| June
19 , 2006
Bulldozing Hope
HUD to New Orleans'
Poor: "Go F(ind) Yourself (Housing)!"
By BILL
QUIGLEY The
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has announced they
plan to demolish over five thousand public housing apartments in
New Orleans. In August 2005, HUD reported they had 7,381 public
apartments in New Orleans.
Now
HUD says they now have 1000 apartments open and promise to repair
and open another 1000 in a couple of months. After months of rumors,
HUD confirmed their intention to demolish all the remaining apartments.
HUD’s
demolition plans leave thousands of families with no hope of returning
to New Orleans where rental housing is scarce and costly. In New
Orleans, public housing was occupied by women, mostly working, their
children as well as the elderly and disabled.
To
these mothers and children, HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson said:
"Any New Orleans voucher recipient or public housing resident
will be welcomed home."
Exactly
how people will be welcomed home, HUD did not say.
How can thousands of low-income working families come home if HUD
has fenced off their apartments, put metal shutters over their windows
and doors and are now plans to demolish their homes?
Jackson,
who is likely sleeping in his own bed, urged patience for the thousands
who have been displaced since August of 2005: “Rebuilding
and revitalizing public housing isn't something that will be done
overnight."
Patience
is in short supply in New Orleans as over 200,000 people remain
displaced. "I just need somewhere to stay," Patricia Thomas
told the Times-Picayune. Ms. Thomas has lived in public housing
for years. "We're losing our older people. They're dropping
like flies when they hear they can't come home."
Demolition
of public housing in New Orleans is not a new idea.
When
Katrina displaced New Orleans public housing residents, the Wall
Street Journal reported U.S. Congressman Richard Baker, a 10 term
Republican from Baton Rouge, telling lobbyists: "We finally
cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but
God did."
This
demolition plan continues HUD’s efforts to get out of the
housing business. In 1996, New Orleans had 13,694 units of conventional
public housing. Before Katrina, New Orleans was down to half that,
7,379 units of conventional public housing. If they are allowed
to accelerate the demolition, public housing in New Orleans will
have been reduced by 85% in the past decade.
The
federal demolition of housing in New Orleans continues a nation-wide
trend that has led some critics to suggest changing HUD’s
official name to the Department of Demolition of Public Housing.
Much
of the public housing demolition nationally comes through of a federal
program titled “Hope VI” – a cruelly misnamed
program that destroys low income housing in the name of creating
“mixed income housing.”
Who
can be against tearing down old public housing and replacing it
with mixed income housing? Sounds like everyone should benefit doesn’t
it? Unfortunately that is not the case at all. Almost all the poor
people involved are not in the mix.
New
Orleans has already experienced the tragic effects of HOPE VI.
The
St. Thomas Housing Development in the Irish Channel area of New
Orleans was home to 1600 apartments of public housing. After St.
Thomas was demolished under Hope VI, the area was called River Gardens.
River Gardens is a mixed income community - home now to 60 low income
families, some middle income apartments, a planned high income tower,
and a tax-subsidized Wal-Mart! Our tax dollars at work – destroying
not only low-income housing but neighborhood small businesses as
well.
Worse
yet, after Katrina, the 60 low-income families in River Gardens
were not even allowed back into their apartments. They were told
their apartments were needed for employees of the housing authority.
It took the filing of a federal complaint by the Greater New Orleans
Fair Housing Center to get the families back into their apartments.
As
James Perry, Director of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Center
says about the planned demolition of public housing, “If the
model is River Gardens, it has failed miserably.” Despite
HUD’s promise to demolish homes, the right of people to return
to New Orleans is slowly being recognized as a human rights issue.
According
to international law, the victims of Katrina are “internally
displaced persons” because they were displaced within their
own country as a result of natural disaster. Principle 28 of the
Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement requires that the U.S.
government recognize the human right of displaced people to return
home. The US must
“allow internally displaced persons to return voluntarily,
in safety and with dignity, to their homes or places of habitual
residence …
Such
authorities shall facilitate the reintegration of returned or
resettled internally displaced persons. Special efforts should
be made to ensure the full participation of internally displaced
persons in the planning and management of their return or resettlement
and reintegration.”
The
US Human Rights Network and other human rights advocates are educating
people of the Gulf Coast and the nation about how to advocate for
human rights. HUD has effectively told the people of New Orleans
to go find housing for themselves. New Orleans already has many,
many people, including families, living in abandoned houses –
houses without electricity or running water. New Orleans has recently
been plagued with an increase in the number of fires. HUD’s
actions will put more families into these abandoned houses. Families
in houses with no electricity or water should be a national disgrace
in the richest nation in the history of the world. But for HUD and
others with political and economic power this is apparently not
the case.
As
in the face of any injustice, there is resistance.
NAACP
civil rights attorney Tracie Washington promised a legal challenge
and told HUD, “You cannot go forward and we will not allow
you to go forward.”
Most
importantly, displaced residents of public housing and their allies
have set up a tent city survivors village outside the fenced off
1300 empty apartments on St. Bernard Avenue in New Orleans.
If
the authorities do not open up the apartments by July 4, they pledge
to go through the fences and liberate their homes directly. The
group, the United Front for Affordable Housing, is committed to
resisting HUD’s efforts to bulldoze their apartments “by
any means necessary.”
If
the government told you that they were going to bulldoze where you
live, and deny you the right to return to your home, would you join
them?
Bill
Quigley is a human rights lawyer and professor at Loyola
University New Orleans School of Law. You can reach him at Quigley@loyno.edu
For
more information about the July 4 protest by the United Front for
Affordable Housing, call Endesha Juakali at 504.239.2907, Elizabeth
Cook 504.319.3564, or Ishmael Muhammad at 504.872.9521. If you know
someone who is a displaced New Orleans public housing resident and
they want to join in a challenge to HUD’s actions, they can
get more information at www.justiceforneworleans.org.
For
more information on the human rights campaigns for Katrina victims,
see the US Human Rights Network at www.ushrnetwork.org or the National
Economic and Social Rights Initiative, www.nesri.org.]
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