www.counterpunch.org
September 25, 2007
HUD's Home Wreckers
Tightening the Noose Around New Orleans
By BILL QUIGLEY
Odessa Lewis is 62 years old. When I saw her last week, she was crying
because she is being evicted. A long-time resident of the Lafitte
public housing apartments, since Katrina she has been locked out of
her apartment and forced to live in a 240 square foot FEMA trailer.
Ms. Lewis has asked repeatedly to be allowed to return to her
apartment to clean and fix it up so she can move back in. She even
offered to do all the work herself and with friends at no cost. The
government continually refused to allow her to return. Now she is
being evicted from her trailer and fears she will become homeless
because there is no place for working people, especially African
American working and poor people, to live in New Orleans. Ms. Lewis is
a strong woman who has worked her whole life. But the stress of being
locked out of her apartment, living in a FEMA trailer and the
possibility of being homeless brought out the tears. Thousands of
other mothers and grandmothers are in the same situation.
Renting is so hard in part because there is a noose closing around the
housing opportunities of New Orleans African American renters
displaced by Katrina. They have been openly and directly targeted by
public and private actions designed to keep them away. The U.S.
Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) just added their
weight to the attack by approving the demolition of 2966 apartments in
New Orleans.
Despite telling a federal judge for the last year and a half that
approvals of public housing demolition applications take about 100
working days to evaluate, HUD approved the plan to demolish nearly
3000 apartments one day after the complete application was filed. HUD
says the 3000 apartments are scheduled to be replaced in a few years
with up to 744 public housing eligible apartments and a few hundred
subsidized apartments.
Unfortunately, HUD's actions are consistent with other governmental
attacks on African American renters.
After Katrina, St. Bernard Parish, a 93% white adjoining suburb,
enacted a law prohibiting home owners from renting their property to
anyone who is not a blood relative. Jefferson Parish, another majority
white adjoining suburb, unanimously passed an ordinance prohibiting
the construction of any subsidized housing. The sponsoring legislator
condemned poor people as "lazy," "ignorant" and "leeches on
society"--specifically hoping to guard against former residents of New
Orleans public housing. Across Lake Ponchartrain from New Orleans, the
chief law enforcement officer of St. Tammany Parish, Sheriff Jack
Strain, complained openly about the post-Katrina presence of "thugs
and trash from New Orleans" and announced that people with dreadlocks
or "chee wee hairstyles" could "expect to be getting a visit from a
sheriff's deputy."
HUD's actions are also bolstered by pervasive racial discrimination in
the private market as well. The Greater New Orleans Fair Housing
Action Center has documented widespread racial discrimination in the
metro New Orleans rental market and in the states surrounding the gulf
coast.
HUD told a federal judge a few days "the average time [for the process
of reviewing applications for demolition] is 100 days." They did
suggest that the process could be expedited in the case of New
Orleans. So it was. Instead of reviewing the details of demolishing
3000 apartments and considering the law and facts and the
administrative record for 100 days, HUD expedited the process to one
day.
HUD and the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO, which HUD has been
running for years) argued passionately that residents displaced from
public housing (referred to once in their argument as 'refugees') are
financially "better off" than they were before. This echoes the
Barbara Bush comment of September 5, 2005 when she said, viewing the
overwhelmingly African American crowd of thousands of people living on
cots in the Astrodome, "And so many of the people in the arena here,
you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this - (she chuckles
slightly) this is working very well for them."
HUD announced approval of demolition of 2966 units of public housing
in New Orleans - 896 apartments at Lafitte, 521 at C.J. Peete, 1158 at
B.W. Cooper, and 1391 at St. Bernard. A few buildings on each site
will be retained for historical preservation purposes.
New Orleans had a severe affordable housing crisis before Katrina when
HANO housed over 5000 families. There was a waiting list of 8000
families trying to get in. HUD and HANO together did such a poor job
of administering the agency that there were about 2000 more empty
apartments that had been scheduled for major repairs for years.
The continuing deceptions by HUD and HANO have been shameless. Since
Katrina, HUD has continued to act out both sides of a charade that the
local housing authority is making decisions and HUD is waiting on
local actions. Yet, the decision to demolish was announced by the
Secretary of HUD in DC over a year ago. But in the year since then,
HUD has continued to tell a federal judge that any legal challenge to
demolitions was premature because HANO had not even submitted an
application to HUD for their careful 100 day evaluation. This is while
a HUD employee runs the agency, commuting back and forth to DC each
week. HANO even announced they would have 2000 apartments ready for
people in August of 2006--a deadline not met even in September 2007.
HANO later announced to the public that they had a list of 250
apartments ready for people to return only to admit in writing weeks
later that no such list existed--nor were the phantom apartments
ready.
The list of untruths goes on.
HUD would not agree to delay the demolition of the 3000 apartments
until Congress finished reviewing legislation that would give
residents the right to return and participate in the process of
determining what kind of affordable housing should be in place in New
Orleans.
And so HUD's actions help further restrict the opportunities for
African American renters in New Orleans. Adjoining white suburbs do
not want African American renters back. HUD does not want them back.
The local federal judge has refused to stop the demolitions.
But the mothers and grandmothers and their families and friends are
still determined to return and resist demolition. One sign at a recent
public housing rally summed it up. "We will not allow the community we
built to be rebuilt without us."
Odessa Lewis, despite her tears, said she is not giving up. She and
other public housing residents promise "we did not come this far to be
turned back now. We will do whatever is necessary to protect our
homes." Thousands of African American mothers and grandmothers are the
ones directly targeted by HUD's actions.
Forty years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr., said "We as a nation must
undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the
shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented"
societyWhen profit motives and property rights are considered more
important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and
militarism are incapable of being conquered." We can add sexism to the
list, particularly in the fight for the right of public housing
residents to return.
The fight of Ms. Lewis and others on the gulf coast shows how much we
need a radical revolution of values.
Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola
University New Orleans. He can be reached at Quigley@xxxxxxxxxx
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