Recently in demolition Category

Helping the Katrina Homeless New Orleans is struggling with a growing number of sick and disabled people who have become homeless since the hurricane. This crisis will only get worse until local, state and federal officials come together behind a plan that finds short-term housing for them immediately, and permanent affordable housing for them quickly.

Congress can start by approving a modest, $73 million in funding to house many of the region’s ill and disabled residents, who would also be provided with psychiatric and social services. Such a measure passed the Senate, but it is facing resistance in the House.

Congress also needs to take at least two additional steps to prevent even more people from becoming homeless in New Orleans, where rents have soared since the storm. It should extend the disaster housing assistance program, which is set to expire in March 2009, so more people are not forced into the streets. It should also rewrite federal disaster law to permit the Department of Housing and Urban Development to provide the long-term assistance that thousands of hurricane survivors are clearly going to need.

In New Orleans, homeless services agencies estimate that the homeless population has doubled since the storm. The homeless are said to be sicker and more severely disabled than in the past. Outreach workers have come across people suffering from severe mental disorders, as well as from cancer, AIDS and end-stage kidney disease.

In what could be a harbinger of things to come, 30 percent of the people surveyed in one homeless encampment reported that they had moved onto the streets after being cut off from Federal Emergency Management Agency housing assistance or while living in a household that had lost the benefit.

The state of Louisiana has committed itself to creating 3,000 units of supportive housing targeted to extremely low-income families, which includes many people with disabilities and special needs. But for the units to be affordable, Congress must pass the $73 million in funding to pay for rent subsidies.

This would be a terrible place to economize. The dollar amount is small, and the lives of some of this country’s most vulnerable citizens — who were already abandoned once by their government — are at stake.

New Orleans residents have long charged Jackson as being involved in similar unethical deals with his former business partner, Columbia Residential, which was given the contract to demolish and reconstruct the St Bernard Housing project. Columbia owes Jackson up to a half a million dollars due to his prior business dealings with the company.

Residential representatives from five New Orleans public housing developments and their supporter had a press conference demanding their voices be heard regarding demolitions and reconstruction plans.

The gathering comes on the heels of HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson’s resignation due to a scandal involving sweetheart deals and conflict of interest in Philadelphia.

Local residents have long charged Jackson as being involved in similar unethical deals with his former business partner, Columbia Residential, which was given the contract to demolish and reconstruct the St Bernard Housing project. Columbia owes Jackson up to a half a million dollars due to his prior business dealings with the company.

Though this is a well known fact to both the political establishment, as well as the local media, public housing residents has charged both entities with ignoring the issue in their haste to speed up the elimination of  low income, subsidized housing in New Orleans.

The residents further charge that local, state, federal government and the media with ignoring their proposed solutions to the housing crisis in New Orleans.

This involves immediately stopping the illegal, corrupt process of current demolitions/reconstruction of four housing developments, until the residents’ rights of governance, potential home ownership and employment are brought to fruition.

Click here to watch news video of St. Bernard action.