November 2007 Archives

The Coaltion to Stop Demolitions is holding a press conference on Friday, Nov. 30 at 9:30am to make the following requests of the New Orleans city council:

Given over 200,000 persons still displaced from New Orleans after 2 1/2 years, and given 12,000+ homeless persons in the city, and given current redevelopment plans that will exclude 3861 families from public housing, will you amend the City Council Resolution No.. $-07-528 (passed on November 1, 2007) to explicitly

1. oppose the demolition of the BW Cooper, C.J. Peete, Lafitte, and St. Bernard public housing developments, and
   
2. recognize the right of return for all residents living in New Orleans prior to Katrina

If your organization would like to sign on to the petition, please e-mail Pam Nath at nathpam@gmail.com.

The Housing Authority of New Orleans on Thursday approved more than $30 million in contracts for citywide demolition of vacant brick buildings at five developments, part of its sweeping plan to transform New Orleans public housing.

Demolition will begin Dec. 15, said HANO spokesman Adonis Expose, but no specific plans were announced Thursday.

HUD announced in June that it would demolish the city’s four largest developments, St. Bernard, Lafitte, C.J. Peete and B.W. Cooper to make way for "mixed income" neighborhoods.

HANO board commissioner Donald Babers approved the following demolition plans Thursday, without a word of comment from the 20 people who attended the meeting in Algiers:

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A day after the organization shocked its staff members and donors by firing its chief executive, Mark W. Everson, for having an affair with a subordinate, all its historic problems — including governance, past failures in its disaster relief efforts and continuing failures in its blood business — were up for discussion.

“They took forever to hire this guy because they were going to get it right,” said Trent Stamp, president of Charity Navigator, a Web site that rates the efficiency of charities based on financial statements filed with the government.

“They told everyone to be patient,” Mr. Stamp said, “because they were going to find one person with impeccable credentials to lead for the long-term, and for it all to unravel in six months is just another mistake, just like all of the others this organization had made before.”

That sense of dismay echoed throughout the charity world yesterday.

“The tragedy of this is that the American Red Cross is probably the best-known nonprofit organization in this country,” said Diana Aviv, president and chief executive of the Independent Sector, a nonprofit trade association. “When the stories about it are more about governance and management and less about how it saves lives, it’s sad and not just for the Red Cross.”

Mr. Everson appeared to have brought a level of stability to the Red Cross that it had not experienced in more than a decade. Even as he eliminated senior vice presidents and set what some thought were overly ambitious fund-raising goals, employees said, he was respectful of staff members and an ardent defender of the organization.

The wildfires that devastated Southern California last month were the first significant test of the Red Cross under his leadership, and it won generally high marks.

Additionally, governance of the Red Cross is being overhauled. The board has been reduced by roughly half and will be pared further, and an ombudsman hired by Mr. Everson is in place. The board chairman’s job, which traditionally has conflicted with the chief executive’s, has been limited to setting strategy, rather than involvement in day-to-day management.

“Historically, this is a board of denial, but in this case, they faced up to the problem and dealt with it promptly and head-on,” said Peter Dobkin Hall, a lecturer on public policy at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University. “That’s progress.”

But Renata J. Rafferty, a consultant to donors who was critical of the board for hiring Mr. Everson, said Congress should suspend or fire the board.

“They showed far worse lack of judgment in bringing him to the organization and then firing him six months later than he showed,” Ms. Rafferty said.

She said Mr. Everson could have been sanctioned, put on unpaid leave or had his pay cut. “I’m sure there were sanctions that could have been taken short of firing the man,” she said, “which wasted the 18 months they spent searching for him, any money spent on that search and his six months’ worth of learning.”

A senior executive at the Red Cross who had been hired by Mr. Everson told board members about Mr. Everson’s relationship — with a married woman who is head of a Red Cross chapter on the Gulf Coast. Mr. Everson met the woman on trips that were part of efforts to restore the Red Cross’s reputation there. She is pregnant, two Red Cross executives said.

Some former executives said changes put in place after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, like a stronger support system for chapters and improved logistical management of disaster resources, accounted in part for better operations during the wildfires.

“I think, operationally, this scandal doesn’t have any impact,” said Ed Kemery, an associate professor of management at the University of Baltimore who was a Red Cross volunteer in Louisiana after the storms and subsequently at headquarters in Washington, where he worked in the unit dedicated to investigations, ethics and compliance.

“The real question,” he said, “is whether there’s been any change in the culture, which is something that can’t be done incrementally, that involves going in and really shaking things up.”

Nonprofit experts said that the Red Cross needed to move quickly to fill its top job, but that its culture, which is averse to change, coupled with the missteps of over more than a decade, would make it a difficult job to fill.

“You need someone like Colin Powell to step in,” said Paul C. Light, a professor of public service at New York University who does an annual survey of confidence in charities. “But there aren’t that many national figures like that who’ll take the job, and within that pool, there aren’t any who know anything about disaster relief, let alone blood. And who would take this job under these circumstances, anyway?”

— Almost 3,000 families here and across Louisiana will have to leave their government-supplied trailers over the next few months under a new schedule prepared by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

FEMA officials said Wednesday that the agency planned to close all the trailer camps it runs for victims of the 2005 hurricanes by the end of May, including its biggest camp for evacuees, outside of Baton Rouge. Here in New Orleans, 926 families are living in smaller FEMA camps, some of which are supposed to close within days. The agency says its action is intended to hasten the move of residents from trailers to permanent housing, and officials said FEMA is committed to helping them find new housing before the parks close. Counselors will work with residents to track down available apartments.

“We’re with them every step of the way,” said Diane L. W. Perry, a spokeswoman for the agency here, who added that no one will be forced out of a trailer without a home in which to live.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development will assume responsibility for paying to house poor families, as it is also doing for evacuees who are already in rental units around the country. Volunteer groups have been assisting with down payments and furniture in some cases, she said.

But advocates who work with trailer park residents are skeptical of the plan, noting anyone still living in a cramped, flimsy and possibly formaldehyde-tainted trailer probably has nowhere else to go.

Most of those still living in the FEMA parks — which occupy playgrounds, churchyards, parking lots and fields around southern Louisiana — had previously been renters, and little low-cost rental housing has been repaired or built since the storm. Many people in the trailer sites are elderly or disabled, and large numbers are living alone.

“I have talked with people who had no place to go and their location closed down,” said Davida Finger, a staff lawyer with Loyola University Law Clinic. “Booting people out of their one safe place is kicking people when they are down.”

The new schedule does not affect the largest number of trailer dwellers, those living in trailers on private property (usually their own driveways). The timetable for these 9,545 families depends in large part on their rebuilding progress and on local ordinances.

But by the end of next year, the agency will stop paying for about 3,700 families living in government trailers in private trailer parks, agency officials said. They plan to remove about 258 trailers requested by employers for their workers by the end of February.

Federal officials have always said that the trailer program was a stopgap, and that their goal was eventually to move hurricane victims into permanent housing. Publicizing the schedule — in many cases far in advance of the agency’s usual 60-day notice — is meant to help residents make plans, said Ms. Perry said.

“We want to make sure people are safe before the next hurricane season,” she said.

Earlier this year, concerns about formaldehyde contamination prompted the agency to end a plan to allow residents to buy their trailers.

The formaldehyde issue did play a role in the decision to move people out of the trailers, said Ronnie Simpson, a FEMA spokesman.

In the shadow of the looming skyscrapers and corporate wealth of Poydras Street in New Orleans and the impending plan to demolish and redevelop public housing, dozens of public housing residents, activists, organizers and supporters rallied in front of the federal courthouse last Tuesday to shine a light on the corruption of housing officials and demand the re-opening of public housing. With demolition threatened to begin as early as Nov. 28, talk of a mass protest in New Orleans is heating up around the country. Many activists believe New Orleans is a test ground for the demolition of public housing across the nation and its replacement with “mixed-income” developments that would displace thousands of families. They say: “Pledge to come to New Orleans and resist this privatization of public housing!” Photo: Mavis YorksNew Orleans rallies to save public housing, considers nation-wide call for mass protest to stop demolition 

It was a little past 4:00 on Tuesday, Nov. 13, and Sharon Jasper was leading the crowd in a chant in front of the federal building on Poydras in downtown New Orleans. The call and response was simple, loud and clear: "What do we want?" "Housing!" "When do we want it?" "Now!"

A section of heavy chain lay across Jasper’s shoulder, while she held a noose in one hand. A resident of the St. Bernard public housing complex, her accessories dramatized the current plight of New Orleans’ shut-out public housing tenants.

"Take the noose from around the poor working class people," Jasper declared. "Take the shackles off our feet. We are out to fight all the corruption of the city government. Public housing is a human need and a human right."

As she spoke out, people marched in a circle on the plaza in front of the federal facility, carrying signs that read, "They push out, we push back," "Stop high rents" and "Down with poverty pimps."

The "poverty pimps" are being called out for either profiteering from the demolition of public housing in New Orleans or for their obstruction of any attempt to re-open the developments that currently exist. Speakers called out Federal District Judge Ivan Lemelle for his dismissal of large portions of a class action suit filed on behalf of the residents of public housing, and Una Anderson, a former School Board official running for a seat in the Louisiana Legislature, who has partnered with development firms to assume redevelopment rights for the C.J. Peete Housing Development.

HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson was called to task for his ongoing financial ties to Atlanta-based Columbia Residential, one of the firms given a lucrative role in the St. Bernard redevelopment project. Also being investigated is a close friend’s claim that Jackson lobbied to award him a no-bid $500,000 contract for consulting assistance to HANO after Katrina. Jimmie Thorns is also said to be a close friend of Judge Lemelle.

Referring to a publicized plan to convert the St. Bernard Development into a golf course, attorney Tracie Washington, president of the Louisiana Justice Institute, said, "We don’t need a golf course at the St. Bernard housing development! You want to build a golf course? Go to [nearby suburb] Metairie!"

A number of barbs were directed at Sen. David Vitter, the Republican from Louisiana, for his ongoing obstruction of Senate Bill 1668, which allows for, but does not demand, one for one replacement of public housing units. Vitter’s recent scandal involving moral indiscretions in Washington, D.C., was brought up on more than one occasion. A sign read: "Tell David we need housing, not brothels!"

According to an information sheet handed out at the rally by organizers, pre-Katrina there were 5,200 families living in New Orleans public housing, with another 2,000 units temporarily vacant while awaiting renovation.

The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) took over the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) long before Katrina. But the Bush administration’s fingerprints are all over its current course of action.

HUD, through HANO, has opened up only 1,600 public housing units post-Katrina. In addition, HUD is planning to completely demolish four of the city’s major public housing developments: Lafitte, St. Bernard, B.W. Cooper, and C.J. Peete.

The info sheet reports: "After demolishing these thousands of apartments, HUD has approved plans to lease the property to private developers for 99 years to build mixed income housing at each of these sites. HUD has approved developers’ plans to dramatically downsize each development."

The net result would work out to an 82 percent loss of low-income public housing units. As one long time New Orleans activist put it at the rally, "If you can’t see that the overall plan is to keep poor people out of the city, you must be blind."

Katrina survivor Joetta Chestnut speaks to the press as the New York Solidarity Coalition with Katrina & Rita Survivors rallied Nov. 13 in solidarity with New Orleans against the planned demolition of public housing there. Photo: Monica Moorehead, Workers WorldNew Orleans’ public housing, extraordinarily well built WPA-era brick buildings, arranged college campus-style, suffered little or no wind or water damage from Katrina. If replaced by mixed-income housing, only 16 percent of the homes would be affordable for public housing residents, providing no opportunity for most former tenants to return to their old neighborhoods. And there would be more years of displacement before occupancy is possible.

Furthermore, these replacements would take more than three quarters of a billion dollars for more flimsy construction and little provision for hiring local construction contractors or workers, plus more millions for rent subsidies and consulting, legal and other fees. Since the developers can expect to make a profit on their buildings, rents to help defray these taxpayer-supported efforts will mostly be out of reach for former public housing tenants, who are paid minimum wages for the jobs they do for the rest of the city in tourism, health care and other services. That these are mostly African Americans suggests either institutional or intentional racism.

Another reminder of the city’s worsening housing/no housing crisis are the homeless people currently massed in Duncan Plaza, directly across from City Hall. At the federal building, a representative of Homeless Pride, a group organizing in the park and a member of the coalition sponsoring the rally, said: "Our cause at Duncan Plaza is to build a movement of homeless people, and it is growing bigger and bigger … The private landlords are getting richer and richer. This has got to stop."

The sign on this New Orleans public housing apartment building – empty of its residents who are literally dying to return home – reads, “These are our homes.”A Homeless Pride flyer handed out at the rally stated: "There are over 16,000 homeless men, women and children living in the city of New Orleans. We are residing in abandoned homes, buildings, cars and street underpasses across the city. The government does little to help us. Money that could house us never seems to be available for us.

"It is time that this inhumane treatment stops! We, the people of Homeless Pride, are taking a stand against atrocities." Lafitte, which could house almost 900 families but is now almost empty, sits across the street from a homeless encampment where dozens of people live under a freeway overpass.

At the City Council meeting on Monday, Nov. 19, public housing advocates confronted Councilwoman Stacy Head over her refusal to support a bill in the U.S. Senate, SB 1688, that would mandate reopening 3,000 units of New Orleans public housing within 90 days of its passage.

Louisiana Sen. David Vitter, described by Mike Howell as "the person in the U.S. Senate doing everything he can to block public housing," claims he opposes SB 1688 because of Stacy Head’s stance against it.

Howell stated the coalition’s basic demand: "Everyone who needs a house should have one. The first step is to reopen public housing. Let all the public housing people come home. Everyone has a right to come home."

(Atlanta) - More than 40 human rights organizations today decried the scheduled demolition of 3,000 public housing units in New Orleans. The groups have issued a letter to U.S. Representative Maxine Waters, urging her continued leadership on behalf of public housing residents by finalizing dates for nationwide congressional hearings. The letter, part of a national campaign for passage of the Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Act, was also sent to Louisiana Senator David Vitter and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson.

"To demolish affordable housing without sufficient remaining low-income housing stock is not only irresponsible, but a violation of international human rights standards," said Jared Feuer, southern regional director of Amnesty International USA.

Click for more imagesThursday, November 8, 2007 – New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) are threatening to clear the Resurrection City Encampment at Duncan Plaza erected by Homeless Pride with the support of the Peoples’ Hurricane Relief Fund, Common Ground Relief, Survivors Village, the Anti-Racist Working Group, C3 and several other organizations.  

Threats against Homeless Pride and the Encampment have been escalating over the past week. Since Saturday, November 3rd NOPD has conducted several search raids on the encampment in addition to various other means of harassment and intimidation. The threats of the NOPD appear to be a move on their part and that of the Nagin Administration to further resolve the housing crisis in New Orleans by discriminatory repression, forced removal, and the fundamental denial of human rights. It is also clear from these threats that they preparing for the coming confrontation over public housing, in particular the demolition threat against the Lafitte Housing Projects (see “Pledge of Resistance” statement at www.peopleshurricane.org for more details).  

As a glance of the photo gallery on the PHRF website clearly illustrates (see Homeless Pride action) , Homeless Pride has been a key force in the struggle to save Public Housing in New Orleans, and is in many ways a product of that struggle as it was initiated in part by PHRF and Survivors Village in July as a continuation of the “Resurrection City” encampment action. Nagin and the NOPD are clearly aware of these facts and are undoubtedly factoring this in their repressive calculus to crush the Reconstruction Movements critical “Housing is a Human Right” campaign.  

We cannot allow these threats and attacks on Homeless Pride and the Housing struggle to go unchecked. Here’s what we need you to do immediately:

Editor’s note:  The Peoples’ Hurricane Relief Fund (PHRF) condemns the biased reporting masquerading as news in the following article by the Times-Picayune. PHRF shares these articles to provide our supporters and the general public with context and background information on the attacks against Homeless Pride, the "Housing is a Human Right" campaign, and the Reconstruction Movement.

The homeless bivouac at Duncan Plaza is only getting larger, but some relief is on the way from the Road Home

This burgeoning rights movement has staked a claim on a growing encampment that sits in the shadow of City Hall. Before the watchful eyes of city officials, the homeless camp has tripled over the past few months, to the point where it’s now sleeping roughly 150 a night — a size that seems to threaten its very existence, as it’s now garnering the attention and annoyance of public officials.

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Pledge of Resistance in Defense of the Right to Housing in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast 

A major human rights crisis exists in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. It is a crisis that denies the basic rights to life, equality under the law, and social equity to Black, Indigenous, migrant, and working class communities in the region. While this crisis was in existence long before Hurricane Katrina, the policies and actions of the US government and finance capital (i.e. banking, credit, insurance, and development industries) following the Hurricane have seriously exacerbated the crisis.  

One of the clearest examples of this crisis is the denial of the right to housing in New Orleans, particularly in the public housing sector. Since the Hurricane, the US government through the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has denied the vast majority of the residents of public housing the right to return to their homes. Unlike the vast majority of the housing stock in New Orleans, the majority of the public housing units received little to no flood or wind damage from the Hurricane. Yet, as of October 2007 only one-fourth of the public housing units have been reopened and reoccupied. The Bush government refuses to reopen the public housing units in New Orleans because it appears intent on destroying the public housing system, demolishing the existing structures, and turning over the properties to private real-estate developers to make profits.  

Based on the discriminatory Federal Court ruling issued on Monday, September 10th, all of the major public housing units in New Orleans are now subject to immediate demolition (the latest report from Monday, November 5th is that HUD will attempt to start the demolition on Monday, November 19th. However, this is being challenged by various legal advocates and will be delayed until at least Wednesday, November 28th pending a Federal court hearing). The first site on the schedule for demolition is the Lafitte housing project. Lafitte therefore, is the line in the sand that must be drawn by all peoples in support of the human right to housing.  

Pledge:

• I believe in the fundamental human right to housing.
• I will not be a witness to the denial of this right to the peoples of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.
• I therefore pledge myself to resist the denial of this right by all civil and humanitarian means available including civil disobedience.
• I pledge to stand ready to take action against this imminent threat and to put myself on the line, either directly in New Orleans or in strategic locales throughout the US, in support of the demands and leadership of the peoples of New Orleans and their organizations in the struggle for housing and human rights.

Have you ever received training in civil disobedience? 

We ask that all those interested in coming to New Orleans to contact us before making the journey. We need to ensure that everyone coming is registered, properly orientated and trained in order to partake in this act of resistance in the manner determined by the local leaders and residents.
Please contact us via email at action@peopleshurricane.org 

All making this pledge must be advised of the following:

1. As of now we do not know exactly when the demolition orders will be given. We hope to have this information within at least 48 hours of the scheduled demolition to contact you and give you sufficient time to act (including travel for residents and allies coming in from out of town).
2. Given the limited timeframe and resources of the various organizations spearheading this fight back, access to the following will be limited:

• Legal counsel and aid. All effort is and will be made to provide adequate legal support, but the reality is that it is limited at present.
• Lodging and food. Given the uncertain timeline and limited resources, housing venues are presently limited, but all effort will be made to support all those making this bold pledge.