Ray in New Orleans

I take umbrage with "easily and cheaply." If they had started working on renovations right after the storm, it would have been cheaper. But these buildings have been rotting since then. They have lead paint and asbestos and no copper and old plumbing (one set of valves for the whole bathroom). There are too many one bedrooms to easily accomodate families. It would be prohibitively expensive to bring these things up to code, which they need to do to get flood insurance.

I would push for phased redevelopment (and so did Providence!!) but HUD and HANO wouldn't hear of it. There's fishy stuff going on with the 3 for-profit renovations (Lafitte is being redone by non-profits), but let's not kid ourselves, it would have cost a ton of money to renovate these things to bring them up to code and make them livable.

Other than that, though, it's a fantastic letter, written articulately and passionately.

(For the record - I, too, say, bring them home!!)

Darlin' ... Freakin' wonderful.

These are the points I've been trying to get across.

Make sure you check the renovated "bricks" down in Saint Thomas

For those keeping score at home, I got one response from Shelley:

"Thanks for writing.
Shelley."

and nothing yet from the rest of them. Shelley had to respond, I guess, since I'm her problem due to accidents of geography.

Fielkow has been an astonishing disappointment. What say we get Percy to run for a seat?

Now this, I like.

I regularly agree with ya'll's opinions, but have to disagree here.

True. We have a housing shortage, but to me the solution is not putting people in unsafe situations. These developments concentrate poverty without any prospect of recovery.

We should help folks own there homes. We should be willing to create opportunities for people of varying means to live next door to each other as neighbors.

Opening these decrepit buildings only delays a new start for these areas.

We have a housing shortage, but to me the solution is not putting people in unsafe situations. These developments concentrate poverty without any prospect of recovery.

Right now, with vouchers, those people are going to go into places like Hollygrove, Central City, the 7th Ward, the 9th Ward, Pigeontown...neighborhoods that one could argue have their own concentrated poverty with little prospect of recovery. Maybe we should bulldoze Central City? Certainly it's already been suggested that the Lower 9 be turned into permanent parkland. If it's good for the projects, it should be good for the other neighborhoods, right? Tear down Iberville, now you gotta tear down a big chunk of the Treme, cause it's "unsafe". Where does it stop?

We should help folks own there homes.

So say I'm a single parent, used to live in a project, which was a community, where I knew all the neighbors, had family nearby, grandma kept an eye on the boys and knew which older ones were getting into trouble while I worked at my service industry job in the CBD.

Then some well-meaning freeper who thinks that "home ownership" is the cure for all of society's ills gets me into my own home, living next to a bunch of middle class strangers. Now I've got no family around to provide free child care for my little ones, I've got no relatives around to keep an eye on my older boys, because all my middle class neighbors put their kids into daycare and go to work all day. What do I do? I now own a home, but I no longer have the community connections that I've built up for generations. And so either I quit my job and go completely on the dole, such as it exists today, and lose my house, or I go to work and I cross my fingers that my kids will manage to steer their way through life during the 10+ hours a day that I'm not around to watch them.

These projects are not just "public housing". They are communities. They are neighborhoods, just as surely as the Garden District and Broadmoor and Carrollton and Hoey's Basin and Walnut Bend are neighborhoods. So make no mistake...what we are doing, starting today at C.J. Peete, is the wholesale destruction of neighborhoods. And we destroy those bonds of community amongst the working poor who lived there, and for a lot of them, the bonds of community are the last threads holding their lives together and keeping the good kids out of trouble and off the corners.

The communities will splinter, the individuals will take their vouchers to slumlords in crime ridden neighborhoods where they are strangers, and 7th Ward kids will get into fights with the new 4th Ward kids they've been forced to live amongst, etc etc, and guess what happens? The crime rate is going to spike like you've never seen.

And all this "progress" is based on vague promises of mixed income development to be ready maybe in 2010, maybe later, and other vague promises of other vague opportunities, when this city has provided nothing but dwindling opportunities and broken promises for decades.

It's a scam and a shell game, and a small minority of power brokers who are already rich are going to get richer, while a large community of working poor Nth-generation New Orleanians will have their homecoming postponed again, probably permanently. And you know as well as I do that a lot of white people in this city are thinking "thank fucking god".

And I am not one of those white people.

Opening these decrepit buildings only delays a new start for these areas.

So tear down the decrepit buildings. Lafitte is not decrepit, it was well-constructed and only minimally flooded.

And I just have to ask: if these places are hellholes of despair with no future, then why are so many residents desperately wanting to move back in?

How about we start with providing the alternatives to public housing, and once those are a rousing success, we can tear down the projects and everybody will cheer. But your alternatives have to result in higher education, higher incomes, and lower crime, or all you've done is moved the problem from one style of architecture to another, enriching a few lucky people in the process.

I've got no interest in those kinds of alternatives.

Just try and get Public transportation from Miss Coras Neighborhood.

How about a School, or food, none of that either.

Deconcentrate poverty is a myth.

"These projects are not just "public housing". They are communities. They are neighborhoods, just as surely as the Garden District and Broadmoor and Carrollton and Hoey's Basin and Walnut Bend are neighborhoods."

Ya know what? I'd like to know exactly how many former-project residents actually want to live there again. Ironically, today several of my (African-American) co-workers were talking about this issue...the consensus was, why would anyone want to live in those dumps?

Can not better be done for Americans in the richest country in the world?

I think *all* who want to should come back to Nola but, I don't care what anyone says, coming back to the slums is not in their best interest.