BUSH REGIME DESTROYING PUBLIC HOUSING IN NEW ORLEANS
BLOOMBERG - In New Orleans, public housing doesn't mean bleak high-rise towers. The city has thousands of units with Georgian brickwork and lacy ironwork porches that came through Hurricane Katrina barely scathed.
Yet the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, last week approved $31 million worth of contracts to demolish 4,500 public housing units of such high quality that some are on the National Register of Historic Places.
The demolitions, scheduled to start as soon as Dec. 15, come as the city faces an unprecedented shortage of rental housing. To add insult to injury, the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced last week that it would evict hundreds of residents of emergency trailer parks in New Orleans over the next six months, even though they don't have houses to return to.
Merry Christmas, poor people. . .
New Orleans tracts have been among the worst managed, suffering most of their damage from neglect by the Housing Authority of New Orleans. HUD took over the local agency and had determined before the storm to evict residents and demolish thousands of units.
Low-income housing advocates were not the only defenders of these projects. Sturdily built and sensitive to local history, the tracts always had the potential to lose their "project" stigma and join the rest of the city as an invigorating mixed-income neighborhood. . .
HUD and the local housing authority have steadfastly resisted revamping thousands of units on four other public housing sites, preferring to bid them out for new construction of mixed-income developments that will take years to build and house a fraction of the neediest.
Washington policy makers see homeowners as the only class of residents who deserve aid. So billions have been poured into financing to stretch inadequate insurance payouts, like "soft" second mortgages that become grants. And these programs have worked. Neighborhoods of mostly owner-occupants are swarming with contractors completing repairs.
Renters -- about half the households in New Orleans -- have been left to fend for themselves. Before the storm, many landlords could make a profit renting out aging ranch houses or Creole cottages at modest rates. Few were subsidized, most served people of modest income and many are remarkable works of historic architecture that could catalyze more growth if fixed up.
11 Comments:
Housing projects are always being touted as "having the potential" to lose their 'ghetto' stigma and join in the life of the community at large--but they don't. And, like it or no, part of the reason they don't is the life-culture of too many of their inhabitants. I condemn thoroughly the abysmal handling of the whole NOLA situation--but I don't condemn anybody who sees no valid reason for rebuilding or re-creating a slum situation.
To paraphrase William Burroughs' line from "The Place of Dead Roads", There are two kinds of people in the world, the shits and the johnsons, the johnsons being the hardworking salt of the earth and the shits being those better than the rest of us (little turds who couldn't dig a hole if you gave them a shovel).I'll let you figure out which one 8:27 is.
"Burroughs read other authors creatively. He was not very systematic in the way in which he borrowed ideas from other writers. He tended to take whatever fit his own needs. One of the clearest influences on his view of the world was Jack Black, the author of You Can't Win. In his autobiographical narrative, Black made the distinction between two kinds of people, Johnsons and Shits. Johnsons mind their own business and lend a helping hand to those in need, and the Shits put their nose into your business and want to extend the powers of the State over personal life. They have created this cop-ridden planet. Burroughs read and reread Black's book several times during his life and used the idea of the Johnson Family in The Place of Dead Roads. It fit his own dualistic view of humanity."
http://clogic.eserver.org/2003/snedeker.html
And neither of you have been able to give a cogent or coherent reply to 8:27's position, which is, how in hell do you think rebuilding slum projects is 'helping' blacks, anyway?
8:27 doesn't seem to care much about helping minorities or anyone else but rather is using this venue to propagate racist code crap and so are you
People who didn't grow up in the projects are not in a position that allows them to understand what it's like. A few exceptional individuals occasionally get it, but the average white person from suburbia just has no idea how our whole society works to keep the poor and undereducated from even seeing a way out, much less actually achieving one. But then, it's always easier to blame the victim than to change your own privileged view of what the world is like.
For your info, I did "grow up in the projects". The replication of that type of situation anywhere is the worst of all possible solutions, and most especially in NOLA, where it will simply bring about the return of an easily exploitable class of the disenfranchised, all neatly confined to an area where they can most expeditiously be penned in one place, and held in check by empty promises of "help". Of course, I don't really expect assumptionist pompous asses such as yourself to be able to see further than the ends of your own, probably white, know-it-all paternalist noses. And of course, you would never expect an African-American to be literate enough to answer you in a cogent manner, or have any wish to contest your patronizations. It's you who are the true "racists" here, using your paternalistic privilege to keep Blacks in a second-class status, while letting them know, sanctimoniously, how very much you are "helping" them. Too bad nothing will likely ever shake you from your blind, self-satisfied stupidities. What, pray tell, do any of you know about "the ghetto", would you be so good as to tell this poor, ignorant niggah? Thanks in advance, Massah and Mistress. I'll be awaiting your profound insights with baited breath.
Congratulations, you just made all the same errors you are accusing everyone else of. I, too, grew up in the projects. I, too, am capable of expressing myself according to the rules of standard English. In fact, I just supported part of your position against the racist douche-bags you are at odds with.
Why are you so accepting of the racist attitude toward public housing that white politicians are using every day to bash us? Just because they were handled incompetently in the past, creating as many problems as they solved, does not mean they have to be handled that way in the future.
Either you are a poser playing games, or you have started hating your own race. Why not try working to make public housing better, like I am, instead of insisting that doing nothing would be an improvement over building better projects?
What I'm saying is that I could never trust a guy who ran as a dem because even if he were Jesus he'd have to sell his soul to get the nomination. Kuccinich has already abandoned his promise to seek an independent WTC investigation. He'll shitcan all else that's in his way. I'm a metaphorical hitch-hiker who'd rather ride with someone I partially disagree with than travel with psycho frauds who are all smiles.
sorry wrong item
7:16, you are really an idiot if you believe that "things will be handled differetly in the future". By whom? Those same good ole boys who've done so much for the people up til now? What possible alternative do you envision here?
Forget it. If I'm a poseur, you have your head up your rectum, and your type is unreachable, I've found. Keep looking to The Man to fix it all for you. Good luck.
Post a Comment
<< Home