HANO's continued dereliction of duty

T-P reporter Gwen Filosa doesn't mince words in relaying the latest in HANO's push to destroy low-income housing in New Orleans.

New Orleans will permanently lose part of its rich cultural history if the federal government succeeds in erasing the 1940s-era public housing complexes, preservationists said Thursday.

Seventeen months after Hurricane Katrina and the levee failures ravaged 80 percent of New Orleans, the city's public housing stock remains mostly shuttered and tagged for demolition as developers plot mixed-income communities to take the place of the Lafitte, St. Bernard, C.J. Peete and B.W. Cooper housing developments.

But in addition to losing thousands of apartments in a city hungry for shelter, the government's recovery plan for public housing will bury the durable, historic complexes that cannot be replaced with rows of pastel, faux shotguns, the critics said.

Regular readers of this space will understand that I am 100% on Filosa's side of this. But even I have to smirk a bit at this editorial disguised as a report qualified only by the barely noticeable phrases "preservationists said" and "critics said". Still it's in a good cause.

HANO's plans for these developments are ridiculous for three reasons. First, the buildings slated for demolition are significant centers of the city's architectural and cultural landscape.

But James Dugan, of the Louisiana Landmarks Society, said the brand-new houses at Fischer housing development on the West Bank, which replaced a notorious high rise, are an affront to the rich architecture of New Orleans public housing.

"These are low-density, garden style apartments," Dugan said of Lafitte, which he lives near. "They are not the miles and miles of public housing you have in New York. This is the experiment that succeeded. Not to be overly critical, but what is across the street is not New Orleans. It's the Disneyland version."

Demolition and replacement of these structures with "Disneyland" constitutes a massive Squandering of the city's Heritage.

Second, the demolition signals a complete failure of HANO to carry out its mission. Massive portions of our community have been dispersed, bullied and forgotten by the agency charged with meeting the housing needs of low income families. HANO's proposal would drastically reduce the stock of low-income housing available in an already shamefully tight market. Meanwhile by building "market rate" units on land previously dedicated to low-income housing HANO baldly declares its intention to serve the housing needs of the well-to-do over the needs of the poor. This is a direct transfer of wealth away from the least wealthy segment of the community. I am ashamed to live in a city that so enthusiastically endorses such a policyof perverse social engineering.

Third, HANO and HUD are proceeding with this program while ignoring the protests of a vast majority of the people they are supposed to serve. This isn't to say there hasn't been input from the public.

Dugan and other preservationists spoke Thursday night at HANO's legally required meeting at the Fischer Community Center, which drew at least 60 people.

"We're working with HANO's vision, to transform obsolete public housing and bring in mixed-income communities," said Tracey Dodd, of United States Risk Management, the local firm HANO hired to draft redevelopment plans. But speakers almost uniformly denounced the idea of demolishing the historic neighborhoods in favor of mixed-income developments like River Garden, which replaced the St. Thomas complex in the Lower Garden District.

The attendees at nearly all of these "legally required meetings" have stated their opposition in no uncertain terms and each time their objections have been dismissed.

Why are the concerns of these flood-dispersed residents allowed to fall on deaf ears? The paltry amount of support for restoring low-income housing that has been granted an audience in polite conversation tends to center around the need to "bring back the workforce" as though government commitment to low-income housing existed only for the benefit of the owners of New Orleans's tourist-plantation economy. Perhaps if we were endowed with the minimum amount of humanity required to view the working poor as something other than labor units we might begin to work earnestly toward restoring these communities ripped apart by the Federal Flood.

Update: Heh.. sorry... HANO's right after all. Those kitchens just won't do.