U.S. Sen. David Vitter and U.S. Reps. Richard Baker, Jim McCrery and Rodney Alexander, all Republicans, today said that New Orleans does not need as many public housing units as it had before Hurricane Katrina.
Louisiana’s Senators are at odds over the future of public housing, with proposed legislation by Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La. calling for "one-for-one replacement" of the government-subsidized apartments with new mixed-income developments.
Landrieu said the need was unmet before the storm when about 6,000 low-income people were on a waiting list for the city’s 7,000 public housing units — of which only 5,100 were occupied while many were in a state of disrepair.
With rents up 45 percent since the storm, an estimated 12,000 homeless people in the city and low-wage service-industry workers struggling to find housing, Landrieu said the demand is as great as it has ever been.
Landrieu’s Louisiana colleague, Vitter, has taken the lead in opposing the bill, saying that with just two-thirds of New Orleans’ population back after Hurricane Katrina, the need for public housing has fallen off.
The New Orleans City Council will vote Thursday on whether to approve demolition permits for the "Big Four" developments that the federal government wants to see transformed into mixed-income neighborhoods. At least four council members have said this week they plan to vote for demolition.
In a letter Wednesday to U.S. Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee Chairman Chris Dodd and Ranking Member Richard Shelby, the Louisiana Republicans said that if New Orleans delays redevelopment of public housing, it could lose "vital tax and financing incentives for future redevelopment down the road."
"The present version of the bill requires that any public housing unit unoccupied before Hurricane Katrina, which is demolished as part of the current redevelopment plan put in motion prior to the storm, be replaced," Vitter said in a statement. "The federal government should not force the allocation of scarce funds and resources toward the recreation of housing unoccupied even before the hurricane."
Vitter said that public housing in New Orleans was a long-standing policy failure for those it was meant to help, and that the city needs to move forward with redevelopment.
"Public housing in New Orleans has for many decades tragically served almost no other purpose than to warehouse the city’s poor and disenfranchised," Vitter wrote. "New Orleans’ public housing developments were allowed to persist in a perpetual state of disrepair, causing generations of public housing residents to live in deplorable, inhuman conditions. That generations of our fellow citizens were allowed to live in government-operated and sanctioned slums is offensive and intolerable."
