New Orleans: HUD Policies Limiting Housing for Poor

By Bill Quigley
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor

Friday 29 December 2006

Gloria Williams and her twin sister, Bobbie Jennings, are both 60 years old. They are two of the more than 4,000 families who lived in public housing in New Orleans before Katrina struck. The families are still locked out of their homes. Their residences are two of 4,534 apartments that the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has announced plans to demolish. The demolition is planned even though it will cost more to tear down and rebuild many fewer units than it would to fix them up and reopen them. Ms. Williams, Ms. Jennings, and thousands of families like them, are fighting HUD. They want to return.

Gloria and Bobbie started working early. As children, they picked cotton, strawberries, snap beans and pecans before and after grade school every day in rural Louisiana. "We were raised up to work," they said.

They moved to New Orleans after their father drowned. Their home was marked by regular domestic violence. A few years later, their mother was murdered by a boyfriend.

As teens, they moved in with an abusive relative. They ran away, came back, and stayed with other relatives. They can even remember nights when they slept under their aunt's bed in a hospital while waiting for her to recuperate.

As young women, they continued working. They worked in restaurants before starting careers as Certified Nursing Assistants. Then they worked for years in nursing homes and in private homes, caring for the elderly and disabled. They fed people, cleaned people, bathed people, cared for people. Each married and raised children and grandchildren. Like residents in 25 percent of the households in New Orleans, neither owned a car.

In the past few years, the sisters' years of physical work took their toil, and they can no longer work. Ms. Jennings had back surgery, and she suffers with high blood pressure. Ms. Williams has heart and lung problems, high blood pressure, and clots in her legs that prevent her from standing or walking for long periods. Each lives solely on about $600 a month from disability. There are no pensions.

When Katrina hit, they had been living in the C.J. Peete apartments for years. Bobbie Jennings had been there for 34 years. Her twin, Gloria Williams, had lived there for more than 18 years.

Their combined families - 18 in all - evacuated to Baton Rouge to ride out the storm. When it was clear they would not be going home any time soon, their host family told them it was time to move on. In September 2005, the 18 moved into one daughter's damaged home in Slidell, about 30 miles away from New Orleans - all sleeping on the first floor because the roof was still damaged.

One of their sisters, Annie, was hospitalized with cancer when Katrina hit. It took the family weeks before they finally found her in a hospital in Macon, Georgia.

When the city opened, they got rides into town and checked on their apartments. No water had entered them, but their doors had been kicked down and all their furnishings were gone. The housing authority told them they could not move back in for a couple of months more, while their apartments were secured and fixed up. The housing authority started repairing and painting apartments in her complex, but abruptly stopped after a few weeks.

Slidell was getting tight, so the sisters accepted an offer to relocate to California. After a month, they returned. Being 3,000 miles apart from family was too heartbreaking. A four-day bus ride brought them back to Slidell in January 2006. After hitching rides into New Orleans, Ms. Williams found a subsidized apartment. The only way the landlord would accept her, though, was if she paid him an extra $400 under the table. Otherwise, he would rent it to someone else who would.

So Ms. Williams paid the extra money and moved in with her grandchildren, while she waited for her old apartment to reopen. She used FEMA money to buy new furniture.

In late February 2005, Ms. Williams was hospitalized for three weeks for surgeries on her legs.

In June 2005, HUD officials announced that they were not going to let any residents back into Ms. Williams' apartment complex and three others (Lafitte, Saint Bernard and BW Cooper) because they were going to be demolished. More than one hundred maintenance and security workers for the housing authority were let go. HUD took over the local housing authority years ago, and all these decisions are being made in Washington, DC.

The demolished buildings would make way for much newer and many fewer apartments, which would be built by private developers. The demolition and private development would be financed by federal funds and federal tax breaks designed to help Katrina victims!

Nearly $100 million in Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds was designated for the private developers. Another $34 million in Katrina Go-Zone tax credits also was donated to the developers.

In July 2005, Ms. Williams' apartment caught fire, and again she lost everything. Her landlord did not want to let her out of her lease. He told her that she and her grandson could still live there: All they had to do was clean the soot off the walls and ceilings.

At this, Ms. Williams broke down and went back into the hospital.

Ms. Jennings got an apartment and allowed her daughter and her grandchildren to live there because they have no place to stay. She also took in her little sister, Annie, who was dying of cancer. Annie died on August 17, 2005.

Both sisters have severe problems every month in making ends meet. Utility bills eat up most of their monthly checks. With no car and their apartments across the river from New Orleans, they cannot get to the doctor.

Christmas was very tough. Ms. Williams said "We didn't have a Christmas. We didn't have food to put on the table." Her grandson went to her sister's house to get a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Ms. Jennings cried as she said, "Behind Katrina and my little sister dying, my life just stopped. This is the second year we didn't have a Christmas. It is so hard to try to start over. I let my daughter and her two grandchildren sleep on the bed. I sleep on a pallet on the floor. Before Katrina, I was on blood-pressure medicine once a day. Now I take four blood-pressure pills three times a day. I also take pills for depression, nerves and stress."

"We just want to go home," Ms. Williams said. "People knew us in our neighborhood. They never messed with us. I could leave my back door open when I went to the grocery. People don't understand that was our home. We want to go home."

Why would people want to go back into public housing? Aren't the developments dangerous and crime-ridden? Isn't this an opportunity to start over and make something better?

Public-housing residents know full well the problems of living there, but still they want to return.

Why? Start with the fact that New Orleans is in the worst affordable-housing crisis since the Civil War. Tens of thousands of houses still remain in ruins after Katrina. Rents for the rest have gone up 70 to 80 percent since Katrina. Even before Katrina, there was a waiting list of 18,000 families seeking to get into public housing - now it is much, much worse.

HUD's demolition plans target 4,534 apartments of public housing in the community. The agency is planning to demolish 1,546 apartments in BW Cooper, 723 in C.J. Peete, 1,400 in St. Bernard, and 865 in Lafitte.

These are not dense, high-rise towers. Public housing in New Orleans is made up of development clusters of mostly two-story and three-story buildings with six to eight apartments in each.

New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, criticized plans to demolish these apartments, saying on November 19, 2006: "Modestly scaled, they include some of the best public housing built 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 public-housing complex."

Most of these apartments rented for modest rents tied to the resident's incomes. Most renters did not pay separate utility charges. Leases were essentially for life, unless someone in the family was caught breaking the law.

HUD initially said they had to demolish the buildings because they were so damaged that they were dangerous to residents.

That was not true.

John Fernandez, an associate professor of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), inspected 140 of these apartments and concluded in papers filed in court that "no structural or nonstructural damage was found that could reasonably warrant any cost-effective building demolition. Therefore, the general conclusions are: Demolition of any of the buildings of these four projects is not supported by the evidence of the survey; replacement of these buildings with contemporary construction would yield buildings of lower quality and shorter lifetime duration; the original construction methods and materials of these projects are far superior in their resistance to hurricane conditions than typical new construction; and, with renovation and regular maintenance, the lifetimes of the buildings in all four projects promise decades of continued service that may be extended indefinitely."

Residents promise to fix up their apartments themselves if given the chance. "I clean for a living," said one young woman resident at a recent public hearing where 100 percent of the residents opposed demolition. "I clean for a living and I am proud of it. I clean every body else's houses, I will sure clean up my own house - just let me back in to do it!"

After the public understood that the buildings were not actually in such bad shape, the authorities then said it would cost much more to repair the buildings than to demolish and start over.

That, too, was not true.

The housing authority's own documents show that Lafitte could be repaired for $20 million - even completely overhauled for $85 million - while the estimate for demolishing and rebuilding many fewer units will cost more than $100 million. St. Bernard could be repaired for $41 million or substantially modernized for $130 million, while demolishing and rebuilding fewer units will cost $197 million. BW Cooper could be substantially renovated for $135 million, compared to $221 million to demolish and rebuild fewer units. CJ Peete's own insurance company reported that it would take less than $5,000 each to repair the CJ Peete apartments.

HUD suggests that less-dense, "mixed-income" communities are the way to go.

But residents and the community knows that if HUD has its way, only about 20 percent of the families who lived in these developments will be allowed to return.

New Orleans has suffered through the experience of HUD's "mixed-income" policies before. The Saint Thomas housing development, once home to 1,510 families, was demolished with promises that people would be returning to a beautiful, redeveloped community. Instead, there is now a Wal-Mart on the site, and hundreds of cute gingerbread pastel houses. How many of the 1,510 families who used to live in Saint Thomas have been allowed to move back in? About a hundred. A few of these families have had to force their way in with litigation by the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center. The demolition of Saint Thomas is hailed as a mostly good outcome by nearby developers and some of the young professionals who moved into the surrounding neighborhood, knowing what was coming. What do the more than 1,400 families who were moved out and not allowed to return think? Don't ask - no one else is.

HUD has the same plans for the neighborhoods where they are trying to demolish housing. According to documents filed with the Louisiana Housing Finance Agency:

* Saint Bernard will go from 1,400 apartments to 595 apartments - only 160 of which will be for low-income public-housing residents. There will be 160 tax credit mixed-income units and 145 market-rate units.

* CJ Peete will go from 723 units to 410; of the 410 units, 154 will be public-housing eligible, with 133 mixed-income and 123 market-rate.

* BW Cooper will go from 1546 to 410, 154 public housing eligible, 133 tax-credit mixed income, and 123 market; And Lafitte will downsized in the same way.

As a result, HUD plans to spend tens of millions of Katrina assistance funds to end up with far fewer affordable apartments.

The new Congress is looking into this. Representatives Barney Frank and Maxine Waters chair the committee and subcommittee with oversight of HUD. There is also a federal class-action lawsuit filed by the Advancement Project, Jenner & Block, and local attorneys.

Residents of the Saint Bernard housing development and their allies plan are not waiting any more. On Martin Luther King's Birthday, January 15, 2007, they are going in, with or without permission. "What better way to celebrate Martin Luther King's Birthday than to risk going to jail for justice?" says Endesha Jukali, a neighbor who lived and worked in Saint Bernard for years.

But the clock is still ticking. HUD, which has not "officially approved" its own announcement, says the demolition needs to get started to take advantage of the Katrina tax credits. Neither the Congress nor the federal courts has yet stepped in to stop the demolitions.

What do the sisters think about this? Ms. Jennings says: "I lived there for 34 years. That is my home. I just cannot afford to live outside the development. I don't know how else to explain it. I have the tears, but I do not have the words." Her twin sister, Ms. Williams, cries and says: "That was my home for over 18 years. I never gave them no trouble. My home never flooded. I will clean it myself, just please let me back in. I wish I could make people understand. I just want to go home."

--------

Bill Quigley is a human-rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. He is one of the lawyers representing thousands of families who want to return to their apartments in New Orleans. For more information about this situation, see www.justiceforneworleans.org or contact the Advancement Project at (202) 728-9557.



Go to Original

In New Orleans's Lower Ninth, Still Waiting for a Break in the Clouds
By Courtland Milloy
The Washington Post

Wednesday 27 Wednesday 2006

New Orleans - I was passing through the Crescent City last week on my way to visit my parents in Shreveport for the holidays. It was raining, and I stopped when I saw a man just standing in a pool of water outside his home in the Lower Ninth Ward. Turns out his name was Clark Kent.

"It's leaking like crazy in there," said Kent, 49, a tattoo of his initials showing through a rain-soaked shirt. He thought the roof was about to collapse and figured that it was better to be wet and alive outside than wet and crushed to death inside.

"You think Katrina is over, but we still have houses falling down around here," he told me.

Seeing people suffer like this can make you feel grateful for what you have. But it can also make you angry. What happened to the billions of dollars in private donations and government funds that were earmarked for rebuilding this city?

Viewed in aerial photographs, the area looks to be as much a part of the Gulf of Mexico as the state of Louisiana. And the Lower 9, the ever poor and mournful home of the blues, appears little more than the muddy bottom of a cracked and leaky bowl of a town.

And yet, it's still New Orleans - world-renowned for a culture of blues, jazz and magic that actually derives power and passion from teetering so precariously on the brink of oblivion.

"It's looking better than it did six months ago," said Albert Bass, who was distributing food, clothes and tools to residents in the ward. He is a volunteer in a group called Common Ground, and he grew up in the area. "My family used to live right there," Bass said, pointing to a vacant lot near a levee. "Our house was one of the first to go."

Some of the remaining homes had been spruced up with holiday lights and cutouts of Santa Claus. But there really wasn't much to celebrate. "It's mostly frustrating and very tiring," said Matthew Sabin, coordinator for Common Ground. "After 16 months, people were hoping for more."

Much of the money that was supposed to be used to rebuild the city has been caught up in red tape. This is what USA Today reported last week:

"One $7.5 billion Louisiana program to help people rebuild or relocate has put money in the hands of just 87 of the 89,403 homeowners who applied. In the Lower 9th Ward, a mostly poor section of the city, floodwaters severely damaged more than 1,300 buildings, more than in almost any other part of New Orleans, according to city records. Yet by early December, the city had issued only four permits for new homes to be built there, a USA Today analysis of permit records shows."

The article quoted U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.): "The bottom line is that the taxpayers of this country are going to spend literally tens of billions of dollars and be surprised and disappointed at how little they are going to be able to show for it."

Kent knew all about that.

"I applied for a trailer," Kent said. "But as you can see, I don't have one." What he did have was a feeling of deja vu as the rain brought back a flood of bad memories. "I was trapped on the roof, water pouring in through the windows," he recalled, occasionally taking a step back as water rose around his feet. "People in the two-story house next door said, 'Come over here.' So I waded over, but the water kept rising, and we ended up being trapped on the roof over there." He sounded exasperated, his face drenched in despair. "Three days and three nights before a boat came and got us."

Now the water was rising again.

Kent had gathered up several plastic bags filled with clothes and was headed to a car, where he planned to sleep that night. Before driving away, headed for my parents' warm, dry and comfortable home, I wished him a happy New Year.

"Like hell," he replied.

-------