New York Times
U.S.
In New Orleans, Ex-Tenants Fight for Projects
Lee Celano for The New York Times
“I’m a young man who grew up in the projects,” Alvin Richardson told housing authority officials last month at a stormy public meeting on plans to raze and redevelop four large housing complexes.
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By ADAM NOSSITER
Published: December 26, 2006
NEW ORLEANS, Dec. 25 — The heritage of suspicion and misery separating this city’s poorest residents from its comfortable classes is playing out in a fierce battle over the future of the public housing projects here, a fight in which the shelter of as many as 20,000 people is at stake.
Hurricane Katrina
It has raged ever since the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development announced plans last June to demolish four of the largest projects in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and no amount of assurances that the agency wants to replace the crime-haunted, aging brick structures with something better has calmed the anger of former tenants.
This month, under pressure, HUD restated that it might allow some tenants to return while proceeding with redevelopment; a face-off in Federal District Court here Friday between tenant advocates and department lawyers could be decisive.
The struggle over housing in New Orleans raises the larger issue of how to reintegrate the most vulnerable residents after the hurricane, the ones most disrupted by the storm and still displaced 16 months later.
And it has brought sharply into focus how much the New Orleans housing projects were places apart, vast islands of poverty in an already impoverished city. HUD has already chosen two nonprofit developers to replace the Lafitte project, a forbidding complex of 1940s reddish brick dormitories near Interstate 10, with a mix of houses and apartments, some subsidized and some not. The new housing will “dramatically improve living conditions” for the former tenants, a legal brief by the department says.
The agency’s plans and the resistance of the tenants has become a cause celebre for advocates of many stripes. They shouted down hapless housing officials at a tumultuous public meeting here last month; they demonstrated angrily outside Mayor C. Ray Nagin’s home two weekends ago; and the courtroom vituperation, in the lawsuit against HUD, has been unusually bitter.
Still, the advocates’ talk of ethnic cleansing, social engineering and HUD’s purported “violation” of international law has partly obscured the reality of what the projects were and what even some who question the planned demolition fear they could become again if the redevelopment project falls through.
“I think the romanticism that goes with the ‘good old days of public housing’ belies the harsh realities of crime and social malaise that had been created as a result of a concentration of low, low income folks,” said Michael P. Kelly, who directed the troubled Housing Authority of New Orleans from 1995 to 2000 and now runs its counterpart in Washington, D.C. “Women that would put their babies in bathtubs at the sound of gunfire, that was a reality; coming home from your job and having to walk through young people participating in drug trades.”
Working women trying to raise children, many of whom staff the low-wage tourist hotels here, often made that walk, as they do in public housing in other cities. But here the journey had a particularly tough edge, in keeping with the often violent city surrounding the projects.
The toughness was underscored in striking fashion at last month’s public meeting, notably by one of the many enraged former tenants who rose to criticize the federal housing department and the city housing authority.
“I’m a young man who grew up in the projects,” said that critic, Alvin Richardson. “I grew up in the Iberville project, the Desire, the Calliope, the St. Thomas, St. Bernard, and I survived them all. You can’t do nothing to me because I survived the ghetto.”
The peculiar physical environment of the projects, a confluence of their isolation, their dilapidation and the large numbers of vacant apartments, combined to create difficulties, some veteran police officers say. It was not the tenants who created problems, but nonresidents taking advantage of the dense clustering of small, low-ceilinged apartments.
“The way they were constructed, it’s not law-enforcement friendly,” said Lt. Bruce Adams, a veteran police officer who grew up in the Desire project. “All those entrances and exists. The fact that it’s so condensed is causing the problem.”
Don Everard, director of a social service agency that worked for years in one of the projects, said that with all the vacancies, “you didn’t know what was up the stairwell.”
“You didn’t know who was using an abandoned apartment,” Mr. Everard said.
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