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.
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 célèbre 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.
Since August there have been at least five killings in the old Iberville project, abutting the French Quarter, even though the complex is only about one-quarter occupied. In the latest, a young man was found shot in the head, propping up the door of an abandoned apartment with a bag of crack cocaine at his feet.
At the St. Thomas project, the violent crime rate was more than seven times as high as the city’s as a whole, according to a paper done at the London School of Economics; only 2 percent of its residents were employed full-time.
At the C. J. Peete project, which is on the department’s demolition list, Lawrence Powell, a Tulane University historian, recalled a flourishing open-air drug market across the street.
Bernell Stewart, a nearby resident standing across from the empty Lafitte project, said, “Every time you looked around, somebody was getting killed on this corner.”
Even those critical of the housing department acknowledge that the projects, with all their troubles, had effectively cut off their inhabitants, an isolation reinforced by generations of living in them. Mr. Powell, who ran a social services agency at C. J. Peete in the 1990s, said he tried to “help people move out where they would become homeowners, to move back to the original goal where it was a way station, not warehouses.”
That alienation was starkly in evidence at the public meeting last month. “For once, I would like for us to live in y’all’s houses and let y’all live in ours,” Josey Willis, a displaced Lafitte resident, told the officials. “Let us change places and see what we feeling; then you can feel what we feeling.”
Other cities have seen similar resistance from public housing tenants fearful of change. But here the tenants’ extreme poverty and a legacy of mistrust fueled by years of official neglect has given the fight an edge. Misspent money caused the federal department to keep a close watch over the local housing authority in the mid-1990s, and the department finally took it over in 2002. The projects here were in such poor shape that “a lot of us said it shouldn’t even be considered affordable housing,” said Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution, who served as chief of staff for former Housing Secretary Henry G. Cisneros.
This city’s politicians have been notably silent on the issue but have occasionally suggested that they, too, are wary of a return to the old days. “We don’t need soap-opera watchers right now,” President Oliver Thomas of the City Council said last February, commenting on the lives of displaced public housing residents.
The department’s goal is to deconcentrate the poor, in concert with the philosophy that developed during the early 1990s calling for redeveloping public housing as “mixed income” communities. The best-known example here, the redevelopment of St. Thomas after its demolition in 2000, is still a subject of fierce controversy, a mix of successes and shortcomings that has fueled suspicions.
The pleasant streets of pastel-colored houses that replaced the grim St. Thomas buildings have put life back into a Lower Garden District neighborhood that for years was fearful and moribund.
On the other hand, the new development has accommodated less than one in five of the old St. Thomas families, though the developer says expansion will add more. And those that are there feel threatened by tenant rules designed to make the neighborhood’s market-rate inhabitants comfortable, including occupancy restrictions, Mr. Everard said.
“Folks got cheated out of their dream,” Mr. Everard said. “The whole concept of the mixed-income community ended up dislocating the vast majority of poor people.”
Yet a return to the old days is an outcome that even some former tenants do not embrace.
“If they’re talking about redevelopment, I’m for it,” Natasha Dixon said at the meeting last month. “But why can’t y’all do it in phases? Why can’t that happen now, to get the people home?”
