Dec. 6 (Bloomberg) — In New Orleans, public housing doesn’t mean bleak high-rise towers. The city has thousands of units with Georgian brickwork and lacy ironwork porches that came through Hurricane Katrina barely scathed.
Yet the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, last week approved $31 million worth of contracts to demolish 4,500 public housing units of such high quality that some are on the National Register of Historic Places.
The demolitions, scheduled to start as soon as Dec. 15, come as the city faces an unprecedented shortage of rental housing. To add insult to injury, the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced last week that it would evict hundreds of residents of emergency trailer parks in New Orleans over the next six months, even though they don’t have houses to return to.
Merry Christmas, poor people.
