Residents fight demolition of affordable housing

New Orleans is about to be hit with another horrible disaster. This time the federal and city governments are not only sitting by and ignoring the tragedy but actually causing it.

On Dec. 15 bulldozers are scheduled to tear down all four of the city’s major public housing developments, which consist of more than 4,500 units. The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development announced plans to demolish the sites last year and the Housing Authority of New Orleans recently approved $30 million in contracts for the demolitions.

Former residents and other city activists have been waging a fierce battle to halt the destruction of these homes.

Protesters attended a New Orleans City Council meeting on Dec. 6 demanding that the council take action to stop the demolitions. When the council declined to vote on the issue, the crowd began shouting and chanting.

The media reported that a sheriff’s deputy then grabbed and shoved civil rights lawyer Bill Quigley against a wall and handcuffed him. Quigley represents former residents of the four developments in a lawsuit against HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson that seeks to stop the demolitions and force the city to renovate the buildings. Last month a federal judge denied their request.

The people of New Orleans are not giving up. Stop the Demolition Coalition, a grassroots group, is calling on people around the country to join the residents of New Orleans to resist the destruction of the buildings. It declared Dec. 10 “Human Rights Day Come to New Orleans.”

HUD intends to replace the four developments—St. Bernard, Lafitte, C.J. Peete and B.W. Cooper—with “mixed income” housing, which means many African Americans, the sole residents of these buildings, will be prevented from returning to the city. A Nov. 29 AP story quoted Quigley as saying the current 4,500 public housing units would be replaced with 1,841 apartments, of which only 744 would be fully subsidized.

The destruction of the four developments is particularly outrageous given the homelessness and severe housing shortage in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina devastated the city in 2005. Most of the units suffered minor damage that would require far less money to fix than it will cost to tear them down and rebuild.

John Fernandez, an associate professor of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, surveyed 140 of the units in the four projects. In a declaration filed on behalf of the plaintiffs in the suit against Alphonso Jackson, Fernandez said he found no structural or nonstructural damage that would reasonably warrant any building demolitions. In fact, he said the construction of these buildings is superior to contemporary buildings.

New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff also criticized the destruction of the housing developments, which he said are among the best public housing in the United States. “Solidly built, the buildings’ detailed brickwork, tile roofs and wrought-iron balustrades represent a level of craft more likely found on an Ivy League campus than in a contemporary housing complex,” he wrote in a Nov. 19, 2006, article.

“The low red-brick housing blocks of the Lafitte Avenue project, in the historically Black neighborhood of Treme, for example, are scaled to fit within the surrounding neighborhood of Creole cottages and shotgun houses,” Ouroussoff continues. “As you move deeper into the complex, the buildings frame a series of communal courtyards sheltered by the canopies of enormous oak trees. Nature, here, was intended to foster spiritual as well as physical well-being.”

Everyone has a right to such well-being as people around the country join in solidarity with the people of New Orleans who are fighting displacement and racist gentrification.