Seeking a Different Vision for New Orleans

"The pending demolition of the St. Bernard, B.W. Cooper, C.J. Peete, and Lafitte projects has confirmed the fears of the city’s poorest, blackest, and hardest hit communities: that New Orleans’ “recovery” in the wake of the storm is built on the city’s old demons of racial and class strife.

When redevelopment is finished in 2010, HUD projects, New Orleans will have roughly 3,300 low-income public housing units—a reduction of a few thousand —plus around 1800 voucher-subsidized apartments and a comparable number of HUD-developed “market rate” units.

But under the mixed-income rubric, politics and profit motives may ultimately determine the distribution of higher- and lower-income homes. Activists say the concept often masks segregation as progress, as development interests gentrify neighborhoods and price poor families out.

So far, according to a funding analysis by the housing think-tank Policylink, the redevelopment projects now underway would abandon more than 60 percent of HUD’s pre-Katrina affordable housing stock—homes within reach of families earning under $15,900 per year. Meanwhile, since the hurricane, average market-rate rents have jumped by nearly 50 percent.

While officials move forward with demolition, community groups are launching alternative rebuilding efforts: small initiatives that articulate a grassroots counterpoint to the material focus of conventional development schemes."