There's No Place Like Home!

It's been two years since Katrina raised havoc in the
Gulf of Mexico and still the battle to rebuild New Orleans
continues as now another lawsuit has been filed accusin
the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
of cleansing the city of African Americans. Please feel free
to comment after reading the story below.

PUBLIC HOUSING advocates are gearing up for a sit-in at the offices of the Housing Authority of New Orleans tomorrow. Their frustration is understandable. Two years after Hurricane Katrina scattered residents to communities outside the Crescent City, most have yet to return home. But the protesters' goal of getting the displaced back into their old units is wrong. While the historical significance of those structures is undeniable, so is their history of being forlorn concentrations of poverty.

To tour the barracks-style apartment complexes of New Orleans is to see the best and worst of public housing. Because most of them were built in the 1940s, a walk into one of their cramped units is a walk back in time. For instance, residents can't run water in the bathtub and the bathroom sink at the same time. Warmth in the winter is provided by space heaters. For the most part, the old projects are cut off from the flow of the city because the city's streets don't go through them. Now, if you go to the redeveloped Fischer and St. Thomas complexes, you'll see the best in modern public housing. Warehousing of the poor and marginalizing them from the larger community are out. Modeled on HOPE VI developments, these are mixed-income neighborhoods of townhouses. The homes are spacious. The appliances are new. The sense of hopelessness that envelops Iberville, the one fully functioning old-style public housing project, is not present.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development wants to bring four other old public housing estates into the modern era. But a lawsuit by the Advancement Project, a Washington-based civil rights organization, has stopped HUD from doing so. The lawsuit accuses the agency of cleansing African Americans from New Orleans by keeping the four public housing projects shuttered. It demands a right of return for all New Orleans public housing residents, and it demands that those families go back to the units they fled on Aug. 29, 2005. Until the case goes to trial in November, those families will have to wait. This is unconscionable. Yes, they should return. But they should return to something much better than they left.

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