TRACIE WASHINGTON: Oh, no. No, not at all. We’ve got experts from MIT, all over the country, who have looked at the housing. I mean, that — and, you know, the proof is in the pudding, really, quite frankly. They wanted to close down all of the housing, and immediately after Katrina, some of the residents got word of this, and they went and they took over one of the developments, Iberville. And so, they were able to get Iberville open.
Some of these developments that are closed down took in no water. I mean, they were not damaged at all. Lafitte? No water. C.J. Peete? No water. But the decision was made to take advantage of an opportunity. Hurricane Katrina came. Look what we can do. We can keep these people away from here, bring in the bulldozers, tear down this housing, cut the unit space and occupancy by two-thirds, call it mixed-income, take that one-third that’s left and divide it into three, so we have a third of that space for public housing residents, and the rest we will use for market rate and, you know, a little bit below market rate. And that has always been the plan.
