|
|
|
Poverty Is the New Prostitution: Race, Poverty, and Public Housing in Post-Katrina New Orleans
Alecia P. Long
| In the depths of the Great Depression, the federal government, led by a president with a vision of social justice and some interest in the fate of the nation's poorest and most vulnerable, oversaw the passage of the U.S. Housing Act of 1937. For once, local New Orleans leaders had their act together, and the city was the first in the nation to qualify for funds. The city's first six housing projects were racially segregated—two for whites, four for blacks—as was the case throughout much of the South.1 One of the projects for whites was named Iberville, in homage to one of Louisiana's founders, Pierre Le Moyne, sieur d'Iberville. Located two blocks from both the French Quarter and Canal Street, Iberville is one of only four housing projects that have been reopened to a pitifully small percentage of former residents since Hurricane Katrina. The complex sits on a valuable, enticing, and contested piece of real estate, ardently desired by investors and developers who want to "clean up" the area adjacent to the French Quarter and make it more business and tourist friendly. Despite Katrina's tragic breadth, a closer look at this neighborhood's history reveals that contemporary events resonate with a depressingly familiar past. This is not the first time city leaders have acted to move poor blacks out of this area in the name of "progress." Unfortunately, New Orleans has seen it all before. The neighborhood that became the infamous vice district Storyville, and later a public housing project—built for whites but ultimately populated entirely by African Americans—started out as the low-lying swampy backside of New Orleans proper, the lowdown doppelgänger of the higher, drier French Quarter. |
1
|
|
When Katrina struck, the Iberville Housing Project had 673 occupied apartments. Some of its residents walked to the nearby French Quarter and worked hard but often invisibly, as maids in hotels or as kitchen staff in the Quarter's many celebrated restaurants. Lacking cars, credit cards, or the several hundred dollars in ready cash necessary to stage any kind of evacuation from the city, many of them stayed behind because they had no other choice. As the water began to rise, many Iberville residents waded through the muck and then lived through the hellish aftermath in either the Superdome or the Convention Center. When they were finally rescued five days later, they were widely dispersed across the country in the chaotic evacuation that followed. The residents of public housing, just like the city's other renters and homeowners, also lost their homes and neighborhoods when the flimsy, federally underfinanced levee system collapsed. Many Americans seem not to realize that fact or to care, perhaps because the housing was federally owned and subsidized.2 |
2
|
There are about 3792 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
|
