Take action to save NOLA public housing
This is from Facing South (slogan: "Blogging for a Progressive South"), the excellent blog of the excellentInstitute for Southern Studies.Tuesday, December 04, 2007
Next Monday, Dec. 10, is International Human Rights Day. It's also the day when activists in New Orleans are calling for actions opposing the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development plans to tear down more than 4,600 public housing units in four complexes across the city—while replacing them with private, mixed-income developments that will set aside only 744 apartments for low-income people.
The decision to demolish these public complexes, which suffered only relatively minor damage [PDF] during Hurricane Katrina, comes as rents across the city have doubled since the storm—as has the homeless population.
The activists are asking concerned citizens across the country to join the actions in New Orleans or to take action at home. According to a statement from Kali Akuno, director of the Stop the Demolition Coalition:
What is at stake with the demolition of public
housing in New Orleans is more than just the loss
of housing units: it destroys any possibility for
affordable housing in New Orleans for the
foreseeable future. Without access to affordable
housing, thousands of working class New Orleanians
will be denied their human right to return.
Although this situation is unique and urgent in the
city of New Orleans, it does not occur in
isolation. The plans for redevelopment here are
part of a national assault on public housing, in
which tens of thousands of homes have been
demolished in the past decade.
Organizers are asking supporters from across the country to organize demonstrations at local HUD offices and other government buildings. They are also asking them to make calls to government officials demanding the reopening of public housing in New Orleans. Among those leaders they are asking people to call:
* New Orleans City Council Member Stacy Head, who has been a leading force in pushing for the tear-downs. Her number is 504-658-1020.
* New Orleans City Council Member Shelley Midura, who is being asked to oppose the demolitions and support the reopening of public housing. Her number is 504-658-1010.
* D.H. Griffin, the North Carolina-based contractor hired to demolish the Lafitte complex. For locations of the company's offices across the South, click here. The toll-free number is 888-336-3366.
* U.S. Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), who's blocking passage of the Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Act (Senate Bill 1668). Sponsored by his colleague, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), the measure would require any demolished public housing units to be replaced by other units available to low-income residents. Vitter can be reached in Washington at 202-224-4623 and New Orleans at 504-589-2753.
* Members of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, where SB 1668 is currently stuck. They are Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) at 202-224-6361, Wayne Allard (R-Colo.) at 202- 224-5941, Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) at 202-224-5623, Robert Bennett (R-Utah) at 202-224-5444, Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) at 202-224-2315, Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) at 202-224-4343, Tom Carper (D-Del.) at 202-224-2441, Robert Casey (D-Pa.) at 202-224-6324, Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) at 202-224-6142, Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) at 202-224-2823, Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.) at 202-224-6342, Michael Enzi (R-Wyo.) at 202-224-3424, Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) at 202-224-4224, Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) at 202-224-1638, Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) at 202-224-3041, Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) at 202-224-4744, Jack Reed (D-R.I.) at 202-224-4642, Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) at 202-224-0420, Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) at 202-224-5744, John Sununu (R-N.H.) at 202-224-2841 and Jon Tester (D-Mont.) at 202-224-2644.
Send information about any solidarity actions to action@peopleshurricane.org with "Solidarity" in the subject line. If you have any questions, contact the
Stop the Demolition Coalition at action@peopleshurricane.org or call 504-458-3494. For more information on the issues at stake and planned protest actions, visit the websites of Defend New Orleans Public Housing , Justice for New Orleans, and the People's Hurricane Relief Fund http://www.peopleshurricane.org/.
Labels: affordable housing, hud, katrina, New Orleans, public housing
Naomi Klein at Firedoglake
The discussion appears to be over, but earlier today Naomi Klein was fielding questions about her new book at the weekly Firedoglake book salon.What is the shock doctrine? Klein explains:
I started researching the free market's dependence on the power of shock four years ago, during the early days of the occupation of Iraq. I reported from Baghdad on Washington's failed attempts to follow "shock and awe" with shock therapy - mass privatisation, complete free trade, a 15% flat tax, a dramatically downsized government. Afterwards I travelled to Sri Lanka, several months after the devastating 2004 tsunami, and witnessed another version of the same manoeuvre: foreign investors and international lenders had teamed up to use the atmosphere of panic to hand the entire beautiful coastline over to entrepreneurs who quickly built large resorts, blocking hundreds of thousands of fishing people from rebuilding their villages. By the time Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, it was clear that this was now the preferred method of advancing corporate goals: using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering.We haven't been using Klein's terminology, but disaster capitalism should be a familiar concept to readers of Dollars & Sense. In "Fisherfolk Out, Tourists In" (July/August 2005), for example, Vasuki Nesiah wrote:
Most people who survive a disaster want the opposite of a clean slate: they want to salvage whatever they can and begin repairing what was not destroyed. "When I rebuild the city I feel like I'm rebuilding myself," said Cassandra Andrews, a resident of New Orleans' heavily damaged Lower Ninth Ward, as she cleared away debris after the storm. But disaster capitalists have no interest in repairing what once was. In Iraq, Sri Lanka and New Orleans, the process deceptively called "reconstruction" began with finishing the job of the original disaster by erasing what was left of the public sphere.
From Thailand to Sri Lanka, the tourist industry saw the tsunami through dollar signs. The governments concerned were on board from the outset, quickly planning massive subsidies for the tourism industry in ways that suggest the most adverse distributive impact. Infrastructure development will be even further skewed to cater to the industry rather than to the needs of local communities. Within weeks of the tsunami, the Alliance for the Protection of National Resources and Human Rights, a Sri Lankan advocacy group, expressed concern that "the developing situation is disastrous, more disastrous than the tsunami itself, if it is possible for anything to be worse than that." ...And I heard similar analysis from local African American activists along the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, following Hurricane Katrina. When I interviewed Derrick Evans of Turkey Creek Community Initiatives (March/April 2006), he said:
Proposals announced by TAFREN [Task Force for Rebuilding the Nation] and by various government officials call for the building of multi-lane highways and the wholesale displacement of entire villages from the coast. Coastal lands are to be sliced up into designated buffer zones and tourism zones. The government is preventing those fishing families who wish to do so from rebuilding their homes on the coast, ostensibly because of the risk of future natural disasters; at the same time, it's encouraging the opening of both new and rebuilt beachfront tourist hotels.
The plans are essentially roadmaps for multinational hotel chains, telecom companies, and the like to cater to the tourism industry. Small-scale fishing operations by individual proprietors will become more difficult to sustain as access to the beach becomes increasingly privatized and fishing conglomerates move in. The environmental deregulation proposed in the PRSP will open the door to even more untrammeled exploitation of natural resources. None of the reconstruction planning is being channeled through decision-making processes that are accountable or participatory. Ultimately, it looks like reconstruction will be determined by the deadly combination of a rapacious private sector and government graft: human tragedy becomes a commercial opportunity, tsunami aid a business venture.
Not unpredictably, even the subsidies planned for the tourism industry in the wake of the tsunami are going to the hotel owners and big tour operators, not to the porters and cleaning women who were casual employees in hotels. Many of the local residents who were proprietors or workers in smaller tourism-related businesses, now unemployed, are not classified as tsunami-affected, so they are denied even the meager compensation they should be entitled to. The situation is much worse for the vast informal sector of sex workers, souvenir sellers, and others whose livelihood depended on the tourism industry. If the tsunami highlighted the acute vulnerability that accompanies financial dependence on the industry, the tsunami reconstruction plans look set to exacerbate this vulnerability even further.
[W]hat you'll find is that the unresolved problems pertaining to any one of those issues can be overlain on a map: that the lowest-lying land is typically where black folks, generations ago, would have acquired their land; where they would have settled and developed their communities, which would have been the least disturbed by 20th-century infrastructure; and that now, in the wake of a "Mississippi miracle"--the economic revitalization of the coast, for example, the advent of dockside casinos--would be the most ripe or prime for redevelopment.David Bacon, writing in this year's Annual Labor Issue, sees similar forces at play in Iraq.
Today, you've got casino- and tourism-driven feudalism, coupled with militarism, constituting much of the local economy. Katrina has probably raised the cachet of the casinos and the military bases even more as the two main mules that are gonna pull us out of this mud. Government contracts for shipbuilding; bigger, wider roads and highways for trucking. Deeper, wider, dredged out shipping lanes for shipping; free trade agreements. Bigger and better casinos with more bells and whistles. More of the same is the economic forecast, because they can't imagine anything else.
President Bush says he wants democracy, yet he will not accept the one political demand that unites Iraqis above all others. They want the country's oil (and its electrical power stations, ports, and other key facilities) to remain in public hands.Perhaps the quickest way to understand how shock plays into all of this is to watch the short film based on Klein's book.
The fact that Iraqi unions are the strongest voice demanding this makes them anathema. Selling the oil off to large corporations is far more important to the Bush administration than a paper commitment to the democratic process....
The occupation has always had an economic agenda. In 2003 and 2004 occupation czar Paul Bremer published lists in Baghdad newspapers of the public enterprises he intended to auction off. Arab labor leader Hacene Djemam bitterly observed, "War makes privatization easy: first you destroy society; then you let the corporations rebuild it."
The Bush administration won't leave Iraq in part because the economic agenda is still insecure.
One Firedoglake commenter asked Klein,
Isn’t shock a funciton of any visionary change, regardless of whether it is left or right? Mao & Pol Pot come to mind. Why, then, is it disaster capitalism rather than disaster transformationalism?Klein replied:
I wrote this book because the far left has been held accountable for the crimes and abuses required to impose its utopian, year-zero fantasies. The far right has not. And when criminals are not held accountable for their crimes, they re-offend. It’s worth remembering that Paul Bremer was Kissinger’s right hand man during the coup in Chile in 1973.In today's discussion, Klein emphasized nonetheless that market forces are not all powerful and that, in fact, we are at an important turning point.
The so-called “free market” is in crisis today - we see it with sub-prime, a s well as with the massive disillusionment with the Bush Administration. Even Greenspan warns in his book that people are losing faith in market fundamentalism.
This is a moment for the left/progressives to propose our vision with real confidence and without apologies. We shouldn’t be afraid to be angry at grotesque injustice, and we need to stop being apologetic about believing in universal human rights and universal health care.
Labels: Books, Disaster Capitalism, firedoglake, Gulf Coast, Iraq, katrina, mississippi, Naomi Klein, oil, sri lanka, tsunami, unions
Support Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Act of 2007 S. 1668
We received this from Amelie Ratliff of Mass Action for the Gulf Coast:Finally, there's a bill in Congress that would help some of the hardest hit Katrina survivors come back home. Unfortunately, it is about to die because some members of the Senate think it's fine for certain New Orleanians— specifically those who are Black and poor—to be shut out of the city.
I just called on my senators to support the Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Act of 2007 (S. 1668). It would re-open desperately needed housing and make sure there is no loss of affordable public housing in New Orleans. Please join me by contacting your senators and check out powerful videos about the housing situation in New Orleans created by Brave New Foundation and as part of the Voices from the Gulf Project. It takes just a moment:
http://www.colorofchange.org/s1668/?id=1834-142331
Saving Affordable Housing in New Orleans
New Orleans public housing residents have been fighting for over two years to return to apartments that were minimally damaged by the storm. But the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has shut them out, because it wants to demolish most of the available public housing units—and replace them with far fewer mixed-income housing.[1] The vast majority of the most affordable public housing units, pushing thousands of mostly Black low-income residents out of the city.
S.1668 honors the right to return of all New Orleans public housing residents. It requires the re-opening of at least 3,000 public housing units and ensures that there is no net loss of units available and affordable to public housing residents. It also designates $1.7 billion for rental housing assistance and earmarks millions for community development programs, which will benefit an even larger segment of the lower income population. But the bill is in danger of dying -- because some senators are opposed to preserving affordable public housing.
It's hard to know what motivates each senator, but it's an open secret that many folks have a desire to see a richer and Whiter post-Katrina New Orleans, and many of them have a great deal of political influence. Senators like David Vitter (La.) and Richard Shelby (Al.) appear to be playing to those interests by standing in the way of this legislation, and others are following their lead. If they win, it will be yet another instance of the federal government abandoning those most vulnerable during and after Katrina.
The Gulf Coast needs a housing policy that welcomes all citizens home, especially those who need the most help coming home. Senate bill 1668 is an opportunity to do that. Please join us in demanding that your senator support the bill.
http://www.colorofchange.org/s1668/?id=1834-142331
Thanks.
Labels: affordable housing, Gulf Coast, housing bubble, hud, katrina, New Orleans, public housing, S. 1668
Monique Harden responds to the Times
Environmental activist Monique Harden, whom D&S collective member Ben Greenberg interviewed for our March/April 2006 special issue on Katrina, co-wrote an excellent letter to the editor of the New York Times:April 15, 2007
Home to New Orleans (1 Letter)
To the Editor:
An April 10 news article praises Edward J. Blakely, the executive director of New Orleans’s Office of Recovery Management, for having a “clinical, outsider’s eye” when in fact his eye is blind to the human rights of New Orleanians displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
According to the United Nations Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, people forced to flee their communities as a result of a natural disaster are “internally displaced persons” who have the human right to return to their communities.
In your article, Dr. Blakely pointedly denounces the right of return, describes New Orleanians as “buffoons” whose culture is rife with racism, and hopes that “new Americans” will replace New Orleanians trapped outside the city.
History has shown that violating the human rights of a group of people begins with disparaging their character, expressing contempt for their culture and portraying them as unworthy of the places they live.
Dr. Blakely’s recovery agenda denigrates the humanity of people struggling to find a way home to New Orleans.
Monique Harden
Nathalie Walker
New Orleans, April 11, 2007
The writers are co-directors of Advocates for Environmental Human Rights.
Thank you, Monique and Nathalie, for taking the Times to task for praising this "outsider's" perspective.
Labels: Edward J. Blakely, katrina, Monique Harden, New Orleans, New York Times, right of return
HUD Considers Allowing Public Housing Residents to Wait for Demolitions in Their Own Homes
US Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin recently met with the US Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Alphonso Jackson, to negotiate the possible return of some New Orleans public housing residents to their homes .
In those meetings, Jackson said he would consider reopening more storm-damaged units to low-income people forced from their homes 16 months ago. Many have lived in Texas and elsewhere since the storm, unable to return.
"We're looking at, where possible, to phase in many of these developments," Jackson said recently. "Where we can save units for a period of time, we will do that. But where we can't, we need to bring the units down." ...
Waters, who plans hearings in New Orleans next month on the city's housing shortage, said HUD can begin razing the worst projects while allowing residents to live in those that had less water damage.
Waters is the incoming chair of the subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity for the House Financial Services Committee, which Barney Frank chairs. Without a call for cessation of all demoliton plans and a Congressional investigation, Waters' advocacy may only amount to St. Bernard residents coming home now and getting evicted later, when the public housing demolitions begin.
Elsewhere, Barney Frank was recently heard correctly referring to the New Orleans housing crisis as "ethnic cleansing through inaction." He has also recently been heard taking some clearly progressive economic positions :
[I]t's a problem that we have in America, and it's a problem that is worldwide.... the increasing separation of the well-being of the average citizen from overall economic growth.
[I]t has generally been an accepted fact that economic growth is a good thing and that the rising tide will lift all boats....
The rising tide lifts all boats has always been a problem. If you think about that analogy, the rising tide is a very good idea if you have a boat. But if you are too poor to afford a boat and you are standing tiptoe in the water, the rising tide goes up your nose. And so that's a mistake....
One of the consequences of this separation between economic growth and the well-being of the great majority of citizens is that an increasing number of citizens don't care about economic growth. Not surprising. Not only do they not benefit, but in many cases they get the short-term disruptive effects.
But the question remains: will Barney Frank and Maxine waters stop the ultimate destruction of public housing in New Orleans?
Barney Frank and Maxine Waters need to feel strongly supported by their constituents in taking uncompromising stands for the rights of public housing residents to return to—and keep—their homes.
(Cross-posted on Gulf Coast Fair Housing Network.)
Labels: alphonso jackson, barney frank, hud, katrina, maxine waters, nola, public housing, ray nagin, st. bernard