Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans was clearly pandering, in his speech on Monday that calls for a Divinely ordained chocolate city. He is seeking to ease the tensions he is largely responsible for creating. It was he who created the Bring New Orleans Back Commission (BNOB), composed mostly of white, well-to-do, business/corporate types who have a profound interest in reducing the numbers of African-American working class families in New Orleans.
If Nagin really wanted his “chocolate city” to be restored, he would not have appointed Joseph Canizaro to chair the BNOB.
Why? Joseph Canizaro is the real estate magnate and banker, President Bush fund raiser, who is responsible, with a lot of help from his friends, for the diaspora created by the destruction of the St. Thomas Housing Development in the late ’90’s.
Canizaro made $70 million in that event, profits earned off of the lives and backs of African-American working class families, when land he purchased near St. Thomas became a new home for a Wal Mart. Standing in the way of this development initially was the St. Thomas Housing Development.
850 African American households were displaced with the destruction of St. Thomas, in a pre-Katrina diaspora, to all points in the city, many to low-lying, flood-prone areas. St. Thomas was located in the Garden District, which did not flood. This diaspora triggered turf wars and resulted in deaths.
I had begun to contact some of the former residents of St. Thomas this past summer, and some I spoke to were still looking for adequate housing.
Hope 6 funds were used to demolish St. Thomas, as they have been used all over the country for the destruction of African American neighborhoods in American cities. “MIxed income housing” has been created within the void, and yes it sounds good on paper.
Hope 6, and mixed income housing communities always result in a drastically reduced numbers of available housing for low-income, often minority, workers and their families.
Homelessness is a rising problem in our country, and HUD policies of using HOPE 6 funds to destroy neighborhoods, is adding to the problem (note in the article I link to advocating the destruction of public housing, there isn’t a single mention of concern for residents once public housing is destroyed).
Alphonse Jackson, Secretary of Housing and Urban Affairs, swept into New Orleans this past October, shortly after the storm, and unleashed a Katrina of his own: he declared, with 4 City Councilwomen standing behind him, that New Orleans would be a city of fewer poor people, and that it was time to dismantle the public housing system in favor of mixed-income communities.
He failed to note, however, that under the Fair Housing Act, passed in 1968, any change in policy calls for public hearings and resident input.
Jackson also declared much of public housing to be “ruined”, as did Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) officials, right after the storm. We countered this by going into the developments in late September, and snapping photos, and contacting HANO officials and the media with those photos.
HANO began to back-track. We helped to encourage and organize residents by contacting them in shelters and all points displaced. We encouraged them, and they encouraged each other, to lobby HANO to reopen public housing.
It worked. HANO and Jackson counted on community support to close troubled public housing developments, but this support did not materialize in most quarters. Even New Orleans City Council members backtracked and began calling for the reopening of public housing to help ease the post-Katrina housing crisis.
So-called “troubled” neighborhoods belong to the people who live there. We cannot improve our neighborhoods if we lose them.
Now, slowly, this lumbering system of housing developments is reopening, despite the crunch in funds from HUD to HANO, which I believe is purposefully designed to discourage citizen use of public housing. Residents are hanging tough and pressuring, and waiting…for the reopening of all of public housing.
Canizaro is now calling for the creation of mixed income communities, much like he helped to creat at St. Thomas, to be constructed all over the city, essentially demolishing African American working class neighborhoods that have been hard hit by the flooding.
Canizaro, interviewed on MacNeil/Lehrer the other night, said New Orleans had a crime problem pre-Katrina. He said many poor people are not coming back to the city, and the crime problem will be alleviated.
This transparent racism and classism is what passes for urban planning in our city right now. But many residents see through this. I attended a District D meeting that included residents from the hard hit New Orleans east. Many residents challened that they will not be driven out of neighborhoods by any plan. Some have expressed that they will commit violence to defend their homes.
By the way, the use of eminent domain is included in the Master Plan, as a “last resort”.
Residents know what is coming. As they struggle to marshall their resources to rebuild, they see this plan for what it is: an attempt to shift the demographics of New Orleans: to keep out African American, working class families, to reduce crime, and a land grab.
Already, commission members of the BNOB have reported, in this Times Picayune article, that they have been approached by developers, who they refused to name, to create “infill” sites: commercial/industrial development, with housing for workers nearby. These sites are slated for all of the devasted neighborhoods.
Our contention is: assist residents in rebuilding destroyed or damaged homes. Long-terms residents should be employed in any commercial/industrial developement.
This was a manmade disaster, in the sense of faulty construction of levees. We believe residents are due damages, which would assist them in rebuilding their homes and returning to the city.
In the master plan, Canizaro has called on a four-month planning process, during which neighborhoods must “prove” their viability in returning. The plan also calls for a moratorium on rebuilding. Both items are already serving to discourage some from rebuilding, as it is intended to do, in my view. It has also had the opposite effect: there is a flood of stubborn, New Orleans residents seeking permits to rebuild.
The spirit of the people here is amazing.
Many residents are determined to defeat a plan that would create a Disneyesque New Orleans, devoid of the very people who created the culture that has given us jazz, creole cuisine and Mardi Gras Indians.
There is a populist movement arising out of necessity here, to defeat this plan.
Please spread the word, and if you like, let your displeasure be known to our city leaders, particularly Mayor Nagin, who is danger of melting the very Chocolate City, that he professes to want to rebuild.
I would also like to encourage people to become aware of public housing issues, and homelessness issues, in their own communities. Seattle has an activist network around the issue of public housing that I’ve linked to in this article.
I linked to two articles, authored by Jay Arena. He is a Ph.D. candidate at Tulane University, and is finishing up his dissertation on the St. Thomas housing development and the forces that destroyed it. He can be contacted at jarena@tulane.edu
You can download the BNOB’s master plan here.
I would be glad to entertain any questions and/or criticism.
Nagin always looks to me like he’s kind of enjoying all of this. All the attention, the celebrity cast upon him but all the destruction around him. Those are the kinds of people who imagine there is PROFIT to be had from other peoples misfortune, the kind of people you don’t want around you and never in a postion of power. It’s very similar to Bush. And they both always look clubby, like they are about to go golfing again.
Thank you Duranta… great diary.
I thought about Martin Luther King… and how this nightnare of seeing the starvation and drowning of the residents of the Gulf States was in no part a part of his dream.
We lose MLK and wind up with Halliburton pukes.
Wake up America!!!! We’re killing the dream by refusing to open our eyes.
I think at least property owners have it right: file for a permit. In almost all jurisdictions there are waivers and/or fast-track permit procedures in natural disasters, as long as the work is classfied as “repair damage”. Most cities only need the estimate of repairs from the insurance company. (They include floor plans and extremely detailed task sheets). At least they’ll have an intent to rebuild on the record.
The caveat is that owner’s sometimes figure this is a good time to add that extra room, or go up two stories. Not a good idea if you want the permit fast, because they are then subject to the standard permit approval process.
On public housing: the concept of mixed-income housing is valid if done right. That means developer-required percentage minimums for available units in each subdivision/neighborhood, with no offsets or in-lieu fees allowed. Meaning: you want it, you build to the spec (10%, 15%, etc.) in the approval docs. We have virtually no very-low, or low income housing in our little ville because it’s cheaper for the builders to just pay the fees.
Cutting to the chase, I’d strongly suggest trying contact a legal expert who has some cases under their belt in land-use + publicly-financed housing.
Thanks for your comment. My concern with mixed income housing is the overall, drastic reduction in the numbers of available, low income housing units that this always results in. If units were rebuilt, one to one, with those units reserved for the residents they are displacing, I could go along with.
Any policy that reduces the numbers of low income units, adds to the housing crisis in our country.
Any policy that reduces the numbers of low income units. . .
Understood and agree. But I still think it important to include those units in larger developments. It’s all about increasing the density. Smaller lots and multi-family zoning within those areas are a function of lines on the subdivision map.
Also helps to zone-in multi-purpose structures in all in-fill areas vertically: retail, then office, then residential on upper floors. Applies to high-and low-rise “downtown” developments as well. Otherwise we continue to have tall structures laying “fallow” after 5pm on weekdays.
Nothing so energy-wasting, pounded-owl-shit-ugly, and expensive as an empty high-rise office building.
big building, businesses on bottom floors, with preference given to “neighborhood” type businesses like grocery stores, pharmacies, etc, up top, lofts. Big loft – poof! higher income housing. Divide loft in two – poof! low income housing.
But as duranta points out, the aim is NOT to create economically and ethnically diverse neighborhoods, the aim is to get rid of poor people and give rich men more money.
Well, yeah, I caught that part. But since those downstream actions are known, it’s possible to lock in restrictions on sales up front. Maybe not easy, but it is possible.
One of the big mistakes in the recent past was to have the developers retain ownership of the property, with an agreement to maintain prices for 20 years. 20 years and one day and the low-income people were turned out.
During the five days before–when we all knew what was coming–and the five days after Katrina, when we saw predictions fulfilled, it simply did not look from this end of the country that Mayor Nagin was doing his job. We got plenty of talk about being hamstrung, but we never saw him doing anything. And I for one am sure there was plenty for the executive of a city government to be doing–regardless of the obstacles FEMA was throwing up–or even, because of them.
I am less impressed with Mr. Mayor-without-a-City all the time.
I saw Nagin go through a weird transformation during the aftermath. He publicly called to light “forces” who were conspiring, so he said, to co-opt the city’s recovery. “I know what they are trying to do, ” he said. Then he might with those forces in Dallas, in a meeting that was closed to the public. I requested the minutes of that meeting in a freedom of information request with Nagin’s office. I’ve heard nothing, and I don’t expect to.
I think he was completely sold to the ideas that are now outlined in the master plan, at that meeting. Not that he wasn’t aligned with some of those forces, pre-Katrina.
cursing on CNN. That seemed like the only reasonable response to the situation, a healthy reaction to an unhealthy situation.
But then he lost me when he came out of his fancy hotel suite and cut the line for a bus in front of hundreds or thousands, who knew at that point, of cleansees who had been standing there for days, slowly dying of thirst, and then when Mr.Danger went down there to “meet” with him, his transformation seemed complete – a new Nagin, all ready for his meeting in Dallas and looking forward to a new world of swimmin pools and movie stars – the Big Easy’s own Arafat.
The ‘crime problem’ won’t be solved unless when rebuilding schools in the areas of poor people are on par with schools in the richer areas…the crime problem isn’t solved by supposedly not letting poor people back into the city but creating excellent schools/job opportunities/fair wages for all. At least that would be a start. And of course middle class and rich people never committ crimes, right.
You make an excellent point, several actually. New Orleans is based on a service industry job environment. New Orleans voters passed an increase in the minimum wage, which Mayor Nagin opposed.
Now that there is a job shortage, he is calling for a “living wage”.
We couldn’t get attention for the issues we tried to raise regarding the low income in this city, including police harrassment, and neglect of public housing.
Now while officials pay lip service to these issues, they move to shrink neighborhoods.
for all you do on the front lines of the Resistance against the War Against the Poor.
Thank you Duranta,
I have np words for this yet but this is a major story and it’s not the headline. Nuff said.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/01/18/katrina.missing.ap/index.html
One of the issues around the bulldozing of homes in the lower ninth ward in particular, is that most home owners have not been contacted by the city, and…what if there are bodies still buried beneath the splintered homes.
Bulldozers remind me of Palestinian’s homes being bulldozed by Israel. Those bulldozers are produced in America of course. It’s too convenient in so many ways to just flatten these homes. Serves so many different purposes.
You’de think the fact that the Coroner is requesting continued searches for over three thousand missing Americans would be news but we know they’re not considered Americans.
It’s just all so sickening and wrenching.