Katrina's wrath lingers for New Orleans' poor

[babylonsister]

Katrina's wrath lingers for New Orleans' poor
By Brad Heath, USA TODAY


NEW ORLEANS — If the government has its way, the moldering hulks of the St. Bernard public housing projects soon will be rubble.

That has been the government's plan for more than a year — and for more than a year it has been locked in a legal battle with housing advocates here who want officials to fix up apartments waterlogged by the flooding that followed Hurricane Katrina rather than tear them down. Unless the vast system of public housing is reopened quickly, advocates fear many former residents will never come back.

The result: More than two years after the storm hit, all but a few of the city's government-run apartments remain shut, surrounded by barbed wire and uninhabitable. Demolition of some began this week. Building replacements will take at least two more years.

There is little question that Hurricane Katrina hammered the poor when it inundated the Gulf Coast in August 2005, obliterating some of the poorest parts of the USA's poorest states. The question now is whether thousands of low-income residents who were displaced by the storm will ever be able to come back.

"They can't come back because there's no place for them to lay their head," says James Perry, executive director of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center. "We just don't have anything for the low-income people."

While virtually no aspect of the recovery here is moving swiftly, the return of housing and services for the poor has proved particularly contentious. Much of the money the federal government promised for the job still hasn't been spent, and some of the actual work of rebuilding affordable housing has gotten bogged down in bitter local disputes.

more...

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-12-13-katrinapoor_N.htm

[uppityperson]

1. k&r for figuring out where to live, where to work, where to get health care, how to do it all

[babylonsister]

4. ...while your own gov't throws up roadblocks instead of houses.

:-(

[flashl]

2. They know what they want to build

"HUD wants to bulldoze much of the city's shuttered public housing and replace it with mixed-income developments."

Not much talk about mixed-income jobs. It's a "polite" way of pushing those who can't afford the new housing out of the city.

[babylonsister]

3. That's why it's so criminal they're allowed to get away with this.

:grr:

[Leopolds Ghost]

5. kick n/t