NEW ORLEANS – With the second United Nations opinion in a week criticizing the government’s treatment of black Hurricane Katrina victims, a group of New Orleans housing activists on Friday urged federal and local officials to save portions of the city’s public housing projects from the wrecking ball.
“The United Nation’s today for the second time has gone on record saying “What are you doing in New Orleans?” said Natalie Walker, co-director and attorney for Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, a public interest law firm. “We’re not protecting human rights in the guise of this so-called recovery.”
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development spokeswoman Donna White pointed out that nobody from the U.N.’s Geneva offices, which issued the opinion, visited New Orleans.
“The view from the Alps is obviously different than the view from the Mississippi,” she said in an e-mail. “Our plan is a vast improvement over the old paradigm of concentrating families in islands of poverty, a recipe for dependence and despair across generations.”
The activists cited a statement by the U.N.’s International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. It noted the “disparate impact that this natural disaster continues to have on low income African Americans” and called for local and federal governments to help Katrina’s displaced.
The statement was among 46 opinions the committee issued on alleged racial discrimination worldwide. It was less pointed than the Feb. 28 opinion by U.N.-appointed experts Miloon Kothari, an investigator for housing, and Gay McDougall, an expert on minority issues. They called treatment of blacks in Katrina’s aftermath a possible human rights violation, saying “the spiraling costs of private housing and rental units, and in particular the demolition of public housing, puts these communities in further distress.”
Neither opinion carries legal or regulatory power, but they have given housing advocates some standing to argue for a last-minute stop to the demolitions. The fate of the four complexes and the 4,500 units they comprise seems all but assured, with early stages of demolition occurring at some and permits holding up the process for others.
Still, the international rhetoric escalated Friday when U.S. Sen. David Vitter, R-La., said: “Enough is enough. I intend to call for a hearing in the (Senate) Foreign Relations Committee to investigate whether the U.N. is focusing on the right priorities, especially since much of its funding comes from our American taxpayer dollars.”
HUD says the public housing units will be replaced with “mixed-income, mixed-use” developments, which are built through Bush administration tax breaks for private developers. But the agency has not committed to a one-to-one replacement of the units and some estimates have found that only 18 percent of the units are slated for replacement so far.
The local arm of HUD, the Housing Authority of New Orleans, on Thursday publicized a self-commissioned survey that found 72 percent of former public housing residents wanted to return to New Orleans, but only 14 percent wanted to return to the four complexes slated for demolition.
Advocates on Friday, including former public housing residents, called the survey questions a “false choice” that did not ask Katrina victims if they wanted to return to a refurbished version of their old unit with open space outside and better inclusion in the city grid.
“Who would want to return to the public housing (conditions) pre-Katrina?” said Walter Gallas, of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, who has argued for the old buildings to be saved and improved. “We don’t want that either.”
Activists said if the complete demolition takes place government officials will exacerbate a housing shortage in the city. Rent has increased 40 percent since the storm, homelessness has doubled to 12,000 people according to nonprofit estimates, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency is scrambling to move people out of 7,833 trailers after finding unsafe levels of formaldehyde in the dwellings.
More than two years after Katrina hit in August 2005, the recovery of the city shows sharp contrasts, according to numbers compiled by a local demographer who uses utility hookups to track population return. The mostly white, middle-class Garden District has grown with 107 percent of its population back, for example, while the black, working-class community of the Lower 9th Ward shows a 9.9 percent return. But the Garden District stands on higher ground and suffered far less damage during the storm.
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U.N. criticizes treatment of black Katrina victims
March 10, 2008
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