Here is his quote from Newshounds.
Gingrich answered: “We ought to be inventing a way so that those people who were driven out of public housing don’t return back to the totally inadequate public housing of the past but have a better future. Those children who are now scattered across America – we have to worry about their getting a real education and, candidly, in some cases they may get a better education, if we put our minds to it, than they would have gotten trapped in areas of poverty, with schools that were failing, with nobody in the community who was able to be a role model so I think the time right now is to look forward in a positive way… and how are we gonna fix the bureaucracies that so clearly failed?”
Newt Gingrich Suggests Hurricane Victims May Be Better Off As Evacuees
And of course we know Barbara Bush used almost the same words in discussing how lucky the refugees were:
“What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas,” Barbara Bush said in an interview on Monday with the radio program “Marketplace.” “Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.”
“And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway,” she said, “so this is working very well for them.
Barbara Bush Calls Evacuees Better Off
Sounds like talking points to me. When you hear it from two of them, it is most likely talking points and part of a plan. A plan, I guess to figure out some other way to handle low income housing. I don’t pretend to know what they have in mind.
I posted earlier that they were not rebuilding low-income housing in the Charlotte County area hit so hard by Hurricane Charley. Last year 95% of housing like that, including trailer parks and housing centers was destroyed. A local station there has a video remembering it a year later. The person speaking says they won’t turn them out in the cold, or something to that effect. Here is the video.
Here is my previous diary about the destruction of the housing there. I believe, but can’t verify, that there are many still without homes in the Hardee County area of Florida where Charley wreaked such havoc. It is hard to find news about it, but rebuilding is slow there.
95% of low income housing destroyed in Charlotte County, Florida by Charley
Here is the gist of my diary:
The people in FEMA village there, some 500 trailers, will have to get out in February. This article shows their quandary, which basically is that they have nowhere to go.
You have just plotted a probable future of many who were uprooted from this storm. If you come upon any more information…please share it with us.
There has been damn little coverage of Hurricane Andrew’s survivors, or Charlie’s for that matter.
I read this article today, and it seemed to fit in with the diary. The rich and powerful get to decide it all in Bush’s America.
Old Line Families Plot the Future of New Orleans
The green expanse of Audubon Park, in the city’s Uptown area, has doubled in recent days as a heliport for the city’s rich — and a terminus for the small armies of private security guards who have been dispatched to keep the homes there safe and habitable. Mr. O’Dwyer has cellphone service and ice cubes to cool off his highballs in the evening. By Wednesday, the city water service even sprang to life, making the daily trips to his neighbor’s pool unnecessary. A pair of oil-company engineers, dispatched by his son-in-law, delivered four cases of water, a box of delicacies including herring with mustard sauce and 15 gallons of generator gasoline.
Despite the disaster that has overwhelmed New Orleans, the city’s monied, mostly white elite is hanging on and maneuvering to play a role in the recovery when the floodwaters of Katrina are gone. “New Orleans is ready to be rebuilt. Let’s start right here,” says Mr. O’Dwyer, standing in his expansive kitchen, next to a counter covered with a jumble of weaponry and electric wires.
This paragraph caught my eye at the mention of krewes. It reminded me of the Gasparilla pirate invasion celebration in Tampa each year, and the elite nature of their Gasparilla Krewes. I guess both Gasparilla and Mardi Gras have that in common.
But these two paragraphs tell it all…less poor, more rich, build it better than before. Very arrogant paragraphs.
The new city must be something very different, Mr. Reiss says, with better services and fewer poor people. “Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically,” he says. “I’m not just speaking for myself here. The way we’ve been living is not going to happen again, or we’re out.”
Many of the lower income residents also have family ties and communities that go back decades or centuries. If these people are allowed to get away with this, the victims will be devestated AGAIN. Ethnic cleansing masquerading as urban renewal.
New Orleans will rise from the ashes and look like….Palm Beach. The low-income evacuees will never be able to return to that area because they won’t be able to afford a place to live.
I remembered your earlier diary about what happened in Florida, and that’s been on my mind, while reading about the way the poorer refugees have been treated. They’ve been scattering the evacuees all over the country. Where will they end up? No one knows. The longer the clean-up takes (and it WILL take a long time, just due to the nature of the flooding and destruction), the harder it will be for those displaced to return, especially for those who were not property owners and do not have financial resources to wait out the reconstruction.
Nobody builds low-income (or even moderate-income) housing anymore, even in non-hurricane-ravaged areas, unless local ordinances demand it of them. It’s all about profit, and the profit is in tract mansions and luxury condos, not moderately-priced homes and rental complexes. You see this everywhere across the country.
Without the regulation of government agencies, there’s no incentive for the wealthy to accommodate the poor. I’m sure they’re really looking forward to rebuilding New Orleans as they always wanted it to be…. so much easier to claim that the poor of New Orleans are “better off” in whatever communities elsewhere they washed up in, rather than to accept that making the lives of the less priviledged better in New Orleans was ever their responsibility in the first place.
Virtually every politician and media wonk in the country is in complete denial over the scale and permanence of this catastrophe. The ecological damage alone will not be undone during the lifetime of anyone now living.
Already the regime propagandists are out in front making the case that “poverty” is not really so “bad” now like it used to be, nyt op-ed by AEI propagandist here. And the odious David Brooks in his recent NYT piece, is putting forward the idea of dispersing the poor, (the irresponsible and unambitious poor) throughout the country, putting them into the hearts of (presumambly) more responsible communitiers who demand certain “standards of behavior”. This was tried with the Native American population in the 1800s and I think there was even a plan in the early 1900s to do the same with the Jews here in the US, breaking up their neighborhoods and communities in order to diminish their strength and influence. None of this shit works unless one’s goal is not to help the unfortunate but rather than to eliminate them.
BushCo and the Grover Norquist cabal will make certain that the poor will never be able to return to live in the New Orleans area. They’ve been looting the economy with ruthless efficiency ever since they stole the White House in 2000, and they’ll continue to starve any and all social programs of funds as they increase the rate of transfer of the country’s assets from the people to their corporate pals.
The US economy is now a third world economy, only most people don’t realize it yet because it’s such a big economy. And even in the best of circumstances, repairing the damage done by our own government just in these last 5 years alone will likely take decades, if even then.
Brooks isn’t suggesting that their shouldn’t be low income housing, on the contrary, he is saying that it should be built. However, he is arguing that the new NO should be rebuilt as a class integrated city. Personally, I think that would be a good idea, but it is not going to happen – the Bush admin as you point out is ruthlessly classist.
I didn’t mean to imply that Brooks opposed low-income housing, but in fact he only implies endorsement of it obliquely, as in this passage;
And this quote emphasizes my point about dispersion, however incompletely I might have stated it earlier.
My own sense of what cultural integration would mean in relation to an honest appraisal of the problems associated with poverty and class would be more directly focused on better schools with better supplies, raising the minimum wage, zoning and building laws that require landlords to maintain their properties, and which support the common good of the neighborhood. I don’t think Brooks has or will advocate for these measures. His “dispersal” idea is central to his social engineering experiment. And make no mistake; for Brooks this is social engineering, not human interest.
And, in the end as you say, the economics and brutal snobbery of this administration would never allow for decent housing, schools or wages for the poor, let alone to create housing for them in the midst of the affluent.
I just realized I linked to the wrong thing for the David Brooks op-ed referenced above. Here’s the correct link.
You make two excellent points:
and
I think there’s a real possibility that this hurricane will be the interceding event that knocks the economy off its inertia track, from which it is unlikely to recover anytime soon. Without the hurricane, the economy would have continued its quiet, sad decline. Now, who knows?
So it takes a hurricane for the federal government to build schools. Otherwise they can sit in schools that they have labeled inadequate. Their spinning so fast now they aren’t even coming close to making sense. Not that they ever did.
is a good term.
Developers in Victoria BC promised 20% “affordable” housing in their multi-million dollar project. They designated the “affordable” market to be those making $30,000. – $60,000. per year.
Now that sure cuts out those on minimum wage doesn’t it. The people who need housing, who are being pushed down the scale everytime low-income housing is demolished and replaced by luxury units, they are left out once again. What’s the next step after low-income people cannot afford rent?
What’s the next step after low-income people cannot afford rent?
Historically, it has always been some form of involuntary servitude.
Presently, low-income people double up in apartments, move back with parents, move to rooming houses, move to back-pack hotels, move to welfare hotels, live in storage containers, or hit the streets.
I very much dislike the term “low income housing”. It reeks of forced segregation of housing by income.
What we need in this country is low cost housing.