g-man430
December 21st, 2007, 12:22 AM
:ohno: We can fund over $400 billion for a war, but nothing for our own people who need it. What a sad society we live in.
Photos of protest: http://www.nola.com/katrinaphotos/tp/gallery.ssf?cgi-bin/view_gallery.cgi/nola/view_gallery.ata?g_id=9468
Video: http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2007/12/20/nat.nola.housing.protest.clash.wdsu
Council seems ready to approve demolitions
by Gwen Filosa and Coleman Warner, Staff writers
Wednesday December 19, 2007, 12:22 PM
The New Orleans City Council appears poised to approve today the demolition of four of the city's public housing complexes, with four of its seven members signaling approval and one backing demolition of at least one of the aging complexes.
Council members Jackie Clarkson, Stacy Head and Shelley Midura said in interviews this week that they will vote to approve the demolition permits requested by federal housing officials. A spokeswoman for Council President Arnie Fielkow confirmed Wednesday that he will vote for the demolitions.
Cynthia Hedge-Morrell said she would vote for the demolition of the development in her district, the St. Bernard complex, but wouldn't disclose her position on the remaining three complexes: B.W. Cooper, Lafitte and C.J. Peete. Together, the complexes are often called the city's "big four" public housing developments.
Two other members -- James Carter and Cynthia Willard-Lewis -- said Wednesday that they are undecided and declined to discuss the matter in advance of today's meeting at City Hall.
In approving the demolition of federally financed public housing units, the council finds itself in a new and controversial role of setting in motion the wrecking crews to dismantle scores of brick buildings that generations of poor people have called home.
The Housing Authority of New Orleans wanted to begin demolition of 4,500 units on Dec. 15, but a state judge agreed with the Loyola Law Clinic's attorneys that the council first must approve the permits for each of the four sites.
Though protests from activists opposed to the demolitions continue this week, some council members stood firm in their support for tearing down the aging and in some cases dilapidated complexes to make way for new developments serving families with a mix of incomes.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which has had direct control of HANO since 2002, plans to oversee the development of neighborhoods that blend public housing, apartments for people of modest incomes and single-family homes for residents of various income levels.
"I'm going to vote to support redevelopment of the projects in the city," Midura said. "I'll be voting to support the path that most effectively reforms and reopens public housing. That path requires a demolition permit."
Head agreed.
"Redevelopment requires demolition," said Head, adding that the "overwhelming majority" of her constituents want Peete and Cooper transformed into mixed-income neighborhoods.
Midura's district includes the Lafitte development, which has been shuttered since Katrina, while Head's district includes C.J. Peete and B.W. Cooper. The St. Bernard development, closed since Katrina, is in Hedge-Morrell's district.
Call for improvement
Clarkson said New Orleans would be ill-advised to try to stop HUD's plans for redevelopment.
"We need to provide better housing than before Katrina," she said. "By going along with HUD, we get an opportunity to spend their money on our people."
Fielkow has made public statements recently supporting mixed-income housing, but stopped short of promising a vote for demolition. On Wednesday, a spokesperson who declined to be identified said Fielkow will back the demolitions.
Willard-Lewis issued a statement that said she has met with public housing residents and others to "find common solutions to these difficult problems."
Hedge-Morrell released a lengthy statement explaining her decision to vote for the demolition of the St. Bernard in the 7th Ward, where 1,015 families lived before Katrina.
"I would not allow my grown children or my grandchildren to reside in the St. Bernard housing development, even if it could be rehabilitated," Hedge-Morrell said. "Health and safety come first. Experts have shown that St. Bernard has too much asbestos, too much lead-based paint, too much mold."
Hedge-Morrell said she will fight to ensure that poor families who once lived at St. Bernard will be served by redevelopment plans.
Clarkson, the at-large councilwoman, recalled that her former council district included Fischer, which in recent years has been transformed from a high-rise tower and barracks-style apartments to modern housing, including a "senior village" on the West Bank.
"We did not displace the poor, and I plan to make sure we don't," Clarkson said. "We don't have to build a whole bunch of supply if there's no demand."
Vote comes today
Today's 10 a.m. council meeting is likely to draw crowds of activists, who have argued that the old buildings, many of which date to the 1940s, should be rehabbed and reopened. HUD has opposed that plan, arguing that a model that concentrates the poor in large, high-density buildings for decades is a proven failure.
The Coalition to Stop the Demolitions, an umbrella group for scores of activist groups opposing HANO's redevelopment plans, sent out instructions on protesting today's vote in an e-mail message that speculated that the council vote will fall along racial lines. Midura, Head, Clarkson and Fielkow are white, while Carter, Hedge-Morrell and Willard-Lewis are black.
Opponents of the demolitions have pushed for guarantees that HUD will agree to "one-for-one" replacement of all public housing units, but others have said such a move would relegate poor New Orleanians to public housing indefinitely.
Clarkson said last week that tearing down and redeveloping the Lafitte complex would "save Treme and rebuild the neighborhood better than before."
The Lafitte plan, by nonprofit developers Providence and Enterprise, calls for "one-to-one" replacement of the 900 public housing units there pre-Katrina, unlike the plans for redeveloping the other three complexes, which might include far fewer public housing units.
"I consider that the compromise," said Clarkson, of the Lafitte redevelopment plan.
Demand high, Landrieu says
HUD's demolition plans for New Orleans have resonated across the country, with Louisiana's two U.S. senators at odds over the future of public housing in New Orleans.
U.S. Sen. David Vitter and U.S. Reps. Richard Baker, Jim McCrery and Rodney Alexander, all Republicans, said Wednesday that New Orleans does not need as many public housing units as it had before Hurricane Katrina.
That clashes with proposed legislation by Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., who is calling for "one-for-one replacement" of the government-subsidized apartments with new mixed-income developments.
Landrieu said the need was unmet before the storm when about 6,000 low-income people were on a waiting list for the city's 7,000 public housing units. However, of those 7,000 units, only 5,100 were occupied; many were in a state of disrepair.
With rents up 45 percent since the storm, an estimated 12,000 homeless people in the city, and low-wage service-industry workers struggling to find housing, Landrieu says the demand is as great as it has ever been.
Vitter urges change
But Landrieu's Louisiana colleague, Vitter, has taken the lead in opposing the bill, saying that with just two-thirds of New Orleans' population back after Hurricane Katrina, the need for public housing has fallen off.
In a letter to U.S. Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee Chairman Chris Dodd and Ranking Member Richard Shelby, the Louisiana Republican said that if New Orleans delays redevelopment of public housing, it could lose "vital tax and financing incentives for future redevelopment."
Vitter said that public housing in New Orleans failed to help those in need and that the city should move forward with redevelopment.
"Public housing in New Orleans has for many decades tragically served almost no other purpose than to warehouse the city's poor and disenfranchised," Vitter wrote.
Some members of a loosely organized coalition opposing the demolitions held another news conference late Wednesday in front of a small Baptist church in the Lower Garden District, near the site of the River Garden mixed-income development, to insist that poor people won't be well served by a broad move to that sort of option.
Once again, they called on council members to delay a decision on demolitions to allow more time for gathering public comments.
"People, simply because they are poor, are being locked out of our city," said the Rev. Torin Sanders, a Baptist minister and Orleans Parish School Board member.
HUD and HANO officials said Wednesday that they are not lobbying City Council members but are prepared to answer questions during today's meeting.
Police, protesters clash in New Orleans
USAToday
Police used chemical spray and stun guns Thursday as dozens of protesters tried to force their way into a packed City Council chamber during a debate on the planned demolition of some 4,500 public housing units.
One woman was sprayed with chemicals and dragged from the gates. She was taken away on a stretcher by emergency officials. Before that, the woman was seen pouring water from a bottle into her eyes and weeping.
Another woman said she was stunned by officers, and still had what appeared to be a Taser wire hanging from her shirt.
"I was just standing, trying to get into my City Council meeting," said the woman, Kim Ellis, who was taken away in an ambulance.
"Is this what democracy looks like?" said Bill Quigley, a Loyola University law professor who opposes demolition, as he held a strand of Taser wire he said had been shot into another of the protesters.
Protesters said they pushed against the iron gates that kept them out of the building because the Housing Authority of New Orleans had disproportionately allowed supporters of the demolition to pack the chambers.
After roughly 30 minutes of on-again-off-again struggle to get into the meeting, protesters fell back, continuously chanting with bullhorns. An afternoon storm thinned the protesters, some of whom had been waiting since 7 a.m. to enter.
At the peak of the confusion, some 70 protesters were facing about a dozen mounted police and 40 more law enforcement officers on foot. One sheriff's deputy wept on the city hall side of the gate and was comforted by his comrades.
Details on arrests were not immediately available.
The meeting itself was mostly peaceful, although an early fight in the chambers between protesters and police caused a brief interruption. A vote on the demolitions, required by the city charter before the work can begin, was expected in the late afternoon.
The demolition debate has at times exposed class and race divisions in the city — most public housing residents are black, as were many of the protesters, while the City Council is majority white. However, support for demolition among those who spoke at the meeting crossed racial lines.
"It's about being able to walk into a house and say this is a house, not a project," said Donna Johnigan, a black public housing resident who supports redevelopment and who has clashed with residents from other housing complexes. "What we're going to demand is better housing, better schools."
But Walter Gallas, the director of the New Orleans Field Office of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, said the apartment buildings should be prized because they are sturdy and well-built. "I'd like to add a new term to the local dialogue in post-Katrina New Orleans: Planning by demolition," said Gallas, who is white.
The City Council vote is a critical moment in a protracted fight between the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and residents, activists and preservationists.
HUD wants to demolish the buildings, most of them damaged by Hurricane Katrina, so developers can take advantage of tax credits and build new mixed-income neighborhoods.
HUD says the redevelopment, which was in the works before Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005, will mark an end to the city's failed public housing experiment that lumped the poor into crime-ridden complexes and marooned them outside the life of the rest of the city.
Critics say the plan will shrink the stock of cheap housing at a time when housing is scarce and drive poor blacks out of the city. They also say the buildings are, contrary to popular opinion, mostly handsome brick structures that will outlast anything HUD builds in their place.
"It is beyond callous, and can only be seen as malicious discrimination. It is an unabashed attempt to eliminate the black population of New Orleans," said Kali Akuno, an organizer with the Coalition to Stop the Demolition.
Photos of protest: http://www.nola.com/katrinaphotos/tp/gallery.ssf?cgi-bin/view_gallery.cgi/nola/view_gallery.ata?g_id=9468
Video: http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2007/12/20/nat.nola.housing.protest.clash.wdsu
Council seems ready to approve demolitions
by Gwen Filosa and Coleman Warner, Staff writers
Wednesday December 19, 2007, 12:22 PM
The New Orleans City Council appears poised to approve today the demolition of four of the city's public housing complexes, with four of its seven members signaling approval and one backing demolition of at least one of the aging complexes.
Council members Jackie Clarkson, Stacy Head and Shelley Midura said in interviews this week that they will vote to approve the demolition permits requested by federal housing officials. A spokeswoman for Council President Arnie Fielkow confirmed Wednesday that he will vote for the demolitions.
Cynthia Hedge-Morrell said she would vote for the demolition of the development in her district, the St. Bernard complex, but wouldn't disclose her position on the remaining three complexes: B.W. Cooper, Lafitte and C.J. Peete. Together, the complexes are often called the city's "big four" public housing developments.
Two other members -- James Carter and Cynthia Willard-Lewis -- said Wednesday that they are undecided and declined to discuss the matter in advance of today's meeting at City Hall.
In approving the demolition of federally financed public housing units, the council finds itself in a new and controversial role of setting in motion the wrecking crews to dismantle scores of brick buildings that generations of poor people have called home.
The Housing Authority of New Orleans wanted to begin demolition of 4,500 units on Dec. 15, but a state judge agreed with the Loyola Law Clinic's attorneys that the council first must approve the permits for each of the four sites.
Though protests from activists opposed to the demolitions continue this week, some council members stood firm in their support for tearing down the aging and in some cases dilapidated complexes to make way for new developments serving families with a mix of incomes.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which has had direct control of HANO since 2002, plans to oversee the development of neighborhoods that blend public housing, apartments for people of modest incomes and single-family homes for residents of various income levels.
"I'm going to vote to support redevelopment of the projects in the city," Midura said. "I'll be voting to support the path that most effectively reforms and reopens public housing. That path requires a demolition permit."
Head agreed.
"Redevelopment requires demolition," said Head, adding that the "overwhelming majority" of her constituents want Peete and Cooper transformed into mixed-income neighborhoods.
Midura's district includes the Lafitte development, which has been shuttered since Katrina, while Head's district includes C.J. Peete and B.W. Cooper. The St. Bernard development, closed since Katrina, is in Hedge-Morrell's district.
Call for improvement
Clarkson said New Orleans would be ill-advised to try to stop HUD's plans for redevelopment.
"We need to provide better housing than before Katrina," she said. "By going along with HUD, we get an opportunity to spend their money on our people."
Fielkow has made public statements recently supporting mixed-income housing, but stopped short of promising a vote for demolition. On Wednesday, a spokesperson who declined to be identified said Fielkow will back the demolitions.
Willard-Lewis issued a statement that said she has met with public housing residents and others to "find common solutions to these difficult problems."
Hedge-Morrell released a lengthy statement explaining her decision to vote for the demolition of the St. Bernard in the 7th Ward, where 1,015 families lived before Katrina.
"I would not allow my grown children or my grandchildren to reside in the St. Bernard housing development, even if it could be rehabilitated," Hedge-Morrell said. "Health and safety come first. Experts have shown that St. Bernard has too much asbestos, too much lead-based paint, too much mold."
Hedge-Morrell said she will fight to ensure that poor families who once lived at St. Bernard will be served by redevelopment plans.
Clarkson, the at-large councilwoman, recalled that her former council district included Fischer, which in recent years has been transformed from a high-rise tower and barracks-style apartments to modern housing, including a "senior village" on the West Bank.
"We did not displace the poor, and I plan to make sure we don't," Clarkson said. "We don't have to build a whole bunch of supply if there's no demand."
Vote comes today
Today's 10 a.m. council meeting is likely to draw crowds of activists, who have argued that the old buildings, many of which date to the 1940s, should be rehabbed and reopened. HUD has opposed that plan, arguing that a model that concentrates the poor in large, high-density buildings for decades is a proven failure.
The Coalition to Stop the Demolitions, an umbrella group for scores of activist groups opposing HANO's redevelopment plans, sent out instructions on protesting today's vote in an e-mail message that speculated that the council vote will fall along racial lines. Midura, Head, Clarkson and Fielkow are white, while Carter, Hedge-Morrell and Willard-Lewis are black.
Opponents of the demolitions have pushed for guarantees that HUD will agree to "one-for-one" replacement of all public housing units, but others have said such a move would relegate poor New Orleanians to public housing indefinitely.
Clarkson said last week that tearing down and redeveloping the Lafitte complex would "save Treme and rebuild the neighborhood better than before."
The Lafitte plan, by nonprofit developers Providence and Enterprise, calls for "one-to-one" replacement of the 900 public housing units there pre-Katrina, unlike the plans for redeveloping the other three complexes, which might include far fewer public housing units.
"I consider that the compromise," said Clarkson, of the Lafitte redevelopment plan.
Demand high, Landrieu says
HUD's demolition plans for New Orleans have resonated across the country, with Louisiana's two U.S. senators at odds over the future of public housing in New Orleans.
U.S. Sen. David Vitter and U.S. Reps. Richard Baker, Jim McCrery and Rodney Alexander, all Republicans, said Wednesday that New Orleans does not need as many public housing units as it had before Hurricane Katrina.
That clashes with proposed legislation by Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., who is calling for "one-for-one replacement" of the government-subsidized apartments with new mixed-income developments.
Landrieu said the need was unmet before the storm when about 6,000 low-income people were on a waiting list for the city's 7,000 public housing units. However, of those 7,000 units, only 5,100 were occupied; many were in a state of disrepair.
With rents up 45 percent since the storm, an estimated 12,000 homeless people in the city, and low-wage service-industry workers struggling to find housing, Landrieu says the demand is as great as it has ever been.
Vitter urges change
But Landrieu's Louisiana colleague, Vitter, has taken the lead in opposing the bill, saying that with just two-thirds of New Orleans' population back after Hurricane Katrina, the need for public housing has fallen off.
In a letter to U.S. Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee Chairman Chris Dodd and Ranking Member Richard Shelby, the Louisiana Republican said that if New Orleans delays redevelopment of public housing, it could lose "vital tax and financing incentives for future redevelopment."
Vitter said that public housing in New Orleans failed to help those in need and that the city should move forward with redevelopment.
"Public housing in New Orleans has for many decades tragically served almost no other purpose than to warehouse the city's poor and disenfranchised," Vitter wrote.
Some members of a loosely organized coalition opposing the demolitions held another news conference late Wednesday in front of a small Baptist church in the Lower Garden District, near the site of the River Garden mixed-income development, to insist that poor people won't be well served by a broad move to that sort of option.
Once again, they called on council members to delay a decision on demolitions to allow more time for gathering public comments.
"People, simply because they are poor, are being locked out of our city," said the Rev. Torin Sanders, a Baptist minister and Orleans Parish School Board member.
HUD and HANO officials said Wednesday that they are not lobbying City Council members but are prepared to answer questions during today's meeting.
Police, protesters clash in New Orleans
USAToday
Police used chemical spray and stun guns Thursday as dozens of protesters tried to force their way into a packed City Council chamber during a debate on the planned demolition of some 4,500 public housing units.
One woman was sprayed with chemicals and dragged from the gates. She was taken away on a stretcher by emergency officials. Before that, the woman was seen pouring water from a bottle into her eyes and weeping.
Another woman said she was stunned by officers, and still had what appeared to be a Taser wire hanging from her shirt.
"I was just standing, trying to get into my City Council meeting," said the woman, Kim Ellis, who was taken away in an ambulance.
"Is this what democracy looks like?" said Bill Quigley, a Loyola University law professor who opposes demolition, as he held a strand of Taser wire he said had been shot into another of the protesters.
Protesters said they pushed against the iron gates that kept them out of the building because the Housing Authority of New Orleans had disproportionately allowed supporters of the demolition to pack the chambers.
After roughly 30 minutes of on-again-off-again struggle to get into the meeting, protesters fell back, continuously chanting with bullhorns. An afternoon storm thinned the protesters, some of whom had been waiting since 7 a.m. to enter.
At the peak of the confusion, some 70 protesters were facing about a dozen mounted police and 40 more law enforcement officers on foot. One sheriff's deputy wept on the city hall side of the gate and was comforted by his comrades.
Details on arrests were not immediately available.
The meeting itself was mostly peaceful, although an early fight in the chambers between protesters and police caused a brief interruption. A vote on the demolitions, required by the city charter before the work can begin, was expected in the late afternoon.
The demolition debate has at times exposed class and race divisions in the city — most public housing residents are black, as were many of the protesters, while the City Council is majority white. However, support for demolition among those who spoke at the meeting crossed racial lines.
"It's about being able to walk into a house and say this is a house, not a project," said Donna Johnigan, a black public housing resident who supports redevelopment and who has clashed with residents from other housing complexes. "What we're going to demand is better housing, better schools."
But Walter Gallas, the director of the New Orleans Field Office of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, said the apartment buildings should be prized because they are sturdy and well-built. "I'd like to add a new term to the local dialogue in post-Katrina New Orleans: Planning by demolition," said Gallas, who is white.
The City Council vote is a critical moment in a protracted fight between the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and residents, activists and preservationists.
HUD wants to demolish the buildings, most of them damaged by Hurricane Katrina, so developers can take advantage of tax credits and build new mixed-income neighborhoods.
HUD says the redevelopment, which was in the works before Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005, will mark an end to the city's failed public housing experiment that lumped the poor into crime-ridden complexes and marooned them outside the life of the rest of the city.
Critics say the plan will shrink the stock of cheap housing at a time when housing is scarce and drive poor blacks out of the city. They also say the buildings are, contrary to popular opinion, mostly handsome brick structures that will outlast anything HUD builds in their place.
"It is beyond callous, and can only be seen as malicious discrimination. It is an unabashed attempt to eliminate the black population of New Orleans," said Kali Akuno, an organizer with the Coalition to Stop the Demolition.