Dirty South Bureau

HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson stepped down yesterday. If I am saddened by this news, it is only because he resigned after doing so much damage to the lives of so many men, women and children in the city of New Orleans, and that he was not stopped earlier.

It is ironic that Jackson’s resignation comes less than a week after the final accomplishment of his wantonly destructive tenure at HUD- the granting by the city of New Orleans of a demolition permit for the Lafitte Housing Development.

But not to fear; Jackson losing his job will likely not be a time of instability, like it would be if you or I lost our employment. I am sure Jackson’s friends at Columbia Residential, Jackson’s former employer and the company he awarded with a contract to oversee the redevelopment (read: destruction) of the St. Bernard Development, will not allow Jackson to see tough times. Like most former cabinet-level officials, Jackson will be free to return to the world of private industry which did him so well on his way to the top.

There are more than a few similarities between Jackson and another prominent Bush appointee who resigned amid scandal, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Both have lives that read like sinister versions of the Horatio Alger myth. Both are men of color who were born into poverty in large families, to fathers who labored in humble jobs. They are amazing examples of the kind of class mobility that America has prided itself on, often exaggerated in our national mythology of who were are. But Jackson and Gonzales were the real deal; hard-working, ambitious men whose rise would be unthinkable in the pre-civil rights era.

What happened to make these men forget where they came from, and to turn them into the monsters they became? They represent a curious trend in American society. Unlike the blue-bloods who run, say, the Times-Picayune, these men knew poverty and want, rose above it, and then proceeded to mercilessly sacrifice those still trapped below them to their own massive ambitions.

The administration of Bush Jr., himself a patrician and a faux-Texan, will be remembered for promoting a large number of minorities to cabinet-level positions. They appear to have made a study of finding the most ruthless, unscrupulous and spineless African-Americans and Latinos to fill these positions. It is truly a PR feat. Rove, or whoever else has been running the Bush machine, is very clever to have used these individuals to do their dirty work while still paying homage to equal opportunity employment. In this case, it reads more like equal opportunity oppression.

Ultimately, Jackson’s resignation is too late for the homeless under the interstate, and for those in semi-permanent exile in Houston. The Magnolia (C J Peete) Development has already been flattened, and demolition is underway on both parts of B W Cooper and St. Bernard. New Orleans now has a 4% homeless rate, four times that of most major US cities. Most of them, like the overwhelming majority of the poor in New Orleans, are of course black.

Maybe Horatio Alger wouldn’t be the best person to write Jackson’s story. It’s a pity Theodore Dreiser isn’t still around.

Driving by work today I drove past the ruins of what was formerly the St. Bernard Housing Development. Block after block is now rubble; cranes smash what was formerly livable, if not particularly well maintained, housing. Rumor has it that the development will be replaced with a private golf course.

This is what “free-market” restructuring looks like on the ground: the wanton destruction of sound homes in the interests of lining the pockets of developers and politicians. Today, housing, tomorrow, golf courses.

Meanwhile, go under the I-10 on Claiborne, or go to the streets of any major city, and you will see what happens when we as a society don’t ensure the human right to housing.

Alphonso Jackson, George Bush, Mayor Ray Nagin, and every member of the New Orleans City Council will be remembered by future generations as criminals and the restructuring of Katrina which they oversaw as a human rights catastrophe. Already the UN Commission on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has condemned these actions.

Full report

But all of this is too late for the people living under the overpass. As for me, I’m just sick.

So the DSB is back after a lengthy hiatus… actually in the interests of full disclosure I got a new job working for the teachers union. And let me also say that anything that I say here on this blog is my own personal opinion and should in no way be connected to the union.

And what’s new on the horizon (drumroll please…) Alphonso Jackson send us bulldozers for Christmas! And the City Council lacks the guts to do anything about it! Maybe this is because in our electoral apathy we allowed a devout gentrificationist and a woman who epitomizes hatred of poor people to be elected?

Where to start? Alphonso Jackson’s compromising relationship with Columbia Residential?

12,000 homeless people on the streets of New Orleans?

Blatantly biased reporting from that paragon of journalism that we know as our daily paper? (Love those 64-word lead sentences with no clear connection between clauses, guys.)

All I know is that I have sent my letters to Midura and Fielkow, and I am going to be at the City Council Meeting tomorrow morning, Thursday, December 20.

My letter to Shelly Midura:

Dear Councilwoman Midura,

I live in your district in the Bayou St. John neighborhood and I am asking you to vote not to allow HUD to demolish the CJ Peete, Lafitte and St. Bernard Developments.

Though I lived in District C at the time, I was glad when you defeated Jay Batt. You seemed like a person of compassion and integrity. This vote will be a test of those qualities.

We all agree that public housing in this city needs to be improved. But HUD’s plan is privatization, not improvement. It will waste hundreds of millions of dollars in senseless destruction and will not provide enough low-income housing for New Orleanians who want to come home.

There are other plans that have been approved by the city government, including your office, such as the Unified New Orleans Plan, which provide for some demolition but also renovating and improving much of the city’s public housing instead of wantonly destroying it. This plan was arrived at in a democratic and inclusive manner and is supposed to be the official plan for rebuilding the city. I implore you to follow our city’s plan instead of arbitrary and destructive measures put forth by a federal government which has repeatedly shown a lack of care for this city and our people.

There is an article in the art and design section of the New York Times which describes better than I can what a waste destroying these buildings is. Before you vote you should read it— the historical and architectural value of these projects, especially Lafitte, is immense.

But it is the people, not the buildings, who are the real issue. There is a housing crisis in this city of epic proportions, and tearing down thousands of units will make it worse. It will take at least three years to rebuild any of these developments, which will only contain a fraction of the affordable housing. Many poor people simply cannot afford to move back to this city. The failure of the federal and state government to provide for a way for these internally displaced citizens to come home is a violation of international human rights law. If you vote for demolition, you will be a party to that crime.

Please make the right choice, the humane choice, the compassionate choice. Do not allow these demolitions.

Christian Roselund

By Sean Benjamin

In addition to flooding 80% of the city, Hurricane Katrina destroyed over 50,000 rental apartment units. A small portion of these have since been refurbished, but the vast majority are still unlivable and the city still faces an acute shortage of affordable housing 19 months after the storm. Rents have skyrocketed since the storm; landlords have taken the opportunity to jack up the rents on the apartments that are still livable. Apartments that used to rent for as little as $400-500 before the storm now regularly rent for between $800 and $1200. In many cases, rents have more than doubled as the pressures of a drastically-reduced housing stock and the lack of price regulation allow landlords to gouge their tenants. The folks who still haven’t returned home since the storm regularly cite a lack of affordable rental housing as one of the main reasons they are unable to come home to New Orleans.

For the first six months after the storm, I was working with a group called NOHEAT (New Orleans Emergency Housing Action Team) to fight rent increases and evictions. NOHEAT doesn’t exist any more, but high rents are still a huge problem. Since NOHEAT disbanded last year, the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund (PHRF) Tenants Rights Working Group has been doing the bulk of the organizing around issues of fighting high rents. This week they managed to get a hearing before the City Council to demand rent control and the creation of a board of New Orleans renters mandated to defend the rights of tenants and to have a voice for tenants in the rebuilding process. I haven’t been very involved in the housing struggle lately, but when the PHRF called for a large turnout of renters to this City Council meeting, I figured I’d better attend.

Malcolm Suber from the PHRF led a team of presenters to outline the urgency of the housing crisis in front of City Council. He didn’t rant about ‘ethnic cleansing’ or chew the scenery the way that some of the city’s self-proclaimed housing advocates are in the habit of doing; his approach was calm, considered, and was amply backed up with statistics and with testimony from renters and displaced New Orleans residents. He explained that affordable rents were necessary so that the low-wage workers central to the city’s economy could return, and that the lack of affordable housing was a major obstacle to the return of displaced residents and to the city’s reconstruction efforts. The PHRF proposal called for the creation of a city-wide tenants’ council to represent the interests of tenants in all decisions made regarding the reconstruction of the city. He also pointed out that it’s the City Council’s responsibility to protect its citizens by regulating exorbitant rents and demanded the enactment of an anti-price-gouging and rent control ordinance using August 2005 rents as a retroactive benchmark and allowing for modest annual increases to account for increased costs of property insurance after the storm. The PHRF delegation also submitted a 10,000-signature petition in support of these demands.

I doubt Malcolm Suber or the PHRF is under the illusion that the City Council has any real interest in counter-acting the landlords’ price gouging. He’s a solid socialist with decades of community organizing experience, and he’s well aware of the class interests of the Council and the purpose it serves within the city’s economic power structure. But publicly coming before the Council and demanding that it take a strong stand for the citizens it ostensibly serves was the right approach to take. The councillors, for their part, knew they had to appear sympathetic so that when the meeting was covered on the evening news they’d look like they have the interests of tenants at heart. The Council referred the proposal to the housing sub-committee, and most of them made appropriate noises about the urgency of the problem and the need to find ways for displaced New Orleans residents to return. Most of them, that is, except for Stacy Head.

Stacy Head made no attempt to hide her disrespect for the presentation and her disagreement with the need for protection of tenants’ rights. She spent the entire length of the PHRF presentation sighing, scowling, rolling her eyes, and whispering indignantly to James Carter and Shelly Midura, the two councillors sitting beside her. She interrupted Malcolm Suber a number of times to angrily insist that landlords faced insurmountable hardships in insurance costs and that they were the real victims needing protection. (Never mind that the PHRF proposal took into account the fact that small landlords needed to deal with increased insurance and repair costs; they recommended a combination of amortization and pressure on the state legislature to enact controls on insurance companies.)

Later, a former resident of the Lower Ninth Ward got up to testify that he’d been the owner of a small local hip-hop record label before the storm, but he couldn’t come home to contribute to the economy because of high rents and he was still stuck in Baton Rouge while commuting to the city every day. Stacy Head showed him even more contempt. She refused to believe he couldn’t find affordable housing in the city. “You’re a young man,” (I’d guess he was in his 30s) she said with that mixture of disdain and patronizing sweetness that only a yuppie can muster. “You’re probably looking for – what – a one-bedroom?” No, he said, he was actually a family man with two kids to support. “Well, there’s a website you might try looking at; it’s called Craigslist, and it’s got all sorts of listings for apartments available. I’m sure you can find something there.” This in the same cloying, falsely-helpful tones as before, as if it had never occurred to a man trying for months to get his family home and re-start his business that there might actually be apartments listed on *gasp!* the Internet! The audience murmured angrily at her patronizing suggestions, but she kept going with her lecture on Apartment-Hunting 101, completely unaware of how offensive her assumptions were.

So apparently to the Stacy Heads of the city, the housing problem is not due to high rents, lack of livable apartment units, or shuttered public housing; it’s just that these complainers just aren’t resourceful enough to find apartments for themselves. They just need to look harder. The same goes for jobs, I presume. It’s not that unemployment is a built-in side-effect of contemporary capitalism, or that New Orleans’s economy is dominated by low-wage tourism and service-industry jobs through any consequence of the way the city has been run for the last fifty years. No, it’s that people just don’t have the dedication or stick-to-it-iveness to create opportunities for themselves. It’s their own fault, really…….

Stacy Head isn’t the only opponent of affordable housing on New Orleans City Council by any means. The two Cynthias (Cynthia Hedge-Morrell and Cynthia Willard-Lewis) are also allied with developers’ interests and just as opposed to affordable housing. But they manage to talk a good talk, making populist appeals to bringing New Orleanians home while at the same time opposing the construction of affordable housing complexes in their districts. In the time-honored tradition of two-faced New Orleans politicians, they manage to fool a lot of people into thinking they represent the interests of regular folks. But Stacy Head doesn’t even try to seem sympathetic to the needs of tenants. She’s an open unabashed representative of real-estate developers, yuppie gentrifiers, and landlords. During her election campaign last year, one of her most-trumpeted qualifications for elected office was that she had bought a number of run-down rental properties, renovated them, and resold them for a tidy profit. She’s a landlord and gentrifier, plain and simple.

Stacy Head is the Jackie Clarkson for a new generation. Jackie Clarkson was also unabashedly in bed with big money real estate and developer interests, but she was also a caricature of herself: showy, flamboyant, New Orleans old money. Even if you knew she was on the opposing side in most issues, she was just too silly to take seriously. Stacy Head’s got an updated image: young, educated, professional, eloquent, with just enough of a veneer of good-government reform credentials to make her look progressive in some circles. It’s been less than a year since she was elected, and a lot of people were happy to see her defeat Renee Gill Pratt in last year’s election. Pratt was an old-style New Orleans politician of the worst kind: incompetent, openly corrupt, and solidly connected to one of the city’s most powerful political machines. She needed to go. But her replacement is one of the most dangerous politicians operating in New Orleans today.

A couple of the characters responsible for the dissolution of NOHEAT are still around, attaching themselves to the campaign to re-open New Orleans’s shuttered public housing developments. They’ve already singled out Stacy Head as an opponent of affordable housing and as a representative of landlords’ and real estate developers’ interests, and they’ve been picketing her Uptown house for the past couple of weekends. These folks are very problematic. They’re textbook examples of how not to do community organizing; they’ve got a strident, pompous, abrasive vanguardist approach which turns most people off. In any genuinely revolutionary situation, they’d probably be more likely to be strung up as ‘enemies of the people’ than be accepted in the kind of leadership role they aspire to. In fact, their outsized presence in New Orleans housing campaigns is a big reason why I’m not very involved anymore. But once in a while these guys just might have the right idea, and I’m starting to think that their targeting of Stacy Head as a major enemy in the housing struggle is a good choice.

I’ve always liked the idea of using home demos as a way to personalize a struggle and give faces and names to our opponents. Anarchists in Montreal used to organize “proletarian field trips” to the wealthy suburb of Westmount, and one of the best New Orleans demos I’ve been to took place outside a George W. Bush fundraiser at a country club amid the mansions of Old Metairie. The ruling class doesn’t like it when we come into their neighborhoods to raise a ruckus, and it’s also a good way to promote class warfare. In any case, a stepped-up campaign against Stacy Head at her home (and her law firm, for that matter) is a step forward in the fight for affordable housing.

Photos from the Council meeting: http://www.peopleshurricane.org/display/ShowGallery?moduleId=895693&galleryId=52565

Link to the text of the PHRF council presentation: http://www.peopleshurricane.org/storage/documents/council_presentation.doc

Stacy Head’s website: http://www.stacyhead.com/