Housing activists and former tenants gathered at the St. Bernard public housing development Monday to clean apartments, reclaim lost belongings and protest a policy that has kept their homes shuttered since Hurricane Katrina.
Organizers from a housing-rights group, Mayday NOLA, said its members intended to occupy units and remain at the "survivors village" until residents have reached a satisfactory agreement with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
"The residents are the voices demanding justice, and we are inside because of their organizing, and in solidarity with their struggle for their homes," said a letter issued by activists.
Crowds massed outside the sprawling 7th Ward complex as small groups strolled the mostly vacant courtyards. Housing Authority of New Orleans security officers remained on the fringes, though some tenants said they had been threatened with arrest for trespassing.
A HANO spokesman could not be reached for comment, and a HANO officer on the scene declined to speak with a reporter.
"These people just want to come home," said Brenda Joseph, a Gentilly resident who escorted her niece, a former St. Bernard resident, to her apartment. As her niece’s children happily displayed toys and other items left behind, others piled mattresses and trash outside the buildings.
It was unclear how the complex’s gates were unlocked, but all of them were open in midafternoon. Vehicles filled the neutral ground, many of them bearing Texas license plates, and the smell from open-air grills filled the air. An impromptu disc jockey set up speakers and spoke of honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as the O’Jays’ "Family Reunion" blared.
Before Katrina, the St. Bernard complex housed 963 families, but the abandoned, fenced-in ruin is slated for demolition along with several other of the city’s public housing complexes. The decision to raze the complexes led residents to file a civil rights lawsuit against HUD and HANO, saying the agencies are preventing low-income black families from returning to the city.
Inside St. Bernard on Monday, several banners hung in a central courtyard bearing slogans including "Let Us Come Home," "Housing Is a Human Right," "HUD/HANO Displaced Us, Not Katrina" and "Recovery Means Everybody." According to Mayday NOLA, the banners were also hung at the Lafitte, C.J. Peete and B.W. Cooper complexes.
A HUD spokeswoman said in December that the agency was considering reopening some units to former public housing residents in those other three complexes, all of which had been slated for demolition, while other parts of the complexes are demolished and rebuilt. About 40 families already have been allowed to return to Cooper.
"I don’t think it’s fair that they open up one of the projects and not open the rest of them," said former St. Bernard resident Phyllis Lewis as she sat outside one of the apartments. "Give us our house back."
Lewis, who is living in New Orleans, angrily denounced the policies that kept her out of St. Bernard, saying developers and government officials want to turn the complex into condominiums. "We already knew before Katrina they wanted this land," she said.
Next to Lewis, Teka Russell threw some items into a trash heap.
"I came to see what they was going to do about reopening," she said. Russell now lives in Houston, and Monday was her first opportunity to get back inside her old apartment and retrieve papers she needed to give the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
"We’re doing the first step," she said of cleaning out the building. "What’s the next step?"
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