NOLA: BRILLIANT website links neighborhood maps to Y2K Census statistics on

[AirAmFan]

income, poverty, race, housing vacancy rates, and just about every issue discussed recently on this board regarding the future of New Orleans.

Does using this resource help you understand Katrina-related issues better? How?

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DETAILS:

Each neighborhood statistic is accompanied by comparisons to the city as a whole, the state, and the entire USA.

Here's an example, drawn from a DU thread on thousands of long-VACANT housing units on dry land within the city limits. (FEMA is ignoring this resource and planning to spend billions on trailer parks, many far from the locations of evacuees' ruined houses).

From http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x4859099 :

DEFINITIVE PROOF of sky-high vacancy rates in the French Qtr:

I googled '"census tracts" "new orleans" "ninth ward" french quarter"' and got 16 hits. One of them led me to the MOTHER LODE of recent neighborhood data for New Orleans..

The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center brilliantly linked thousands of 2000 Census statistics to maps of New Orleans neighborhoods. A user-friendly front-end to this treasure trove of data is at http://www.gnocdc.org/orleans/index.html .

Click on the "French Quarter" section of the map and you'll get to a neighborhood map, at http://www.gnocdc.org/orleans/1/48/index.html . Clicking on the "housing and housing costs" link below the familiar map of the French Quarter gets you to a page of 2000 Census Statistics, at http://www.gnocdc.org/orleans/1/48/housing.html . There you will see that 37.4 percent of housing units in the Quarter were vacant in April 2000, just as Naomi Klein and her research assistant reported in The Nation.

This vacancy rate is 200 percent higher than the citywide average, and 300 percent higher than the national average!

This is DEFINITIVE PROOF of FEMA's waste and stupidity in ignoring this obvious source of temporary housing. Instead, they are squandering hundreds of millions of dollars on future-slum trailer parks. Many of the trailer sites are hundreds of miles away from evacuees' ruined homes, while thousands of vacant housing units sit empty on dry land inside NOLA city limits.

[KT2000]

1. good find!

thanks!!

this could probably be used to track of the number of missing and dead as well.

[donheld]

2. 55.8% of children 0-5 living in poverty

That is dreadfully sad. 44.2% of children 6-11 living in poverty.

[BlueEyedSon]

5. The US is the richest 3rd world country. nt

[Kurovski]

3. Recommended.

Are their enough people at DU to actually get a post into "greatest", or is everyone at the protest, volunteering in relief efforts, or evacuating?

It's a relatively quiet place here tonight as history unfolds around us.

[symbolman]

4. Anything that can PROVE

how many people were murdered by Bush there block by block has got my vote.. this BS about less than a thousand is Impossible IMHO.. I think when the Mayor said 10,000 he was MUCH closer to reality..

this is golden, who will make the best use of it?

[AirAmFan]

7. symbolman, does this website give you any ideas for

including statistics in your excellent political graphics projects? Do you have a GIS package, like ArcGIS, that would let you do what gnocdc does?

[mom cat]

6. This is an incredible source of information that further validates the

charge that deeply entrenched racism is at play in the treatmtnt of the evaccues. Thanks for this great piece of information.

[AirAmFan]

8. Three EXCELLENT related references, MUCH easier to use

In addition to hosting click-links to neighborhood statistics, neighborhood maps can SUMMARIZE all those statistics. GNOcdc.org has done a bit of that kind of graphical work too.

An EXCELLENT neighborhood map lays out all seventy-some NOLA neighborhoods for which GNOcdc supplies statistics:
http://www.gnocdc.org/mapping/docs/Neighborhood.pdf

With a number of shadings, a poverty map shows exactly where the poor are, and where they are not:
http://www.gnocdc.org/mapping/docs/Poverty.pdf

And an elevation map (2.7mb pdf) shows how being below or above sea level correlates closely with poverty or high income:
http://www.gnocdc.org/maps/PDFs/neworleans_elevation.pdf

[Igel]

9. Great links.

The correlation between poverty and sea level is actually less that I gathered from the news. But still fairly high.

There were maybe 1000 units usable in the French quarter, omitting houses, apartments undergoing work, and that usual 3-4% 'float' as people move between apartments. I'm betting that most post-Katrina evacuees wouldn't want them: mostly 1- and 2-bedroomers. Some such apartments were rejected in Houston, they had extended families. I also wonder how many are owned by snow-birds or part-timers that don't consider those apartments to be their primary residence.

But what you're saying is that the government should have decided to quickly move black families into small units in a neighborhood without water and power ... ? Or keep them in shelters until the French Quarter is up and running, and then give the post-Katrina evacuees priority over pre-Katrina refugees that can return themselves, because the post-Katrina evacuees can't actually afford them in the long run without permanent subsidies?

In 4 months, when NOLA's dry, and the inhabitable sections are open, I'd expect to see a 2-3% vacancy rate in those areas, defining vacancy as "not being leased".

[AirAmFan]

11. Interesting analysis. But you omit one very important factor: SPECULATION

by real estate investors, hoping that the "housing bubble" finally would hit NOLA. IMO, "warehousing" apartments and houses in marketable tourist areas would explain high rates of total vacancies in the French Quarter (which is only one of seventy-some neighborhoods the NOLA Planning Commission recognizes--there could be more high-ground neighborhoods with thousands more warehoused housing units).

Since uncertainties for speculators have increased sharply, IMO many now would sell their warehoused properties gladly now, providing housing for, as Naomi Klein estimated, 70,000 of the estimated 200,000 evacuees likely to return.

And how long do you think the high-ground neighborhoods of NOLA will be without basic utilities?

Why then do you seem to think it makes sense for FEMA to purchase 200,000 trailers, many of which likely would be located hundreds of miles away? Such a plan assumes NONE of the vacant units could house evacuees more cheaply than the $30,000 or so future-slum trailer parks will cost per household.

Have you even read the article in The Nation?

[Igel]

16. I hadn't considered speculation, but this was in 2000.

I'm fairly sure I didn't mention trailers. It's a dubious short-term solution. The track record in Florida is that most people leave fairly quickly, but some stay in the trailers because they can't afford to go elsewhere.

One problem I have is with suggestions I've heard to essentially warehouse NOLAers until we can ship them back where they came from: it strikes me as misguided, whether it's to maintain a certain class/racial balance in NOLA--or in Houston. Setting race/class quotas as public policy to either import or export people treats them far too much as a commodity for my tastes.

I also think that as soon as basic services are restored to NOLA and the surrounding area there'll be no vacant apartments. Speculators will make them available at a nice profit; snow-birds will sublet or drop their leases. And I personally think that the NOLA racial demographics will shift but little; class demographics will shift a bit more for a while, with those in the 'very poor' category sharply reduced. But I can't get my head around the idea that where somebody is poor is so crucial. I've been dirt poor in Los Angeles and in Oregon.

[AirAmFan]

17. How did "race/class quotas" get into the discussion?

The hurricane and flood did not hit the 70-some neighborhoods of NOLA equally. A couple of hundred billion dollars are going to be spent to preserve New Orleaners' longstanding ties to their community. Naturally, those billions need to go disproportionally to evacuees whose homes have been destroyed and whose neighborhoods may be condemned.

It makes more sense to me to spend those billions to house people from Lower Ninth and other hard-hit areas inside NOLA whenever possible. The article in The Nation points out that Sheila Jackson Lee is going to introduce legislation making housing vouchers (like HUD's Section 8 vouchers) available to low-income people so they can continue to live in their city.

It's easy to think of government programs that would be likely to make PROFITS for a government or public/private rebuilding agency. Anybody who buys up now-vacant properties on high ground in NOLA is likely to make big profits in the long run. But there are short-run and medium-term risks and uncertainties that private investors may not be willing to take with tenants in those properties. For example, what are NOLA property tax rates likely to be?

Anti-warehousing ordinances and confiscatory property taxes on vacant housing may be necessary to ensure that greed doesn't keep tens of thousands of people from coming home. In addition, public/private partnerships could purchase properties on dry land with guaranteed mortgages and exemptions from local property taxes, could pay off those mortgages with housing vouchers from the poor, and could sell the propoerties for big profits in a few years, after NOLA has been rebuilt.

Why should FEMA allow speculation to keep thousands of desirable properties vacant, while billions of taxpayer dollars go for far-flung slum trailer parks and segregated new schools far from NOLA?

[AirAmFan]

18. OOPS! Here's a link to an article in The Nation I've now mentioned twice

I'd lost track of the fact that this thread was a spinoff of an earlier thread (at http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x4859099 ) mentioned in the lead post here.

This repost may make our little side discussion here more intelligible:

NOLA: Thousands of years-vacant apts sit empty on dry land, while FEMA buys
thousands of mobile homes, 200,000 evacuees are scattered hundreds of miles away, and Dubya plans an "urban homesteading" fantasy that might help hundreds at most. Why doesn't FEMA just allow people whose NOLA homes have been destroyed to relocate to the vacant apartments?

From http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051010/klein :

"Purging the Poor

October 10, 2005 issue (posted September 22, 2005)

... New Orleans is already displaying signs of a demographic shift so dramatic that some evacuees describe it as "ethnic cleansing." Before Mayor Ray Nagin called for a second evacuation, the people streaming back into dry areas were mostly white, while those with no homes to return to are overwhelmingly black. ... it's simple geography--a reflection of the fact that wealth in New Orleans buys altitude. That means that the driest areas are the whitest (the French Quarter is 90 percent white; the Garden District, 89 percent; Audubon, 86 percent; neighboring Jefferson Parish, where people were also allowed to return, 65 percent). ... in all the billions for reconstruction, there is no budget for transportation back from the far-flung shelters where those residents ended up. So even when resettlement is permitted, many may not be able to return.

... Drennen ... says the city now has an opportunity for "twenty-first-century thinking": Rather than rebuild ghettos, New Orleans should be resettled with "mixed income" housing, with rich and poor, black and white living side by side. What Drennen doesn't say is that this kind of urban integration could happen tomorrow, on a massive scale. Roughly 70,000 of New Orleans' poorest homeless evacuees could move back to the city alongside returning white homeowners, without a single new structure being built. ... With landlords preferring to board up apartments rather than lower rents, the French Quarter has been half-empty for years, with a vacancy rate of 37 percent.

The citywide numbers are staggering: In the areas that sustained only minor damage and are on the mayor's repopulation list, there are at least 11,600 empty apartments and houses. If Jefferson Parish is included, that number soars to 23,270. With three people in each unit, that means homes could be found for roughly 70,000 evacuees. With the number of permanently homeless city residents estimated at 200,000, that's a significant dent in the housing crisis. And it's doable. ... After passing an ordinance, cities could issue Section 8 certificates, covering rent until evacuees find jobs. ... Democratic Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, whose Houston district includes some 150,000 Katrina evacuees, ... plans to introduce legislation....

Malcolm Suber, a longtime New Orleans community activist, was shocked to learn that thousands of livable homes were sitting empty. "If there are empty houses in the city," he says, "then working-class and poor people should be able to live in them." According to Suber, taking over vacant units would do more than provide much-needed immediate shelter: It would move the poor back into the city, preventing the key decisions about its future--like whether to turn the Ninth Ward into marshland or how to rebuild Charity Hospital--from being made exclusively by those who can afford land on high ground. "We have the right to fully participate in the reconstruction of our city," Suber says. "And that can only happen if we are back inside." But he concedes that it will be a fight: The old-line families in Audubon and the Garden District may pay lip service to "mixed income" housing, "but the Bourbons uptown would have a conniption if a Section 8 tenant moved in next door" ... So far, the only plan for homeless residents to move back to New Orleans is Bush's bizarre Urban Homesteading Act. ... it barely touches the need: The Administration estimates that in New Orleans there is land for only 1,000 'homesteaders.'"

[pitohui]

10. some of this information is incorrect tho

i would take w. a LARGE grain of salt any claim of available housing in the french quarter also

the us census is all well & good but if it's believe the usa census or believe my lying eyes, i gots to believe my lying eyes

[Cocoa]

12. great site

I'd love to see similar sites for other cities, do you know of any?

[AirAmFan]

13. A webpage at the Urban Institue lists 20-some cites with similar sites,

in the form of (what else?!) a clickable map of the US:

http://www.urban.org/nnip/partners.html

Cleveland, Boston, Seattle, Sacramento, Miami, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, and DC are included; but NYC is missing. Is your city on the list?

Even if your city is missing from the list, if it has an Office of City Planning or Regional Planning Commission, somebody must be sitting on the data you want.

[Cocoa]

14. awesome, thanks!

no, Chicago is not on the list, but I'm interested in other cities too.

I've looked for good map sites on Chicago, no luck so far. I've found sites with enough data, but none presented as well as that NO one in your original post.

[AirAmFan]

15. Good news! Chicago has a community mapping organization that just joined

the partnership at the Urban Institute. The nnip map has not been updated yet, but there is an announcement with links to http://www.mcic.org at http://www.urban.org/nnip/whatsnew.html