Fighting for Public Housing

This video is pretty deep.
It shows, albeit in a slanted way, how the New Orleans City Council locked out people who were protesting the recent decision to tear down rather than re-open about 4000 units of public housing. When protesters opposed the closed meeting, things turned violent, and the police acted with force to subdue the protests. It's all pretty powerful to watch.

I post the video because I think it illustrates something that the public rarely gets to see: righteous anger about the lack of good quality affordable housing for people who don't make a lot of money. I commend the protesters for their indignation and for their insistence about open and accountable public processes.

But this situation is complicated. Many of the protesters depicted in this video are not New Orleans residents. To me, this nuances the protests in an important way. New Orleans has become a kind of national magnet for "activists" searching for a righteous cause. I have been to the city twice in the last two years and have met and spoken with many of them. In fact, much of the community organizing in New Orleans, including a significant piece of this public housing conflict, has been led and fueled by out-of-town activists.

New Orleanians are deeply divided about whether to re-open the projects in question. Many tenant leaders spoke in favor of closing down and demolishing the projects. In the end, all 7 elected City Council members, black as well as white, voted for closure and re-development.

There is no doubt that New Orleans is in dire need of affordable housing. No question. The question is whether re-opening these particular projects is the right thing. I lived in New Haven, CT, during the '90s, when there was a strong and concerted effort to close and re-develop the oldest public housing projects. They were diseased places--dark, poorly lit, poorly maintained, dangerous, and almost 50 years old. They were warehouses for poor people. Some people fought hard to keep them open, wondering, as did the activists in New Orleans, whether the "re-development" wouldn't effectively leave many people without homes because of lower densities and mixed-income alternatives. And probably, they do. In New Haven, they are still trying to find homes FIFTEEN YEARS later. The new homes look like the attached photo... I was unable to find a photo online of the old Elm Haven projects.

But across the nation, in cities from New Haven to Chicago and now New Orleans, the referendum on large scale public housing is that these "projects" are largely failures. They don't work as quality housing. In ordinary circumstances, most everyone in New Orleans would have agreed with that statement.

But these are not ordinary circumstances and these are not ordinary times. As I have written here before, our nation is largely neglecting the housing needs of our lowest income citizens. It is a major national crisis. There is simply not enough public will to provide adequate, clean, affordable, safe housing for all of our nation's citizens.

So, given that reality, I find it hard to blame the protesters, native or not, for trying to draw attention to an issue that goes largely unnoticed by all except those most affected.

Keep an eye on this story as it develops. How New Orleans solves its low income housing shortage--or not--is an important story for our entire nation. Is a society fairly judged by how it treats the least of its citizens? It's not the only barometer, but for a Christian, it's by no means the least among the criteria.