"We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do
it, but God did." --Richard Baker (R-La), September 09, 2005.
New Orleans, the city where
Hurricane Katrina struck in September 2005, is barely covered in the
media these days. The failure to report on New Orleans is a deliberate
omission as the city and its people continue to suffer.
Hurricane Katrina is the
precursor to “clean” the city of its African-American population, and
create a resort for affluent Americans and tourists. The aim is to
gentrify New Orleans and deny its black poor population their right of
return to their city.
The “reconstruction” of New
Orleans has become a euphemism for the destruction of the city’s
cultural and historic heritage.
Major developers and real estate
agents are taking advantage of the city's redevelopment at the expense
of New Orleans' low-income population. In
the current political milieu, economic redevelopment seem to be guided
by an extremely narrow vision capable of responding only to big business
and tourism.
The Housing Authority of New
Orleans (HANO), in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Housing and
Urban Development (HUD), is planning to demolish New Orleans’ largest
public housing developments and replace them with unaffordable housing
units disguised as a “mixed income housing” program (Hope VI).
The Hope VI program is designed to decentralise poverty according to a
neoliberal agenda.
The secretary of HUD,
Alphonso Jackson, has announced that more than
5,300 public housing units --
built for low-income people -- were to be demolished and replaced by
units for people with a wider range of incomes.
It would be the largest project in the city’s history, and would include
the sprawling St. Bernard, C. J. Peete, B. W. Cooper and Lafitte housing
developments, along with most of the city's public housing. The units
have been closed or fenced off to residents since Hurricane Katrina to
allow them to deteriorate. The decision was taken despite the shortage
of housing to accommodate the over 200,000 still displaced New Orleans
residents. Many of those remaining are living in abandoned housing,
without electricity and water. It is possible that more than 3,500
families will have no place to return to if HUD goes with its decision
to demolish the public housing units.
The Hope
VI program allows only about 10 percent of the original population who
used to live in public housing to come back.
Public schools and healthcare
services will be reduced or removed to discourage people from returning.
Even if they return, there will be no public housing, no public
healthcare and not enough public schools for them and their children.
The
reality is that those “who've been planning the recovery process never
wanted poor people to return to the city in the first place,” Lance
Hill, the director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research
at Tulane University, told the New York Times. “And they haven't
made it easy” for them to return to their homes. In other words, the
victims will be further victimized.
“That’s
tantamount to ethnic cleansing,”
said Mike Howells, a member of United Front for Affordable Housing. “We
know who is going to be shut out as a result of that” added Howells.
Furthermore, the vacancy rate
in New Orleans, especially in areas less affected by Hurricane Katrina,
is very high, but rentals are beyond reach for low-income people, and
landlords are opting to
keep their properties closed, further
reducing the availability of housing for rent.
In the
2000 census,
the New Orleans' population
67.3 percent black
and 28.1 percent white. However, in the four months following Hurricane
Katrina; the "New Orleans metro area's population was 37 percent black
between January and August 2005 and fell to
between September and
22 percent
December
2005. The percentage of white
residents grew from 60 percent to 73 percent. Households earning between
$10,000 and $14,999 annually dropped from 8.3 percent to 6.5 percent;
while those with a yearly income of between $75,000 and $99,999 rose
from 10.5 percent to 11.4 percent,” according to statistics released by
the Census Bureau this month.
The disaster of
Hurricane Katrina is being used
effectively to artificially change the demographics of New Orleans.
The population of the New Orleans metropolitan area has become
substantially whiter, older and less poor -- not because people suddenly
got richer, but because the
poor are being shut out of the
city -- and it shrank to less than half its
size, according to the Census Bureau. “New Orleans is not going to be as
black as it was for a long time, if ever again,” said Alphonso Jackson.
It is suggested that only the whites and affluent are encouraged to make
New Orleans their home at the expense of African-Americans and their
cultural heritage.
The current restructuring of
New Orleans provides an excellent social experiment of the new epidemic
of privatisation of public housing and public assets. The destruction
inflicted by Hurricane Katrina allows politicians, the ruling elites and
their cronies to remodel the city as a free-market and privately-owned
city catering to the rich and tourists. With
billions of dollars of taxpayers
monies made available for “reconstruction,”
the disaster brought by Hurricane Katrina is the smokescreen for the
gentrification of New Orleans and corporate looting of public resources.
To preserve African-American
heritage, African-Americans should be allowed to participate at the
forefront in the rebuilding and economic redevelopment of New Orleans.
The city’s unique history and cultural heritage should inspire new urban
invention and economic sustainability, not the neoliberal ideology that
has been proven to advance the interests of the rich and affluent.
Furthermore, as a result of
total neglect by authorities, low-income people of New Orleans are
experiencing “a near-epidemic of depression and post-traumatic stress
disorder.” The suicide
rate in the city of a vibrant
African-American heritage “was
less than nine a year per 100,000 residents
before Katrina, and increased to an annual rate of more than
26 per 100,000 in the months after.”
reported the Times.
The crime rate has increased
dramatically. “I thought I could weather the storm and I did -- it's the
aftermath that's killing me,” Gina Barbe, a New Orleans resident told
the Times. The response by authorities has been to deploy the
National Guard troops to patrol the streets, pretending to fix the
social and economic ill they have created.
Most tragic of all, if the
U.S. government is treating its own people in this way, how can a
significant number of Americans be so oblivious to what their government
is doing to peoples in far away places like Iraq? Can you imagine how
the U.S. government (militarism) is treating the people of Iraq?
Iraq has been destroyed not
by natural disaster, but by U.S. barbaric aggression to serve a
Zionist-imperialist ideology at the expense of hundreds of thousands of
innocent lives.
For peace to success and
justice to prevail, mass resistance is the only way left against the
rise of this anti-human ideology and injustice.
Ghali Hassan lives in Perth, Western Australia. He
can be reached at
G.Hassan@exchange.curtin.edu.au.