Reconcentrated poverty

Imagine that.

Housing advocates are warning that many poor families relying on government housing vouchers are ending up in pockets of poverty and crime far from the city center — evidence that a decision to demolish large public housing complexes in the wake of Hurricane Katrina hasn't worked.

The Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, a housing advocacy group, released a report on Thursday (Jan. 21) that said all-too-often households receiving housing vouchers are concentrated in "a small number of census tracts" far from jobs, services and good public transportation.

The center urged the Housing Authority of New Orleans to look at methods to help families using housing vouchers to move into low-poverty neighborhoods.

The study said there are about 18,000 voucher households in New Orleans, making up about a quarter of renters, and that about 25 percent of those households have ended up in a handful of census tracts in eastern New Orleans and across the Mississippi River from the French Quarter in Algiers. Those neighborhoods are also overwhelmingly black and marked by low income, the report said.

"Voucher families are disproportionately stuck in farther flung, segregated, high-poverty neighborhoods with little access to public transit, jobs, or the kinds of opportunity that help families break the cycle of poverty," the report said.

Hey that's pretty remarkable, right? All that talk about how we needed to bulldoze public housing and move people out of their neighborhoods because we were saving them from "concentrated poverty" was bullshit?  You don't say!

Except we did say. We have been saying for years and years. But it's all just shouting into the void.  "New New Orleans" does what it wants with no shame or accountability.  The rest of us just have to go be resilient somewhere.