This is a National Issue

for people who haven’t followed the story as closely:

These housing projects were slated for demolition before the storm as part of an extensive raze-and-sorta-rebuild program to clean the blight that is the New Orleans public housing system.  They’ve been a blight since the moment they went up: my mom grew up in the St. Thomas projects, which were one of the first demolished when HUD took over.  She told me they were horrifying even when she was a little girl, and I can promise you that the decades since + low tax base + general negligence by the city hadn’t improved them.  

The plan, and it’s not a bad one in theory, is to replace the housing projects with mixed income housing.  The idea goes like this: ghettoizing the lowest income areas only encourages the other byproducts of poverty, namely drugs and crime.  If you mix things up a bit, you discourage both.  The problem, of course, is that mixed-income housing means less housing for lower income families, and they’ve never really planned for the deficit in housing.  (note: the existing projects aren’t ‘free’: families still pay ‘rent’, albeit hugely reduced.  So technically speaking, they’re still renters.)

Why did HUD take control of this process?  Because in the 90s, federal money given to the city of New Orleans to clean up its public housing mysteriously vanished.  Whatever else the crimes of the Bush administration might be, I personally wouldn’t trust the city of New Orleans with a penny if there’s no hardcore accountability, and I don’t blame HUD for wanting to take over this process.

The neighborhood that’s replaced St. Thomas is, at least from the accounts of people I’ve read (I don’t live near it anymore) leaps and bounds better than what it’s replaced.  I don’t find this hard to believe: it’s gentrification at work.  Question is, where did the former tenants who didn’t land in the new development go?  I have no idea, frankly, and demolishing more is only going to exacerbate that issue.  What’s worse, some neighborhoods have tried to block construction of new gov’t housing, although this could be for a variety of reasons: racism (seriously), crime, and the abysmal record of the Housing Authority to construct buildings and let them rot.  I’m generally down on NIMBY, but even if it’s just the latter dynamic at work it’s totally understandable.  Still, people need a place to live, and the tent cities are not a solution.

That’s all before the hurricane struck.  Now homeless is 4x per capita higher than it was before.  The city has handled every single step of this badly: after the storm they barricaded the housing projects to prevent people from reentering, even those flats that were undamaged by the storm.  Bizarrely they want to raze some of the best housing developments in the city, like the undamaged Lafitte projects.  A recent NYTimes editorial passionately defended renovation over demolition, if only because the Lafitte projects are architecturally valuable.  

In other words, this is a mess inside a disaster wrapped in a catastrophe.  I don’t have anything intelligent to add to the discussion, but I wanted to provide a little background info for people who might have better ideas.  (Sorry to bust in the diary with such a large comment!)