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Tuesday, December 18

Public Housing Myths/Facts

Bill Quigley wrote an excellent fact sheet on the issue of public housing in New Orleans.  All of the myths below are propegated on the NOLA.com message boards.  Answers to the myths here.

MYTHS

  • "Federal officials, in partnership with developers, are pushing a plan that will demolish 4500 units of traditional public housing, replacing them with 3343 units of public housing and 900 market rate rental units." Statement in Times-Pic 12.16.2007

  • If HANO and HUD do not start demolition right away, they will lose their tax credits.

  • There really is no housing problem, it is just outside agitators who are making it seem like New Orleans has a housing problem.

  • People do not want to come back to New Orleans. There are hundreds of vacant empty subsidized apartments just waiting for people to move in – no one wants to take them.

1 comment:

Rob Harman said...

See the thing is, and I've been to quite a few of these protests, is there are in fact quite a large number of outside agitators. In other words, people not from here, who think what HUD/HANO is doing is wrong, and therefore protest it.But I think this speaks to a larger issue of the need for more grassroots community based organization. Because frankly when we don't do it that way we are discredited. And with good reason, think of all the other incidences when outsiders came in and started fucking around, slavery, imperialism, colonialism. Now I'm not saying the housing activists are attempting to enslave anyone, but if you look at past examples of people coming in from the outside, and the most popular examples, it makes sense that people do not wish to take those people seriously.

I'd like to discuss an example that really pissed me off. A few weeks ago, me and another person of beautifully dark complexion where standing around taking part in a housing protest. The protestors where mostly white (not to mention smelly, dirty, and poorly dressed), with a small group of Black people leading it. Those people where, or so they said, former residents of the projects. As we were standing there one woman asked the dark guy and me to come to the front of the protest because they wanted people of color to be represented the most. This request at first being strategically beneficial to me, infuriated me as the day went on. It was sort of like these outside activists came in, organized a protest, then realized no locals were represented, then when they realized that they couldn't get enough locals to participate to make them look legit they got any random Black person to jump in the front and look angry.

Nuff said. Excuse grammatical incoherency.