, which spiked after the 2005 storm, have been declining. The average sale price in the city dropped to $159,000 in November, the lowest level in years (though it increased in December to an average of $222,000). Even so, sales numbers have been weak for the last few months.
Part of New Orleans’s allure used to be that it was possible to live well on little because a lot of cheap, if rundown, housing was available — a result of years of slow migration from the city. Much of that housing was destroyed; many remaining properties need expensive repairs.
Construction and insurance costs have soared, and borrowers need better credit records to get a housing loan because of problems in the national mortgage market, said Mtumishi St. Julien, executive director of the Finance Authority of New Orleans.
Before Hurricane Katrina, most people in the city were renters, not owners, and more than 50,000 rental units in the metropolitan area were damaged or destroyed when the floodwaters rose. Rents at the remaining apartments shot up by almost 50 percent; a two-bedroom apartment that might have rented for $660 a month in 2004 now costs close to $1,000 a month, according to federal data.
Efforts to help replace rental housing got off to a slow start. Melissa Landry, press secretary for the Louisiana Recovery Authority, said state programs were helping to build 25,000 apartments that would be affordable for low-income residents.
The state, the city and private civic organizations like the Jeremiah Group are hoping eventually to turn those renters into homeowners, by providing subsidies, reducing construction costs and finding a way to cut the price of insurance.
Local and federal officials said they did not expect an increase in homelessness after recent decisions to demolish public housing projects and to close trailer parks run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
But people who work with the families in question are not so sure. The Rev. Marshall Truehill Jr., pastor of the First United Baptist Church, said he was so concerned about an influx of homeless families that he asked the city to convert several former school buildings into shelters.
Based on the turnout at recent forums and public meetings, one question on the minds of many people here is what will happen to all the houses, most badly damaged, that the Road Home program is buying from people who are not rebuilding.
In the city, the properties will be handled by the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, which before the hurricanes was supposed to deal with blighted properties, and by most accounts failed. Joseph Williams, a former banker who became executive director of the agency a year ago, said it had been underfinanced and understaffed in the past but was gearing up to deal with both the Road Home properties and abandoned sites.
Progress has been slow. Last fall, the agency sold 27 blighted properties for redevelopment pilot projects; a nonprofit group called Assisting Hand will break ground Friday on the first of these, in the Seventh Ward.
But what the agency will be able to do with the Road Home properties remains unclear. For one thing, it does not yet know all their locations. In addition to proposals to encourage developers to build or rebuild housing that could be made affordable, the agency is actually planning to reduce the amount of potential housing by allowing neighbors to buy adjacent properties to, for example, expand their yards.
That is what Mr. King would like to do with the house next to his in the Vista Park neighborhood — or rather, next to where his house will be when he rebuilds. He and his wife, Kathi, are still trailer-bound. But many details remain to be worked out, like how much the city will charge for the property.
“I’d just as soon buy it and split it with the neighbors,” he said. “But I’m not sure I can afford it.”
NEW ORLEANS — Thousands of people are looking for a place to live in this city. Many thousands of houses are vacant or for sale, and acres of land sit empty.
A new three-story home stands next to abandoned houses and empty lots, a situation residents call the jack-o’-lantern effect.
But turning potential housing into inhabited homes is proving to be a major challenge, even for a city that survived the fury of Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the levees. For those who need shelter the most, these houses are out of reach.
More than 8,800 houses are for sale in the New Orleans metropolitan area — almost as many as were sold in the last 12 months, according to one of the city’s leading real estate brokerage firms. High insurance costs and the crash in the mortgage market nationwide have slowed sales here, whether people are moving out of town or opting to relocate to a different neighborhood.
Thousands more damaged houses — probably 6,000 within the city limits — are being bought by the State of Louisiana through its Road Home program, which compensates homeowners for their losses in the 2005 hurricanes. These properties will be turned over to local governments for redevelopment or resale. (By one estimate, as many as 20,000 buildings in the city are derelict.)
Meanwhile, 27,500 families, mostly from New Orleans, are still living in tiny, tinny government-issued travel trailers across the state, waiting for their homes to be repaired or for some kind of affordable housing to become available. Many other people remain in faraway cities. And hundreds — by some accounts, thousands — live on the city streets.
The housing situation in New Orleans varies almost block by block. Some areas are hotter than before the storm; others are wastelands. In some neighborhoods, new or rebuilt houses are scattered among empty lots and boarded-up homes, a phenomenon known here as the jack-o’-lantern effect.
By Lake Pontchartrain, in a middle-class neighborhood called Vista Park, a resident, K. C. King, can see a little of everything: new houses raised 10 feet above sea level to surpass new flood regulations, abandoned ranch houses with moldy furniture inside, bald lots, for-sale signs, travel trailers and one renovated house — not popular with the neighbors — that has been turned into a rental. There is even a swimming pool still full of what people living nearby say is filthy floodwater.
“In this neighborhood,” Mr. King said, “the jack-o’-lantern effect is in 3-D.”
Many reasons figure into the mismatch between the need and availability of housing, including history, geography, lingering storm damage and the impact of government programs, intended and unintended. The factor most obvious to economists is price.
“At the very low end of the income strata, we do have a shortage of housing,” said Ivan J. Miestchovich, director of the Center for Economic Development and Real Estate at the University of New Orleans.
Demand for expensive property, however, is low. “On houses more than $350,000 in price, your marketing time is 18 months,” Dr. Miestchovich said. “Over $1 million, it’s two years and more.”
Housing prices, which spiked after the 2005 storm, have been declining. The average sale price in the city dropped to $159,000 in November, the lowest level in years (though it increased in December to an average of $222,000). Even so, sales numbers have been weak for the last few months.
Part of New Orleans’s allure used to be that it was possible to live well on little because a lot of cheap, if rundown, housing was available — a result of years of slow migration from the city. Much of that housing was destroyed; many remaining properties need expensive repairs.
Construction and insurance costs have soared, and borrowers need better credit records to get a housing loan because of problems in the national mortgage market, said Mtumishi St. Julien, executive director of the Finance Authority of New Orleans.
Before Hurricane Katrina, most people in the city were renters, not owners, and more than 50,000 rental units in the metropolitan area were damaged or destroyed when the floodwaters rose. Rents at the remaining apartments shot up by almost 50 percent; a two-bedroom apartment that might have rented for $660 a month in 2004 now costs close to $1,000 a month, according to federal data.
Efforts to help replace rental housing got off to a slow start. Melissa Landry, press secretary for the Louisiana Recovery Authority, said state programs were helping to build 25,000 apartments that would be affordable for low-income residents.
The state, the city and private civic organizations like the Jeremiah Group are hoping eventually to turn those renters into homeowners, by providing subsidies, reducing construction costs and finding a way to cut the price of insurance.
Local and federal officials said they did not expect an increase in homelessness after recent decisions to demolish public housing projects and to close trailer parks run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
But people who work with the families in question are not so sure. The Rev. Marshall Truehill Jr., pastor of the First United Baptist Church, said he was so concerned about an influx of homeless families that he asked the city to convert several former school buildings into shelters.
Based on the turnout at recent forums and public meetings, one question on the minds of many people here is what will happen to all the houses, most badly damaged, that the Road Home program is buying from people who are not rebuilding.
In the city, the properties will be handled by the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, which before the hurricanes was supposed to deal with blighted properties, and by most accounts failed. Joseph Williams, a former banker who became executive director of the agency a year ago, said it had been underfinanced and understaffed in the past but was gearing up to deal with both the Road Home properties and abandoned sites.
Progress has been slow. Last fall, the agency sold 27 blighted properties for redevelopment pilot projects; a nonprofit group called Assisting Hand will break ground Friday on the first of these, in the Seventh Ward.
But what the agency will be able to do with the Road Home properties remains unclear. For one thing, it does not yet know all their locations. In addition to proposals to encourage developers to build or rebuild housing that could be made affordable, the agency is actually planning to reduce the amount of potential housing by allowing neighbors to buy adjacent properties to, for example, expand their yards.
That is what Mr. King would like to do with the house next to his in the Vista Park neighborhood — or rather, next to where his house will be when he rebuilds. He and his wife, Kathi, are still trailer-bound. But many details remain to be worked out, like how much the city will charge for the property.
“I’d just as soon buy it and split it with the neighbors,” he said. “But I’m not sure I can afford it.”
In New Orleans, Plan to Raze Low-Income Housing Draws Protest
By LESLIE EATON - New York Times - Published: December 14, 2007
NEW ORLEANS — At a moment when the shortage of low-income housing in the city is causing significant hardship, the federal government is beginning this week to tear down thousands of apartments in the city’s four biggest public housing projects.
The plan is producing sharp opposition, which has escalated to include raucous demonstrations and, perhaps, threats of arson and other violence.
On Thursday, outside City Hall and opposite a park where homeless people are living in dozens of small tents, about 100 demonstrators chanted “Stop the demolitions now!” A few were displaced public-housing residents; most were activists and public housing advocates from here and cities from New York to California.
Though local and federal housing officials say the storm-damaged projects were inhuman places to live and should not be rebuilt, some protesters accused the government of a darker motive behind the demolition plan. They contended that the government’s real aim was to keep the poor, mostly female, almost entirely black residents of public housing from returning to their city, to their homes.
“They don’t want this city to be for the poor, working-class people,” said Sharon Sears Jasper, a former public housing resident who says she is now living in a “slum house.” Government policies favor the wealthy and tourists, she continued after the demonstration. “Everyone else, kick them to the curb.”
Meanwhile, James Bernazzani, special agent in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation office here, confirmed that its domestic terrorism unit was investigating the source of small posters reading “For Every Public Housing Unit Destroyed a Condo Unit Will Be Destroyed.”
Lawyers for former residents continued to ask the courts to stop the plan, by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, to demolish buildings containing 4,500 units, about 3,000 of which were occupied before Hurricane Katrina.
The government said private developers would replace them with about 3,300 subsidized housing units in developments that will also include homes for people with higher incomes, but others said there would not be that many low-cost units.
The debate over the plan has become a political issue. On Wednesday, John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, urged the government to build replacement housing before bulldozing the projects.
Demolition began on Wednesday night at one housing project that had been scheduled to be destroyed before the storm and will begin on two other projects this weekend.
Federal officials say the barracks-style complexes were substandard before Hurricane Katrina and were badly damaged by the storm. New subsidized housing, and vouchers for existing and new apartments, will ensure that no one who lived in the demolished projects will be left homeless, they said.
“The goal was to rebuild it, build it better, and move people into new homes,” said Jereon M. Brown, a spokesman for the housing department.
Mr. Brown said of the protesters: “Ask how many of them have lived in public housing, have been to public housing other than to protest.”
But the protesters, including some former residents of the projects, say the sturdy apartment buildings could be rehabilitated, especially at a time when little low-cost housing is available in New Orleans.
Hurricane Katrina destroyed more than 50,000 rental units here, and damaged thousands more apartments, affecting two-thirds of the city’s rental stock. Rents have soared for the apartments that remain habitable.
Adding to the pressure on the rental market, almost 3,000 families living in government trailer parks in Louisiana must find a new place to live in the next few months, as the Federal Emergency Management Agency closes the sites it manages. By the end of the year, it will stop paying for 3,700 trailers in private trailer camps.
Some residents of the complexes and many who lived nearby said that they were delighted the projects were going to disappear and that they believed they would be replaced with something better.
Stacy S. Head, a City Council member whose district includes two of the complexes, said she had heard from many who welcomed the new plan.
“The vast majority do not want to go back to the way it was,” Ms. Head said, adding that the old projects were run-down and dangerous, and that the new buildings would help the working poor.
As for the protesters, she said, “I wish that all these people, particularly from out of town, would just leave us alone and let us improve our city.”
Some advocates for the residents said they did not oppose changes or improvements but wanted a guarantee that there would be a place for former residents in the new developments, a promise that they said had not always been kept in previous redevelopments of public housing here.
“Many residents are not against redevelopment but want an interim housing plan that gets them home,” said Judith Browne-Dianis, a director of the Advancement Project in Washington, a civil rights group that is involved in the legal fight against the demolition plan.
At the project where demolition has begun, the B. W. Cooper Apartments, not far from the Superdome, residents were almost unanimous in wanting the government to finish tearing down some of the four-story blond-brick buildings that had been erected in the 1950s and closed before the storm.
“I know people need places to stay, but these places aren’t for living,” Trina Davis said, as a group of women sitting on a nearby porch talked of their hopes of moving into the new buildings that are to replace the old ones across Erato Street.
But Gertrude Luster, who was moving in nearby, said that public housing was needed for people of her age living on fixed incomes. She is 79 and receives $643 a month.
“I don’t think they should tear none of it down,” Ms. Luster said. “People need a place to come back to.”
NEW ORLEANS — At a moment when the shortage of low-income housing in the city is causing significant hardship, the federal government is beginning this week to tear down thousands of apartments in the city’s four biggest public housing projects.
The plan is producing sharp opposition, which has escalated to include raucous demonstrations and, perhaps, threats of arson and other violence.
On Thursday, outside City Hall and opposite a park where homeless people are living in dozens of small tents, about 100 demonstrators chanted “Stop the demolitions now!” A few were displaced public-housing residents; most were activists and public housing advocates from here and cities from New York to California.
Though local and federal housing officials say the storm-damaged projects were inhuman places to live and should not be rebuilt, some protesters accused the government of a darker motive behind the demolition plan. They contended that the government’s real aim was to keep the poor, mostly female, almost entirely black residents of public housing from returning to their city, to their homes.
“They don’t want this city to be for the poor, working-class people,” said Sharon Sears Jasper, a former public housing resident who says she is now living in a “slum house.” Government policies favor the wealthy and tourists, she continued after the demonstration. “Everyone else, kick them to the curb.”
Meanwhile, James Bernazzani, special agent in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation office here, confirmed that its domestic terrorism unit was investigating the source of small posters reading “For Every Public Housing Unit Destroyed a Condo Unit Will Be Destroyed.”
Lawyers for former residents continued to ask the courts to stop the plan, by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, to demolish buildings containing 4,500 units, about 3,000 of which were occupied before Hurricane Katrina.
The government said private developers would replace them with about 3,300 subsidized housing units in developments that will also include homes for people with higher incomes, but others said there would not be that many low-cost units.
The debate over the plan has become a political issue. On Wednesday, John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, urged the government to build replacement housing before bulldozing the projects.
Demolition began on Wednesday night at one housing project that had been scheduled to be destroyed before the storm and will begin on two other projects this weekend.
Federal officials say the barracks-style complexes were substandard before Hurricane Katrina and were badly damaged by the storm. New subsidized housing, and vouchers for existing and new apartments, will ensure that no one who lived in the demolished projects will be left homeless, they said.
“The goal was to rebuild it, build it better, and move people into new homes,” said Jereon M. Brown, a spokesman for the housing department.
Mr. Brown said of the protesters: “Ask how many of them have lived in public housing, have been to public housing other than to protest.”
But the protesters, including some former residents of the projects, say the sturdy apartment buildings could be rehabilitated, especially at a time when little low-cost housing is available in New Orleans.
Hurricane Katrina destroyed more than 50,000 rental units here, and damaged thousands more apartments, affecting two-thirds of the city’s rental stock. Rents have soared for the apartments that remain habitable.
Adding to the pressure on the rental market, almost 3,000 families living in government trailer parks in Louisiana must find a new place to live in the next few months, as the Federal Emergency Management Agency closes the sites it manages. By the end of the year, it will stop paying for 3,700 trailers in private trailer camps.
Some residents of the complexes and many who lived nearby said that they were delighted the projects were going to disappear and that they believed they would be replaced with something better.
Stacy S. Head, a City Council member whose district includes two of the complexes, said she had heard from many who welcomed the new plan.
“The vast majority do not want to go back to the way it was,” Ms. Head said, adding that the old projects were run-down and dangerous, and that the new buildings would help the working poor.
As for the protesters, she said, “I wish that all these people, particularly from out of town, would just leave us alone and let us improve our city.”
Some advocates for the residents said they did not oppose changes or improvements but wanted a guarantee that there would be a place for former residents in the new developments, a promise that they said had not always been kept in previous redevelopments of public housing here.
“Many residents are not against redevelopment but want an interim housing plan that gets them home,” said Judith Browne-Dianis, a director of the Advancement Project in Washington, a civil rights group that is involved in the legal fight against the demolition plan.
At the project where demolition has begun, the B. W. Cooper Apartments, not far from the Superdome, residents were almost unanimous in wanting the government to finish tearing down some of the four-story blond-brick buildings that had been erected in the 1950s and closed before the storm.
“I know people need places to stay, but these places aren’t for living,” Trina Davis said, as a group of women sitting on a nearby porch talked of their hopes of moving into the new buildings that are to replace the old ones across Erato Street.
But Gertrude Luster, who was moving in nearby, said that public housing was needed for people of her age living on fixed incomes. She is 79 and receives $643 a month.
“I don’t think they should tear none of it down,” Ms. Luster said. “People need a place to come back to.”
New Orleans Hurt by Acute Rental Shortage
By SUSAN SAULNY - New York Times - Published: December 3, 2007
NEW ORLEANS, Dec. 2 — Inside trailer No. 27 here at the A. L. Davis Playground, where the government set up a camp last year for displaced residents of Hurricane Katrina, Tracy Bernard’s meager possessions are all packed up, even though she has nowhere to go.
About a month ago, workers for the Federal Emergency Management Agency swept through her trailer park, a bleak tableau of housing of the last resort, taping eviction notices on the flimsy aluminum doors. Thousands of other trailer residents across Louisiana were informed by FEMA last week that they too would be evicted in the next six months.
But few of them will be able to return to the city from which they were flooded out 27 months ago.
More than two years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is suffering from an acute shortage of housing that has nearly doubled the cost of rental units in the city, threatening the recovery of the region and the well-being of many residents who decided to return against the odds. Before the storm, more than half of the city’s population rented housing. Yet official attention to help revive the shattered rental home and apartment market has been scant.
In some core middle- and lower-income areas, blighted dwellings stretch for blocks on end, and the city has been slow to come up with ideas for what to do with those that have been abandoned. Last week, the city housing authority approved the demolition of 4,000 public housing units at five projects damaged by the storm. In their place, the authority plans to build mixed-income projects, large parts of which will not be affordable to previous residents.
Although repairs are being made and more housing is available now than a year ago, demand is still outpacing supply.
Ms. Bernard, a veteran worker for the local public transportation agency who has to move by Monday, has been scouring the city for a place to rent. Properties in her price range, if they exist at all, routinely come without finished walls or stoves. In New Orleans, decent affordable housing remains a casualty of the storm.
“A lot of the city is still boarded up,” said Ms. Bernard, who rented a one-bedroom house in eastern New Orleans for $300 a month before Hurricane Katrina. “Where are we supposed to go?”
One of the more striking changes to appear lately in New Orleans is the highly visible number of homeless men and women living under bridges and in parks. Social service groups say about 12,000 homeless people are living in the city, about double the number before the storm.
The sense of an impending housing crisis grew stronger last week with FEMA’s announcement on Wednesday that it would close all the trailer camps it runs for victims of the 2005 hurricanes on varying schedules by the end of May. More than 900 families are living in FEMA trailer parks around the city.
The agency said its action was intended to hasten the move of residents to permanent housing from trailers. It said counselors would assist every resident in the transition. “We’re with them every step of the way,” Diane L. W. Perry, a FEMA spokeswoman, said Wednesday.
But in interviews at trailer parks last week, a reporter found that some residents had not spoken with a caseworker in weeks, even though they were scheduled to be evicted within days.
“The caseworker is very hard to get in touch with,” said Martin Blossom, a pizza cook who lives in a trailer and who is not sure where he will move in the next few days. “I haven’t talked with the caseworker for two weeks.”
Others said the information they got from caseworkers was useless. Ramona Jones said her counselor gave her several listings, but some of the apartments were not ready for habitation by her eviction date — or they were, in her words, “rat holes.” Landlords are asking $1,100 a month or more. Though Ms. Jones and others are eligible for financial assistance to help pay the high rents, many are reluctant, knowing that, like the trailers, the assistance could disappear, leaving them stranded with huge bills.
“We done been through so much with FEMA till where it’s easy for the federal government to back out on their word,” Ms. Jones, a factory worker, said. “They did it before. Everybody’s looking at, ‘What if?’ ”
Time has already run out for some. Ms. Bernard, 40, and her two daughters got the final word on Friday that they were evicted, cast out of the only home they have had since the storm to whereabouts unknown. And they were not alone.
“I don’t know what’s going to become of us,” said Tiffany Farbe, who lives in a trailer park near the Mississippi River in the Uptown part of New Orleans with her son and mother. “They said get out. I’ve explained to them over and over again our situation. FEMA just makes you feel like dirt.”
The agency objects to that characterization, and says it is only trying to help.
“It’s the next step in the recovery,” said Ronnie Simpson, a FEMA spokesman. “It’s the individual’s responsibility to go out and find what’s suitable for them.”
While the agency provides listings, Mr. Simpson said it did not necessarily endorse the properties or know much about them beyond their locations and the basics, such as the number of bedrooms.
“We know it’s a tough decision, and that’s not lost on us,” he said, but “more and more housing becomes available every day, that’s a fact. The sooner you begin the process, the better. You want to start early and pick what’s right for your family.” He added: “We’re very sensitive to the fact that this isn’t an easy move. But it’s a necessary move.”
Before the hurricane, housing advocates estimated there were about 6,300 homeless people in New Orleans and neighboring Jefferson Parish. Today, the count is 12,000 and growing. Experts said it was hard to ignore the link between the housing situation and homelessness.
“FEMA and the federal bureaucracy seem oblivious to the fact that virtually no new affordable rental housing has yet appeared in New Orleans to replace what was lost,” said Martha J. Kegel, executive director of Unity of Greater New Orleans, a group of 60 agencies that house and feed the homeless. “It will take a long time for enough replacement affordable housing to be built. To withdraw housing assistance to the neediest people is a shirking of federal responsibility for the design failure of the federal levees in New Orleans, which was the cause of most of the destruction of affordable housing here.”
In the past several months, a homeless encampment has sprung up on the steps of City Hall — partly because it is a safe open space and partly because it is a political statement. Tents and sleeping bags are aligned in rows. The crowd of hundreds is a mix of young and old, white and black.
Michael Reeves, 45, sleeps on the grass outside City Hall. He used to rent a one-bedroom in the Ninth Ward for $350 before the storm. “Ain’t nothing left but the ground,” he said. “We didn’t have nowhere to go so we came here.”
Not everyone in the park is a native of New Orleans. Some people came here after the storm to do construction work without realizing they would not be able to find a place to live. Some sleep on-site in unfinished buildings; others have taken up residence in abandoned buildings or in parks.
Ken Cimino, 48, sleeps outside of City Hall, too. He does odd jobs at the Superdome, mostly picking up trash after Saints football games. Mr. Cimino drove to New Orleans recently from New Haven, Conn.
“I came here for construction work, and found the situation wasn’t quite what I expected,” he said. “I thought I’d live out of my car for a few weeks until I found a place. Used up my savings. I just got caught off balance.”
Now, Mr. Cimino says he cannot afford to drive back to Connecticut. He is just one of many laborers who find themselves without options.
Ms. Bernard said she might end up on a friend’s mother’s couch until she wears out her welcome. Then what?
“I know I’m going to find something,” she said. “I have faith. I know God’s going to work something out for us.”
NEW ORLEANS, Dec. 2 — Inside trailer No. 27 here at the A. L. Davis Playground, where the government set up a camp last year for displaced residents of Hurricane Katrina, Tracy Bernard’s meager possessions are all packed up, even though she has nowhere to go.
About a month ago, workers for the Federal Emergency Management Agency swept through her trailer park, a bleak tableau of housing of the last resort, taping eviction notices on the flimsy aluminum doors. Thousands of other trailer residents across Louisiana were informed by FEMA last week that they too would be evicted in the next six months.
But few of them will be able to return to the city from which they were flooded out 27 months ago.
More than two years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is suffering from an acute shortage of housing that has nearly doubled the cost of rental units in the city, threatening the recovery of the region and the well-being of many residents who decided to return against the odds. Before the storm, more than half of the city’s population rented housing. Yet official attention to help revive the shattered rental home and apartment market has been scant.
In some core middle- and lower-income areas, blighted dwellings stretch for blocks on end, and the city has been slow to come up with ideas for what to do with those that have been abandoned. Last week, the city housing authority approved the demolition of 4,000 public housing units at five projects damaged by the storm. In their place, the authority plans to build mixed-income projects, large parts of which will not be affordable to previous residents.
Although repairs are being made and more housing is available now than a year ago, demand is still outpacing supply.
Ms. Bernard, a veteran worker for the local public transportation agency who has to move by Monday, has been scouring the city for a place to rent. Properties in her price range, if they exist at all, routinely come without finished walls or stoves. In New Orleans, decent affordable housing remains a casualty of the storm.
“A lot of the city is still boarded up,” said Ms. Bernard, who rented a one-bedroom house in eastern New Orleans for $300 a month before Hurricane Katrina. “Where are we supposed to go?”
One of the more striking changes to appear lately in New Orleans is the highly visible number of homeless men and women living under bridges and in parks. Social service groups say about 12,000 homeless people are living in the city, about double the number before the storm.
The sense of an impending housing crisis grew stronger last week with FEMA’s announcement on Wednesday that it would close all the trailer camps it runs for victims of the 2005 hurricanes on varying schedules by the end of May. More than 900 families are living in FEMA trailer parks around the city.
The agency said its action was intended to hasten the move of residents to permanent housing from trailers. It said counselors would assist every resident in the transition. “We’re with them every step of the way,” Diane L. W. Perry, a FEMA spokeswoman, said Wednesday.
But in interviews at trailer parks last week, a reporter found that some residents had not spoken with a caseworker in weeks, even though they were scheduled to be evicted within days.
“The caseworker is very hard to get in touch with,” said Martin Blossom, a pizza cook who lives in a trailer and who is not sure where he will move in the next few days. “I haven’t talked with the caseworker for two weeks.”
Others said the information they got from caseworkers was useless. Ramona Jones said her counselor gave her several listings, but some of the apartments were not ready for habitation by her eviction date — or they were, in her words, “rat holes.” Landlords are asking $1,100 a month or more. Though Ms. Jones and others are eligible for financial assistance to help pay the high rents, many are reluctant, knowing that, like the trailers, the assistance could disappear, leaving them stranded with huge bills.
“We done been through so much with FEMA till where it’s easy for the federal government to back out on their word,” Ms. Jones, a factory worker, said. “They did it before. Everybody’s looking at, ‘What if?’ ”
Time has already run out for some. Ms. Bernard, 40, and her two daughters got the final word on Friday that they were evicted, cast out of the only home they have had since the storm to whereabouts unknown. And they were not alone.
“I don’t know what’s going to become of us,” said Tiffany Farbe, who lives in a trailer park near the Mississippi River in the Uptown part of New Orleans with her son and mother. “They said get out. I’ve explained to them over and over again our situation. FEMA just makes you feel like dirt.”
The agency objects to that characterization, and says it is only trying to help.
“It’s the next step in the recovery,” said Ronnie Simpson, a FEMA spokesman. “It’s the individual’s responsibility to go out and find what’s suitable for them.”
While the agency provides listings, Mr. Simpson said it did not necessarily endorse the properties or know much about them beyond their locations and the basics, such as the number of bedrooms.
“We know it’s a tough decision, and that’s not lost on us,” he said, but “more and more housing becomes available every day, that’s a fact. The sooner you begin the process, the better. You want to start early and pick what’s right for your family.” He added: “We’re very sensitive to the fact that this isn’t an easy move. But it’s a necessary move.”
Before the hurricane, housing advocates estimated there were about 6,300 homeless people in New Orleans and neighboring Jefferson Parish. Today, the count is 12,000 and growing. Experts said it was hard to ignore the link between the housing situation and homelessness.
“FEMA and the federal bureaucracy seem oblivious to the fact that virtually no new affordable rental housing has yet appeared in New Orleans to replace what was lost,” said Martha J. Kegel, executive director of Unity of Greater New Orleans, a group of 60 agencies that house and feed the homeless. “It will take a long time for enough replacement affordable housing to be built. To withdraw housing assistance to the neediest people is a shirking of federal responsibility for the design failure of the federal levees in New Orleans, which was the cause of most of the destruction of affordable housing here.”
In the past several months, a homeless encampment has sprung up on the steps of City Hall — partly because it is a safe open space and partly because it is a political statement. Tents and sleeping bags are aligned in rows. The crowd of hundreds is a mix of young and old, white and black.
Michael Reeves, 45, sleeps on the grass outside City Hall. He used to rent a one-bedroom in the Ninth Ward for $350 before the storm. “Ain’t nothing left but the ground,” he said. “We didn’t have nowhere to go so we came here.”
Not everyone in the park is a native of New Orleans. Some people came here after the storm to do construction work without realizing they would not be able to find a place to live. Some sleep on-site in unfinished buildings; others have taken up residence in abandoned buildings or in parks.
Ken Cimino, 48, sleeps outside of City Hall, too. He does odd jobs at the Superdome, mostly picking up trash after Saints football games. Mr. Cimino drove to New Orleans recently from New Haven, Conn.
“I came here for construction work, and found the situation wasn’t quite what I expected,” he said. “I thought I’d live out of my car for a few weeks until I found a place. Used up my savings. I just got caught off balance.”
Now, Mr. Cimino says he cannot afford to drive back to Connecticut. He is just one of many laborers who find themselves without options.
Ms. Bernard said she might end up on a friend’s mother’s couch until she wears out her welcome. Then what?
“I know I’m going to find something,” she said. “I have faith. I know God’s going to work something out for us.”
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Clamoring to Come Home to New Orleans Projects
By SUSAN SAULNY - The New York Times - June 6, 2006
NEW ORLEANS, June 5 — Hundreds of displaced residents of public housing have for several days been returning here for the first time since Hurricane Katrina.
They are armed with little more than cleaning supplies and frustration, in an effort to force the city to reopen their storm-damaged apartments.
The city, saying the projects are not ready, has refused.
Outside the largest complex, the St. Bernard Housing Development in the Seventh Ward, tenant groups have organized evacuees into a tent city called Survivors Village. At the C. J. Peete Development in Central City, older residents, mostly women, broke into their old apartments and carted away plastic bags of refuse and ruined furniture.
At the Florida housing complex in the Ninth Ward, residents slipped through fences topped with razor wire to reach their old units. They piled up heaps of debris that lined Bartholomew Street in the shadow of Interstate 10.
In bone-baking heat under a cloudless sky, evacuees traveling from Atlanta, Baton Rouge, Houston and elsewhere fumed at the city and federal housing officials who have opened fewer than 1,000 of more than 8,000 public housing units in a city suffering from a housing crisis and a shortage of workers.
The residents promised on Sunday to gut and rebuild their own units, and they said they planned to be back permanently — with or without the city's permission — as soon as their work was done.
"They're not giving us any help, and we're tired of waiting," a resident, Nickole Banks, said of the Housing Authority. "People want to come home."
Damage to the projects ranged from very little to severe. The Housing Authority says that as many as 90 percent of the apartments are unsafe and uninhabitable and that time-consuming environmental evaluations remain unfinished. To the residents, these are excuses. They fear that city officials are really trying to redevelop the projects to bring in other residents with more money.
That is a move that some city and federal officials say would be desirable. Private developers have openly discussed the possibility of rebuilding some projects to house a much wider range of tenants.
Because private homeowners are being encouraged to return to the same areas, the public housing question has become part of a larger debate about the future of the city's poor population. Does New Orleans intend to make itself a home for them again?
After the storm, many of the most important institutions and services for the poor broke down and were never repaired. Charity Hospital, a historic institution for the poor, remains closed.
The public defender system has been unable to provide lawyers to poor defendants, and public transportation is essentially broke and is providing far fewer rides.
"They're trying to steal New Orleans from us," Phyllis Jenkins, who has been living in Fort Worth, said Sunday outside what used to be her home in the sprawling St. Bernard development. "Well, I will not be displaced anymore. I'll take my home any way they give it to me. It's been 10 months. They've got to know we're serious. We're going to stand here until they let us in our homes."
Local officials have been clear that they do not want to return to the way things were before the storm, when 10 traditional public housing developments concentrated low-income residents in some of the worst conditions in the city, leading to intense crime and drug use.
"We don't need to recreate pockets of poverty," the president of the City Council, Oliver M. Thomas Jr., said. "They don't work. We want more mixed-income, working communities. I think that's really the only way."
Some officials have made remarkably unveiled comments suggesting that the storm did the city a favor in terms sweeping away the poor.
Representative Richard H. Baker, a Republican from Baton Rouge, said just after the hurricane: "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it. But God did."
A spokesman for the Housing Authority, Adonis Exposé, said the authority was encouraging private and public partnerships to redevelop the projects, a move that began in limited form before the hurricane.
"We find it has worked out, and we're looking into doing it at a lot of other sites," Mr. Exposé said.
Before the storm, 2,000 public housing units had been demolished to make way for newer, better complexes. That stoked fears among residents of public housing that they were being scattered to nowhere in particular.
That turned out to be the case in the redevelopment of the St. Thomas Project, the largest and most controversial to date. It is now a mixed-income development called River Garden, with a small fraction of the original public housing tenants.
Residents who have been protesting fear more of the same could be in store for them. Some of the poor and their advocates see the lack of action as a delay tactic to diminish the chances that many would return.
The Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, which took control of the bankrupt local housing authority years ago, says it is continuing to assess the storm damage to the buildings.
"I wish I could say everything's great, come on home," an assistant secretary, Orlando J. Cabrera, said in an interview. "But it's not great. We've got entire parts of the city that have very few services, that have questionable ability in terms of infrastructure. We have to ask the hard question: 'What would these folks do? Can we put people in there?' "
Mr. Cabrera said considerable federal money was available to allow private builders to redevelop public housing in such situations. The Housing Authority has begun to apply for those funds.
Developers have been seeking permission to rebuild the crown jewel of the projects, the Iberville Housing Development, on a coveted location next to the French Quarter. It is a gem of Depression-era buildings, a sturdy assemblage of small-scale town houses with wrought-iron balconies that overlook courtyards and oak trees. The project, barely damaged by the hurricane, continues to house hundreds of families.
Michael Valentino, the managing partner of a hotel group here, and some tenants have proposed knocking down walls to make the apartments bigger, adding public art and fountains, and bringing in some tenants who would pay market-rate rent.
So far, no deal has been made.
"The magic of Iberville is that the architecture is magnificent; it could be beautiful and vibrant again," Mr. Valentino said about the development, which replaced the Storyville red-light district in an early example of slum clearance. "It's a linchpin piece of the redevelopment of Canal Street and the Quarter."
Mr. Valentino and other developers have the support of some tenants like Kim Paul, president of the residents' council. But they have also drawn the ire of another group, Hands Off Iberville, made up of housing advocates and tenants.
Even though she wants to help remake Iberville into something it never was, Ms. Paul complained about how slowly housing officials were letting residents return to the development, the least damaged in the city. She is in the unusual position of standing up for tenants and developers at the same time.
"I can show you that the apartments don't have mold or mildew," she said Sunday as she joined the other protesters at St. Bernard who were eating jambalaya out of plastic cups. "Before we do anything, we're trying to get all the pre-Katrina residents home."
Passers-by on St. Bernard Avenue, a main thoroughfare, generally supported the peaceful protest outside the fenced-in project. A woman from the Uptown section, Cliffie Pettigrew, stopped her truck and said, "I don't know if you folks are supposed to be here or not, but I want to help because I remember how sad I was when I couldn't get home."
"What ya'll need?" she asked.
"Everything," they answered.
NEW ORLEANS, June 5 — Hundreds of displaced residents of public housing have for several days been returning here for the first time since Hurricane Katrina.
They are armed with little more than cleaning supplies and frustration, in an effort to force the city to reopen their storm-damaged apartments.
The city, saying the projects are not ready, has refused.
Outside the largest complex, the St. Bernard Housing Development in the Seventh Ward, tenant groups have organized evacuees into a tent city called Survivors Village. At the C. J. Peete Development in Central City, older residents, mostly women, broke into their old apartments and carted away plastic bags of refuse and ruined furniture.
At the Florida housing complex in the Ninth Ward, residents slipped through fences topped with razor wire to reach their old units. They piled up heaps of debris that lined Bartholomew Street in the shadow of Interstate 10.
In bone-baking heat under a cloudless sky, evacuees traveling from Atlanta, Baton Rouge, Houston and elsewhere fumed at the city and federal housing officials who have opened fewer than 1,000 of more than 8,000 public housing units in a city suffering from a housing crisis and a shortage of workers.
The residents promised on Sunday to gut and rebuild their own units, and they said they planned to be back permanently — with or without the city's permission — as soon as their work was done.
"They're not giving us any help, and we're tired of waiting," a resident, Nickole Banks, said of the Housing Authority. "People want to come home."
Damage to the projects ranged from very little to severe. The Housing Authority says that as many as 90 percent of the apartments are unsafe and uninhabitable and that time-consuming environmental evaluations remain unfinished. To the residents, these are excuses. They fear that city officials are really trying to redevelop the projects to bring in other residents with more money.
That is a move that some city and federal officials say would be desirable. Private developers have openly discussed the possibility of rebuilding some projects to house a much wider range of tenants.
Because private homeowners are being encouraged to return to the same areas, the public housing question has become part of a larger debate about the future of the city's poor population. Does New Orleans intend to make itself a home for them again?
After the storm, many of the most important institutions and services for the poor broke down and were never repaired. Charity Hospital, a historic institution for the poor, remains closed.
The public defender system has been unable to provide lawyers to poor defendants, and public transportation is essentially broke and is providing far fewer rides.
"They're trying to steal New Orleans from us," Phyllis Jenkins, who has been living in Fort Worth, said Sunday outside what used to be her home in the sprawling St. Bernard development. "Well, I will not be displaced anymore. I'll take my home any way they give it to me. It's been 10 months. They've got to know we're serious. We're going to stand here until they let us in our homes."
Local officials have been clear that they do not want to return to the way things were before the storm, when 10 traditional public housing developments concentrated low-income residents in some of the worst conditions in the city, leading to intense crime and drug use.
"We don't need to recreate pockets of poverty," the president of the City Council, Oliver M. Thomas Jr., said. "They don't work. We want more mixed-income, working communities. I think that's really the only way."
Some officials have made remarkably unveiled comments suggesting that the storm did the city a favor in terms sweeping away the poor.
Representative Richard H. Baker, a Republican from Baton Rouge, said just after the hurricane: "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it. But God did."
A spokesman for the Housing Authority, Adonis Exposé, said the authority was encouraging private and public partnerships to redevelop the projects, a move that began in limited form before the hurricane.
"We find it has worked out, and we're looking into doing it at a lot of other sites," Mr. Exposé said.
Before the storm, 2,000 public housing units had been demolished to make way for newer, better complexes. That stoked fears among residents of public housing that they were being scattered to nowhere in particular.
That turned out to be the case in the redevelopment of the St. Thomas Project, the largest and most controversial to date. It is now a mixed-income development called River Garden, with a small fraction of the original public housing tenants.
Residents who have been protesting fear more of the same could be in store for them. Some of the poor and their advocates see the lack of action as a delay tactic to diminish the chances that many would return.
The Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, which took control of the bankrupt local housing authority years ago, says it is continuing to assess the storm damage to the buildings.
"I wish I could say everything's great, come on home," an assistant secretary, Orlando J. Cabrera, said in an interview. "But it's not great. We've got entire parts of the city that have very few services, that have questionable ability in terms of infrastructure. We have to ask the hard question: 'What would these folks do? Can we put people in there?' "
Mr. Cabrera said considerable federal money was available to allow private builders to redevelop public housing in such situations. The Housing Authority has begun to apply for those funds.
Developers have been seeking permission to rebuild the crown jewel of the projects, the Iberville Housing Development, on a coveted location next to the French Quarter. It is a gem of Depression-era buildings, a sturdy assemblage of small-scale town houses with wrought-iron balconies that overlook courtyards and oak trees. The project, barely damaged by the hurricane, continues to house hundreds of families.
Michael Valentino, the managing partner of a hotel group here, and some tenants have proposed knocking down walls to make the apartments bigger, adding public art and fountains, and bringing in some tenants who would pay market-rate rent.
So far, no deal has been made.
"The magic of Iberville is that the architecture is magnificent; it could be beautiful and vibrant again," Mr. Valentino said about the development, which replaced the Storyville red-light district in an early example of slum clearance. "It's a linchpin piece of the redevelopment of Canal Street and the Quarter."
Mr. Valentino and other developers have the support of some tenants like Kim Paul, president of the residents' council. But they have also drawn the ire of another group, Hands Off Iberville, made up of housing advocates and tenants.
Even though she wants to help remake Iberville into something it never was, Ms. Paul complained about how slowly housing officials were letting residents return to the development, the least damaged in the city. She is in the unusual position of standing up for tenants and developers at the same time.
"I can show you that the apartments don't have mold or mildew," she said Sunday as she joined the other protesters at St. Bernard who were eating jambalaya out of plastic cups. "Before we do anything, we're trying to get all the pre-Katrina residents home."
Passers-by on St. Bernard Avenue, a main thoroughfare, generally supported the peaceful protest outside the fenced-in project. A woman from the Uptown section, Cliffie Pettigrew, stopped her truck and said, "I don't know if you folks are supposed to be here or not, but I want to help because I remember how sad I was when I couldn't get home."
"What ya'll need?" she asked.
"Everything," they answered.
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