Clamoring to Come Home to New Orleans Projects

Hundreds of displaced residents of public housing have for several days been returning here for the first time since Hurricane Katrina.
...
Outside the largest complex, the St. Bernard Housing Development in the Seventh Ward, tenant groups have organized evacuees into a tent city called Survivors Village. At the C. J. Peete Development in Central City, older residents, mostly women, broke into their old apartments and carted away plastic bags of refuse and ruined furniture.

At the Florida housing complex in the Ninth Ward, residents slipped through fences topped with razor wire to reach their old units. They piled up heaps of debris that lined Bartholomew Street in the shadow of Interstate 10. ...
"They're not giving us any help, and we're tired of waiting," a resident, Nickole Banks, said of the Housing Authority. "People want to come home."
...
"They're trying to steal New Orleans from us," Phyllis Jenkins, who has been living in Fort Worth, said Sunday outside what used to be her home in the sprawling St. Bernard development. "Well, I will not be displaced anymore. I'll take my home any way they give it to me. It's been 10 months. They've got to know we're serious. We're going to stand here until they let us in our homes."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/06/us/nationalspecial/06housing.html?hp&ex=1149652800&en=be9c879107f52d30&ei=5094&partner=homepage

their city back. This is unbelievable.

From the article:

officials have made remarkably unveiled comments suggesting that the storm did the city a favor in terms sweeping away the poor.

Representative Richard H. Baker, a Republican from Baton Rouge, said just after the hurricane: "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it. But God did."

This is the P.O.S.'s photo:



Rep. Richard H. Baker
Could he be any uglier?

was precisely breaking up 'pockets of poverty'; people get subsidized housing, but projects built and rebuilt under his watch were generally mixed income, and the surplus population farmed out to the suburbs.

Many of the people affected didn't like it. Activists hated it; the activists no longer had a community they could clearly speak for. The social results were mixed: the suburbs acquired higher crime rates as a result, but the kids were in better schools. The families did worse than the surrounding population, but better than people that were left in their old situations. Persistent poverty's a tough nut to crack; this at least dented it, for some people.

Rebuilding the projects as they were is a very, very good 1960s idea.