Some questions about these school property sales

The administrators of what used be a public school system in New Orleans unveiled a new facilities plan this week. A big part of that plan involves leaving the system fewer facilities to manage. As most of us know, New Orleans's schools were quasi-privatized after Katrina. That process culminated this year leaving all 78 schools currently operating under the control of charter organizations.  But the system owns more property than that.  There are 26 properties belonging to the school system that are unused and which sit in various states of disrepair. In fact, some of them are now just empty lots where schools used to be.  The plan right now is to sell 12 of them off.  There's a specific order of operations they have to follow for that to happen, though.

To divest itself of unused properties, the OPSB first has to vote to put them on the surplus list, a legal designation. Then the buildings or lots are offered to charter school operators and next to other government agencies for possible property trades. If no charter or agency wants a property, it can be sold through public auction.

We've seen an example of OPSB trading properties with other agencies just this year.  The school board approved a swap that turns the McDonogh 7 building over to HANO to be redeveloped as affordable housing.  Or at least it would do that if the Touro-Bouligny Neighborhood Association loses (or drops) its lawsuit. For its story about the School Board plans, the Advocate obtains and rather credulously presents a quote from the neighborhood association's spokesperson. 

"The (association) is primarily concerned over losing a landmark building that has served as a school to its neighborhood and children for over 140 years," said Zepletal, president of the Touro-Bouligny Neighborhood Association. The group is also worried the building will become "vacant, blighted, and a victim of demolition by neglect, given the current lack of development plans (for it) by HANO," she said.

That's not really what they're worried about, though.  What they actually want is to keep anyone from building any affordable housing near them. That's what they told HANO board members over the summer, anyway. 

In its May suit, the neighborhood group argued that the land ought to remain a school and criticized the OPSB for not giving other charter school operators more time to decide if they want McDonogh No. 7 before offering it to HANO.

(HANO Board VP Lisa) Wheeler also highlighted a swell of neighborhood opposition to HANO’s separate plan to redevelop vacant land as affordable housing in Bywater, another neighborhood with high property values.

“The people in Bywater and in Uptown... are not going to sit idly by, when they say they don’t want to (see something turned into affordable) housing,” Wheeler said. “I would rather see us have housing that’s not necessarily Uptown, but still have housing.”

We saw those sentiments borne out again during the October 12th election where there was a housing question on the ballot in the form of Amendment 4.  This was the measure that would have granted the city special powers to create tax breaks for landlords and developers under the assumption that these would become incentives for the creation of "affordable housing."  It was a constitutional amendment so it needed to pass statewide. It did not.  But it passed in Orleans Parish by a wide margin.

Last week, we expressed our own quibbles with the amendment so we don't doubt that some of the "NO" vote came from people who, like us, favor affordable housing but didn't trust that specific policy approach to achieving it. But that kind of nuanced NO is probably an insignificant minority. Given the media (and the mayor and her PAC) tended to frame the message, by and large, it is safe to assume most voters looked at this measure as more of a simple, "Do you like affordable housing, Yes or No?"

Which is why, when we look at The Lens's map of the results we can see which precincts in Orleans Parish favor more affordable housing and which do not.   Predictably, those who do not are clustered in Lakeview and in the deepest parts of Uptown near Audubon Place.  But take a look, specifically, at these little slivers of NO in orange. Those are precincts 12-6 and 12-8. Right in the heart of Touro-Bouligny around where McDonogh 7 is located.

It's possible the school system could trade more properties to HANO.  But seeing as how that can be controversial, they're more likely to try and shoot on through to auctioning them off. In which case, we should look at this map provided by NOLA.com to guess which properties Sidney Torres might snap up at a discount.

Aside from the land speculation, here are a few other questions regarding this plan to consider.

Reading yesterday's NOLA.com story, we learn from Ken Ducote that selling off properties saves on maintenance and insurance and therefore "makes fiscal sense."

While the district's plan may be unpopular with some residents, it largely makes sense to Ken Ducote, executive director of the Greater New Orleans Collaborative of Charter Schools. Ducote, who oversaw school properties for the district for more than 20 years, said that to keep a building properly maintained, the district must spend an average of 2.5 percent of its value each year. So selling some properties makes fiscal sense.

"When you eliminate property that you don’t need, then you save the operations cost, insurance cost, security and so on," he said. The district estimates it costs $350,000 per year for minimal maintenance on the 12 properties it wants to sell.

Later in the article we are reminded that prior to Katrina, school buildings in New Orleans were, to say the least, not very well maintained. We are also told that, in most cases nowadays, maintenance and insurance costs for schools in operation fall on the charter organizations. How well do charters maintain their facilities anyway? Because most of these buildings were recently repaired with federal recovery funds, it's not appropriate to credit charter operators for their current condition. Over the long haul will they be better stewards of these properties than a properly funded and managed OPSB?

We also learn from this article that the district has a facilities fund to help handle some of these costs but it turns out they're already raiding it.

Realizing this, the Legislature created the School Facility Preservation Program in 2014 to dedicate annual tax money for repairs to New Orleans school buildings. It generates an estimated $35 million a year. But Lewis removed $10 million from the fund last year, with the Legislature's approval, to pay for instructional needs, a move Ducote criticized.

The planned sale of a dozen properties would help supplement funds available for facility needs by paying for future construction, without restrictions that limit the preservation program.

Uh oh. That sounds a lot like a plan to cover recurring costs with "one-time money" raised by selling off assets. For a while, Bobby Jindal was able to cover up the damage he was doing to the state budget by engaging in similar practices.  We've just spent the entire John Bel Edwards administration dealing with the consequences of that. Is this sell-off a budgetary stop gap? And if so, will there be more?

Finally, we are told the 12 properties about to be dumped are too small to meet the needs of "modern schools."  Here is how the plan defines that.

To decide which buildings to keep and which to get rid of, the district created guidelines that said sites smaller than 3.5 acres generally are inadequate for modern schools, which ideally include areas for green space, physical education, the performing arts, and students' drop-off and pickup.

Of the properties for sale, only the 3.4 acre vacant lot that used to be the Lafon School in Central City comes close to qualifying.  But it does raise another question about the schools that continue in operation.  Do they all currently offer the arts and phys ed programs the plan demands space for? "Ideally," they should, right?

Anyway, the board approved the facilities plan at its meeting last night.  The Lens has that story along with a link to the plan itself here. Keep an eye on what happens to these properties next.

Ah the NIMBYs look like they've won one

Kinda thought they might be able to stop this. The further uptown you get, the better the neighborhood association people are at shutting down affordable housing projects. 

Update: That article was just at stem when I posted this but now that it's been fleshed out it's... yeah well it is what I thought.

Still, Wheeler said a lawsuit by the Touro Bouligny Neighborhood Association and a recent swell of opposition to the swap gave her pause.

In its May suit, the neighborhood group argued that the land ought to remain a school and criticized the OPSB for not giving other charter school operators more time to decide if they want McDonogh No. 7 before offering it to HANO.

Wheeler also highlighted a swell of neighborhood opposition to HANO’s separate plan to redevelop vacant land as affordable housing in Bywater, another neighborhood with high property values.

“The people in Bywater and in Uptown... are not going to sit idly by, when they say they don’t want to (see something turned into affordable) housing,” Wheeler said. “I would rather see us have housing that’s not necessarily Uptown, but still have housing.”

Oh no these rich people might get mad at us if we don't respect their redlined and segregated neighborhoods.  Probably should just give them whatever they want, I guess. 

NIMBY neighborhood associations

There are a lot of different things to focus on with this OPSB and HANO land swap deal. But the important detail is the neighbors are suing now so they don't have to fight against an affordable housing project later.

Neighbors who want the building to remain a school, however, are upset about the prospect of a trade that would allow HANO to move forward with plans to build a mixed-income housing complex on the historic site.

That fight didn't go well for the NIMBYs in Bywater last week although they certainly made things more difficult than they should have been.  Maybe the Uptowners will have more clout with City Council if it come to that. But they'd rather not find out.

AirBnBucket List

Shorter Stacy: There aren't enough short term rentals in New Orleans.  Let's sell off what's left of our public housing units so we can make more.

At the heart of this latest dispute is whether HANO should be selling, rather than redeveloping, its small apartment buildings.

Head has said the sale of such sites to private developers would place them back on the tax rolls and bring more revenue to the city, while Fortner has said keeping them and renovating the buildings allows HANO to turn a profit over the long term at a time of declining federal funding for the agency.

It's ok, y'all. She's almost gone. That is to say, she's almost through with her council term which is one reason she's working so hard on her to-do list full of stuff that screws over poor people.  The other reason she's so serious about doing all that stuff is she probably wants to run for a state office sooner or later and is burnishing her "business friendly" bona fides to that end in the meantime.  But we'll worry about that later.

Ex offenders are people too

Sometimes it's startling how reluctant we are to extend even a basic level of humane consideration .

The Housing Authority of New Orleans is seeking to extend a policy that tries to make it easier for people with limited rap sheets to obtain public housing.

The change would make the criminal background screening procedures HANO is proposing for for its its own units mandatory for the private entities that now manage a majority of HANO’s properties.

If the changed plans are approved by the authority’s board, it would be a victory for activists who clamored for that modification last week, saying that an older proposal didn’t do enough to afford ex-offenders an opportunity to be reunited with their families.

And this policy change really is about doing the bare minimum.

Currently, the agency bars applicants who have been convicted on illegal drug possession or alcohol-related charges at least twice in the three months before they submit their applications. But the authority now wants to flag all those who have “engaged in the behavior” within a year of their applications. The more generalized policy is too broad, advocates say.

“This policy grants HANO and private managers the ability to deny public housing to individuals engaging non-destructively in drugs and alcohol based on a discretionary and vague standard,” Voice of the Ex-Offender executive director Norris Henderson said. “We all know that Americans of all income levels use drugs and alcohol, and this should not be used to divide our families.”

The discriminatory nature of all of that should be obvious. But that's probably also the point.

The rent is too damn high

Obviously the problem here is we don't give landlords enough say on housing policy.

The proposal that succeeded — introduced by Rep. Nick Lorusso, R-New Orleans, and not backed by Landrieu — increases the board’s membership from seven to eight, adding a landlord. The change was applauded by the New Orleans Landlord Association, which has complained that the panel lacks landlord representation.

But a fair housing advocacy group said the measure is inadequate because it doesn’t also include a seat for one of the 18,000 Section 8 tenants who receive housing vouchers from HANO.

The Section 8 program, officially called the housing choice voucher program, is the federal government’s program for assisting low-income families, the elderly and the disabled to afford housing in the private market. They receive vouchers to pay for privately-owned apartments.

The 18,000 tenants amount to “a quarter of all renters in the city of New Orleans,” said Monika Gerhart-Hambrick, policy director for the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center. “We’re talking about a huge percentage of the city’s rental population.”

Seems fair.

"Turnaround specialist"

Looks like David Gilmore really gave HANO a serious turnaround.

"I think people have been troubled by HANO in the past. We put every effort in to fix HANO especially the finance department," said Ronald McIntyre, former finance director for the Housing Authority of New Orleans.

He was brought in from Washington, D.C. to oversee the finances of the housing authority. McIntyre was hired by then-administrative receiver David Gilmore.

 He says their relationship soured when he started to question how the housing authority handed out contracts.

"David Gilmore and HANO steered contracts to his friends.  He steered contracts and used federal funds to cover those contracts," McIntyre said.

He says says his questions lead to an increasingly hostile work environment and harassment by superiors. McIntyre was ousted from the agency early this year.

"The day after I informed him (Gilmore) in writing that I was going to the EEOC and the inspector general I was terminated," McIntyre.

Honest graft

As you read this article about how the outgoing HANO director used a non-profit to circumvent public bid laws and direct contracts to consulting firms of his choosing there are two things to keep in mind.

First, this person was in charge because he is a "turnaround specialist" charged with managing a federally mandated receivership of the notoriously corrupt housing authority and, you know, showing us local buffoons how grown-ups are supposed to behave.

Gilmore was the latest in a series of receivers since HANO was taken over by the federal government in 2002 after years of poor management. He oversaw the agency’s day-to-day operation and was its lone board member.

The federal government had been scheduled to relinquish control of HANO in mid-2013, but the city had not yet selected an executive director or appointed a board for the agency at that time, so HUD renewed its contract with Gilmore’s company, Gilmore Kean LLC, for six months, through Jan. 8. An option in the contract allowed for a three-month extension, putting Gilmore’s end date at April 8.

Public housing residents and landlords portrayed Gilmore and his team from Gilmore Kean LLC as attentive leaders who cared about improving the lives of those living in government-subsidized developments in New Orleans. Many said they considered the redevelopment of various housing complexes, including the multimillion-dollar Iberville redevelopment, as Gilmore’s greatest accomplishments during his tenure.

Ok well. Good job, then. 

The other thing to note is that this profiteering took place over the course of a long and much delayed process of demolishing New Orleans's public housing and replacing it with.... less public housing.  Because this is what "moves the city forward" or something. So it's honest graft, really.

Last night PBS aired Louis Alvarez and Andrew Kolker's documentary about the 2010 District B Council election "Getting Back To Abnormal."  The fate of public housing in New Orleans is a major theme of the film.  You can watch it here on the POV website until August 12.  There a number of memorable quotes to play with there but my favorite is the part where Pres Kabacoff tells us that after Katrina, "We don't have quite the drag we had here with so many poor people living here"

Laboratory

The city took over control of HANO today.

"New Orleans has become the nation's laboratory for innovation and change," Landrieu said. "The work you see going on especially in housing, from homelessness to low-income housing to the private sector creating public-private partnerships with us, is doing spectacular stuff. You see what it means when I said we did not rebuild New Orleans back the way she was, we built New Orleans back the way she always was supposed to be."

We could have been talking today about the rising cost of living and the attendant pressures on working class residents of New Orleans's ever diminishing stock of public housing. Instead we're talking about experimenting on people and drawing allusions to an imaginary ladder out of homelessness.

Housing-pitality Zone?

What might this be about?

Donovan shrugged off reports that city officials would like to pull HANO and other housing agencies into "a superagency."

 Reckdahl doesn't delve into this at all and I'm having difficulty finding any "reports" published on the matter.

Junkaroos and Movearoos

Of course the redevelopment of the Iberville means that a $710,850 contract goes to a company operated by Byron Lee. What else did you expect?

Third World Justice

Harper's Magazine's Scott Horton on that recent Supreme Court ruling which held that the New Orleans District Attorney's office cannot be held responsible when its representatives suppress evidence in capital cases.

The majority wants to make the suppression of the lab report into a momentary failing of a single man. Thomas concludes that the prosecutors are guilty of only a single “Brady violation”—that is, a violation of the duty to turnover exculpatory evidence—and that this is not enough to justify the defendant’s case against them. But in fact, the suppression continued over many years and involved faulty judgments by a number of people in the prosecutor’s office. Moreover, misconduct of Orleans Parish law enforcement officials has emerged as an embarrassment to the United States on the world stage, figuring even in discussions before monitoring human rights bodies and triggering federal prosecutions. Justice Ginsburg has the better of the argument, pointing to the majority’s dodgy presentation of the facts:

What happened here, the Court’s opinion obscures, was no momentary oversight, no single incident of a lone officer’s misconduct. Instead, the evidence demonstrated that misperception and disregard of Brady’s disclosure requirements were pervasive in Orleans Parish.

Update: More on the Thompson ruling from Slate's Dahlia Lithwick

In the 10 years preceding Thompson's trial, Thomas acknowledges, "Louisiana courts had overturned four convictions because of Brady violations by prosecutors in Connick's office." Yet somehow this doesn't add up to a pattern of Brady violations in the office, because the evidence in those other cases wasn't blood or crime lab evidence. Huh? He then inexplicably asserts that young prosecutors needn't be trained on Brady violations because they learned everything in law school.

Scalia and Thomas are at pains to say that Connick was not aware of or responsible for his subordinates' unconstitutional conduct, except—as Ginsburg points out—that Connick acknowledged that he misunderstood Brady, acknowledged that his prosecutors "were coming fresh out of law school," acknowledged he didn't know whether they had Brady training, and acknowledged that he himself had 'stopped reading law books … and looking at opinions' when he was first elected District Attorney in 1974." And Connick also conceded that holding his underlings to the highest Brady standards would "make [his] job more difficult." As Bennett Gershman and Joel Cohen point out, the jury had "considerable evidence that both Connick and prosecutors in his office were ignorant of the constitutional rules regarding disclosure of exculpatory evidence; they were ignorant of the rules regarding disclosure of scientific evidence; there was no training, or continuing education, and no procedures to monitor compliance with evidentiary requirements; prosecutors did not review police files; and shockingly, Connick himself had been indicted by federal prosecutors for suppressing a lab report of the kind hidden from Thompson."

Meanwhile, why does Ed Murray want to allow HANO (one of the city's most notoriously dysfunctional entities) to create its own armed police force?

Government for and by the property owners

When I first read that HANO was refusing to release data about voucher usage, I thought they were just obstructing efforts to analyze their effectiveness. Their reasoning sounded like a dodge.

“Everyone is always concerned with the concentration of poverty but I’m not sure if we can identify concentrations,” said Keith Pettigrew, deputy general manager for operations at HANO in an interview outside council chambers. “It’s a roundabout way of finding out where people live and people have a right to keep that private.”

But reading the quotes from our illustrious Councilpersons in this article, I get the impression that Pettigrew is spot-on.

Head pointed to Central City, where she says Section 8 vouchers may be concentrating to the detriment of residents who complain about properties that landlords don’t maintain, even though they are receiving the government subsidy, and tenants who “do not conform to” the standards of the neighborhoods.

Head is clearly implying that her way to deal with negligent landlords involves eliminating affordable housing. I have no idea what she means by "tenants who 'do not conform to' the standards of the neighborhoods" but it sounds like a typically Stepfordish Head statement. Meanwhile Jon Johnson is concerned about the needs of landowners in his district while subtly suggesting that subsidized residents just don't belong in his neighborhood.

“This is not equitable or fair to the people who have returned and rebuilt, or to the low-income people who I believe are in some cases being steered places without being told about opportunities in other parts of the city that may be more advantageous or more central,” Johnson said after the meeting.

A few weeks ago, Head and Johnson were equally as vicious toward New Orleanians still unfortunate enough to be stuck with FEMA trailers.

“At what point is the administration going to say, ‘We understand there have been hardships we recognize it, but we have to enforce the rule of law?’ ” Head asked. She said that homeowners in her district believe that “their house value is down 25 to 30 percent because a trailer is in the neighborhood.”

“Five and a half years after Katrina, you have to make a value judgment about how you value the people who have come back,” she said, recommending the city set a deadline of the end of the year to have all trailers removed.

It stands to reason that the folks who are still stuck with trailers at this point are among those who have had the roughest time getting back on their feet. The obstacles presented by negotiating the Road Home process, dealing with SBA loans, arguing with insurance companies are only amplified for homeowners without sufficient means, education, or experience fighting these sorts of battles. More often than not the people left behind by the process are the most socially isolated or the poorest or they have other disadvantages such as disabilities, or they're caring for disabled family members.

Stacy Head wants to make a "value judgment" as to whether or not its worth kicking these people into the streets in order to allay paranoid plutocratic fears about property values.

Property values were of indispensable use to those people Jon Johnson wants to be fair and equitable to now that they've returned and rebuilt. A case is pending in federal court right now which may determine that Louisiana's Road Home program discriminated against poor homeowners in less desirable neighborhoods by basing restoration grants on property values and not the actual cost of rebuilding.

For years, fair housing advocates have complained that the Road Home’s use of home values to calculate grants amounts to racial discrimination because it means families in economically depressed neighborhoods, which are typically majority-black, get less money to repair their homes than someone with an identical house in an area where values have appreciated.

This discrimination could have affected as many as 25,000 families many of whom could be staying in subsidized housing right now. Stacy Head wants to know where they live so she can make a value judgment as to whether or not they're really necessary.

Update: On November 2, I think I might just write in this guy in every race.