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Thousands of New Orleans
Public Housing Units to be Destroyed
200,000+ Low-Income
Residents Remain Displaced
At least 3,000 families who lived in the units
before the storm will have to find someplace else to go. If the
federal government's plan goes forward, New Orleans will have
lost 85 percent of its public housing over the past decade.
Lecture date: 06/20/06
Democracy Now!
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TRANSCRIPT
AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to look at the situation with
public housing in New Orleans. Last week, federal housing
officials announced that more than 5,000 public housing units
for the poor were to be demolished, even though tens of
thousands of low-income residents remain displaced. On Saturday,
public housing residents and advocates protested the decision by
the Department of Housing and Urban Department and vowed to use
any means necessary to stop the bulldozing of their homes. The
HUD decision means that at least 3,000 families who lived in the
units before the storm will have to find someplace else to go.
If the federal government's plan goes forward, New Orleans will
have lost 85% of its public housing over the last decade.
Last week, the Deputy Chief of Staff of HUD, Scott Keller,
attended a meeting of the New Orleans City Council. After the
meeting, Free Speech Radio News correspondent Christian Roseland
asked him if now is the right time to be tearing down public
housing since there are still over 200,000 people displaced from
the hurricane. This was Scott Keller’s response.
SCOTT KELLER: The most important thing is that
you're able to come home to a safe and hazard-free
environment. These buildings are not that way. These
buildings are mold-infested. These building are falling
down. These buildings are not the type of buildings that you
would even warehouse your furniture in if you had to move
out. These buildings are terrible. They are nothing to be
proud of. They are something that is an icon of failed
federal policy. We need to make sure that what we build,
that what we invest in this community, the taxpayers of this
country who are putting billions of dollars down here, that
what we’re putting back is something that is building
families and building communities.
AMY GOODMAN: Scott Keller, at a meeting last week of
New Orleans City Council of HUD, the Housing and Urban
Development Department in Washington, D.C. To talk more about
this, we're joined now by Bill Quigley. He is a law professor at
Loyola University in New Orleans, also the director of the Law
Clinic and Gillis Long Poverty Law Center at Loyola University.
His most recent article is on the website
Counterpunch. It’s entitled "Bulldozing Hope: HUD to New
Orleans’ Poor: 'Go F(ind) Yourself (Housing)!" Welcome to
Democracy Now!, Bill.
BILL QUIGLEY: Welcome, Amy. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you back and to be with
you in the studios of WLAE in New Orleans, where we broadcast
from when we were in New Orleans. Talk about the whole plan for
public housing.
BILL QUIGLEY: Well, it’s, you know, HUD. “Hypocritical
urban demolition” really is what HUD stands for. The federal
government in New Orleans has been in the business of
demolishing and destroying housing. And what's happening here in
New Orleans right now is such an outrage, at a time of our
biggest affordable housing crisis ever, that the federal
government has decided that they are going to destroy 5,000
units of public housing is a disgrace. We have people in this
town that are living in abandoned housing, that are living in
houses without electricity and water, that don't even have
completely fixed-up roofs.
And what HUD is doing here is part of a national policy to
destroy public housing and replace it with this euphemism of
mixed-income housing, which is translated for the people who
live there, means they take conventional public housing, destroy
it and then allow about 10% of the people who used to live there
to come back, but it is a great bonanza for developers, for real
estate people, for banks, for construction groups and the like.
The public housing in New Orleans is actually some of the
most structurally sound property that we have in this entire
city. And the attack is not really on the buildings. It's not
really about the housing. It is an attack on the people who live
in the buildings.
The people who live in the buildings, the poor, as you heard
earlier, the people who attend the public schools, the people
who need the healthcare and the like, those people who are our
sisters and brothers, those people who are the working poor that
keep our community together. Those people are being attacked on
every front, from public education, public housing, employment,
public healthcare and the like. And this just shows that they
have -- that the federal government has no shame whatsoever,
that they would demolish houses under these circumstances.
The important thing I want to say, though, is that the
residents are not just taking this. They had a march this past
weekend where they marched to an upper income community, said,
“Look, if you want to mix, let's do mixed income. Let’s mix
income in your community, you know?” And they held a big banner
in front of a $2 million house, said, “Look, if we're going to
start mixed income, let's start here.”
They have set up a survivor's village, a tent city, outside
of a 1,300-unit apartment called the St. Bernard Housing
Development, and on July 4, which I think is a really important
time, on July 4, they have vowed that if the federal government
and local government doesn't let them back into their houses at
this 1,300-unit apartment complex, where they have put up fences
and barb-wire net, that on July 4, they are going to liberate
their own houses and go back, because that's what's going to be
necessary in order be able to take back this city and take back
opportunities for the people who built this city, whose culture
permeates this city, who have kept this city alive. There's not
room for them in the plans that are going forward.
AMY GOODMAN: As you talk about this plan they have to
liberate their own housing, maybe you could comment on the
National Guard coming back to New Orleans and patrolling the
streets.
BILL QUIGLEY: Yes. You know, the mayor, the governor,
the city council and those folks have asked for and have
received a large number of National Guard, large number of state
police, and that is their response. We had a tragic murder over
the weekend, where five young men under the age of 19 were
killed. And it's a horrifying thing. I think, though, it's very
important to know one of those young men worked at a fast food
place, and he was working at a fast food place because he had
not been able to get back into school. He had shown back up in
the spring, and he was not able to get back into school, because
they said they didn't have room for him, and he should just go
ahead and start in the fall.
If you don't have schools, if you don't have housing, if you
don't have healthcare, if you don't have electricity, don't have
water, then, you know, there is a point at which people are not
going to respond accordingly. So the response of the community
has not been “Let's reinvest in our public education system.” It
has not been “Let's reinvest in our housing system.” It has not
been “Reinvest in the healthcare.” It is “Let's get some more
troops in this town to try to prevent the looting and the bad
things that are happening.”
Certainly people need protection. Certainly security is part
of it, but you just can't do that. You cannot privatize every
public institution that we have and just make it available for
people with money and expect the rest of the people just to sit
back or not come home or just be -- allow themselves to be
victimized over and over and over again. It's not going to
happen.
AMY GOODMAN: You quote the Republican Congressmember
Richard Baker, ten-term Republican from Baton Rouge, telling
lobbyists, when Katrina displaced New Orleans' public housing
residents, he said, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New
Orleans. We couldn't do it. But God did.”
BILL QUIGLEY: Yes. You know, and sadly that is the
position of an awful lot of our elected officials and a lot of
our local power elite, is that they blame the problems of New
Orleans on the people who are the number one victims of the
problems of New Orleans. They blame the kids with disabilities
for having problems in schools when they're not properly placed.
The jails are full. Now they're blaming the judges for not
putting higher bonds on people when we've had three jury trials
in our criminal law system since last August. Our criminal law
system is broken, along with all the rest of these things, and
all it's about is blaming the victims.
And I think there's a real lesson here for the rest of us in
the United States, because what's happening in the Lower Ninth
Ward, what's happening in New Orleans with Katrina, is graphic
and it’s illustrative because it’s so condensed and it's so easy
to see, but these same exact forces of privatization, of
imposing stigmas on poor people, of keeping people out of
neighborhoods, of destroying our public housing, destroying
public healthcare, destroying public education, those things are
happening in every community across this country, and there is a
real lesson here for people. Not only should they give us
solidarity in New Orleans, because we need that, particularly on
July 4 for the next thing.
But to understand that what is happening to New Orleans is
what we have done to the people of Iraq, what we have done as a
country to places outside of our country and what we are doing,
maybe slower, a little more subtly, in every major city in this
country. The people of New Orleans say, you know, if our
government is treating us this way, can you imagine how they are
treating the people of Iraq? Can you imagine how they are
treating the people of Afghanistan? Can you imagine what's going
on in Central and Latin America? And there is a lesson here.
It's a teaching lesson for us about the priorities of our
country, the priorities of the people in power, and the way that
they are willing to marginalize and just discard the needs of
poor and working folks in this community, but in communities all
across this country.
Why do we have a minimum wage of $5.15 an hour, you know, in
this day and age in the richest country in the history of the
world? Why do we have people that are living in abandoned
housing, without electricity, without water, and at the same
time we are going to destroy 5,000 units of public housing? This
is a disgrace! But these people are saying they're doing it for
our good. They’re doing it because they know what's better. It's
paternalism. It’s so-called tough love. It is an attack on the
people who built this country and the people who built our
communities.
AMY GOODMAN: Bill Quigley, law professor at Loyola
University. A census was done looking at the four months after
the Hurricane Katrina that found New Orleans has become
considerably whiter, older, less poor, not because people have
more money there, but because those who are poor are no longer
there. Do you think that there is a kind of plan here to use New
Orleans as a social experiment, to look at a privatized city in
this country?
BILL QUIGLEY: I think absolutely that there is. New
Orleans has become the national laboratory for charter schools.
We have more charter schools than we have anything else, and
that's continuing to grow. We have become the laboratory for
destruction of a public healthcare system. We are now at the
point where we are the laboratory for the destruction of public
housing. Every one of our public institutions that were
destroyed have not been rebuilt, and that is done consciously in
an attempt to privatize everything.
And privatization makes sense for people who have resources.
It makes sense for people who want to own those resources, but
it does not make sense for people who have a sense of community,
of the common good and a role of government to provide an
opportunity for people who are left out of the normal
maximization of profit forces that are in the market.
And New Orleans -- if people don't understand it, what is
happening to New Orleans is coming to your community. Maybe it's
going to come slower. Maybe it's going to come a little more
subtle, but it is the laboratory to take what the lessons that
our country is imposing on the rest of the world and to plant
them in the United States and they are calling them success.
That’s the thing. They are destroying our community. They are
displacing our elderly, our disabled, our poor, and they are
saying it's success and this is what we have to do in order to
save ourselves.
AMY GOODMAN: Bill Quigley, the black population in New
Orleans has gone from over a third of the population being black
to just about 1/5 of the population. What about the right of
return? Do you see people returning?
BILL QUIGLEY: Well, the numbers aren’t exact -- it was
about two-thirds, a little over two-thirds black. And it's a
little bit less than 50% at this point. But everybody is asking
for the right to return. They're starting to demand the right to
return. The people who are back, as you said, are whiter, more
affluent, more old than the way the city was before. They're
perfectly happy with the city that they have now. And they do
not want their quality of life diminished or diluted by letting
back in those people.
And those people are the people who are in public schools.
Those people are the people who are in public housing. Those
people are the people who need public healthcare. But those
people are also the people who clean our streets, clean our
hotels, cook our food, take care of our parents, are the
cashiers, are the servers, are the waitresses, the working folks
who keep our lives together. So we want their services, but we
don't want to have them live in our community anymore. And so it
has racial angle, has a very definite class angle, and it also
has a significant corporate privatization angle, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: Bill Quigley, I want to thank you for
being with us. If people want to follow what’s happening in New
Orleans, read articles, learn about projects that are there for
rebuilding, is there a place you can recommend that they go on
the web?
BILL QUIGLEY: There are a couple of places they could
go. There's one called
justiceforneworleans.org, which is all one word. Common
Ground Collective maintains information on that, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: Bill Quigley, we'll link to these sites
at democracynow.org. And I want to thank you very much for being
with us. Law professor at Loyola University, director of the Law
Clinic and the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center at Loyola.
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