Date Published:
June 15, 2006
As in the face of any injustice, there is resistance.
Public Housing protesters show
unity before taking aciton...
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?
[
Watch Related Interview with Bill Quigley on Democracy Now! ]
HUD to NOLA Poor cont'd
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?
[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 atwww.ushrnetwork.org or the National Economic and
Social Rights Initiative,
www.nesri.org .]
Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and professor at Loyola University New Orleans School of Law. You can reach him at quigley [at] loyno [dot] edu