With the poor gone, developers are planning to gentrify the city

[rodeodance]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1565939,00.html

Power to the victims of New Orleans

With the poor gone, developers are planning to gentrify the city

Naomi Klein
Friday September 9, 2005
The Guardian



On September 4, six days after Katrina hit, I saw the first glimmer of hope. "The people of New Orleans will not go quietly into the night, scattering across this country to become homeless in countless other cities while federal relief funds are funnelled into rebuilding casinos, hotels, chemical plants. We will not stand idly by while this disaster is used as an opportunity to replace our homes with newly built mansions and condos in a gentrified New Orleans."

The statement came from Community Labor United, a coalition of low-income groups in New Orleans. It went on to demand that a committee made up of evacuees "oversee Fema, the Red Cross and other organisations collecting resources on behalf of our people. We are calling for evacuees from our community to actively participate in the rebuilding of New Orleans."
It's a radical concept: the $10.5bn released by Congress and the $500m raised by private charities doesn't actually belong to the relief agencies or the government - it belongs to the victims. The agencies entrusted with the money should be accountable to them. Put another way, the people Barbara Bush tactfully described as "underprivileged anyway" just got very rich.

Except relief and reconstruction never seem to work like that. When I was in Sri Lanka six months after the tsunami, many survivors told me that the reconstruction was victimising them all over again. A council of the country's most prominent businesspeople had been put in charge of the process, and they were handing the coast over to tourist developers at a frantic pace. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of poor fishing people were still stuck in sweltering inland camps, patrolled by soldiers with machine guns and entirely dependent on relief agencies for food and water. They called reconstruction "the second tsunami"........

[whistle]

1. So, the poor of New Orleans will not be allowed back?

[Canuckistanian]

2. Sure they can - if they buy a luxury condo

Oh, and membership in a golf club will be mandatory, too.

[wakeme2008]

3. I really do not believe so

a lot of poor people in NO owned their homes and the land it sits on. The insurance companies have to rebuild their homes. If the City/State wants their land then they have to pay fair market price.

[0rganism]

6. Which fair market price, pre- or post-Katrina?

Seems to me that a lot of those homes just lost a significant portion of their market value.

[bigbrother05]

4. Just read this on

another post its a great article, must read.

[buzzsaw_23]

5. "Jazzworld"

with a heavy dose of Disneyfication. There will still be dioramas of the "Old Days", you know pre-Katrina, when things were wild and dangerous.

McCajun Country Now

[orpupilofnature57]

7. A feasible ploy all along, displacement by Fascism, First you take...

Away public services, which the poor depend on, Then tilt everything from heating to availability of livelihood, and you can move people like Stalin moved the Relocated, theres no difference accept for the guise of democracy.Ever talk to a native Vermonter, Chances are he's got to move unless his father was born in N.J.