There is dissent in New Orleans; beautiful, raucous, noisy, profane, righteous, brave dissent.

Public housing residents in New Orleans just won’t give up. In fact, judging from the increased turnout from protest to protest, the grass roots movement in New Orleans to reopen public housing is growing.

Elderly residents of public housing in New Orleans have told me personally that they will continue to fight until they are on their death beds. Several have said they have nothing to lose. In this video of the April 4th protest at the St. Bernard Housing Development, in which residents clashed with police and HANO security just for the right to enter their flood-damaged apartments, wheelchair-bound Gloria Irving is heard to exclaim, “If I have to die I want to die in New Orleans.”

Cynthia Wiggins, public housing resident and organizer, said at the recent HANO Board meeting, in which 250+ residents wrested control of the meeting from the hands of the newly appointed HUD reciever, Donald Babers, “What are you going to do, start arresting women and children?”

An exasperated, frightened Babers tried in vain to remain in control of the meeting, but wound up conceding to the residents, and allowing them to speak before regular business. Then, in further defiance of business as usual, after Babers ended the comment period,
residents began to chant “No justice, no peace”, preventing any sense of normalcy for the remainder of the meeting. Babers quickly adjourned the meeting, and fled soon afterwards by police escort.

Now, residents are speaking to lawyers, and simultaneously planning a tent city to be constructed just outside of the St. Bernard Housing Development for June 3rd. This tent city will remain open as long as St. Bernard remains closed, residents have vowed.

There is much at stake. The collusion between liberals, conservatives and urban planners, to stake out and create a new New Orleans, devoid of neighborhoods of poverty, is clashing head on with the passionate desire of residents, including public housing residents, to return home to their neighborhoods and communities.

Fueling the growing desperation of residents to return is FEMA reneging on initial promises to provide vouchers for evacuees for one year to 18 months. Low income residents are beginning to pack their bags and head back to New Orleans, some to still partially-closed Iberville public housing, in a desperate attempt to find housing, after FEMA  has withdrawn the welcome mat for Texas for low-income Katrina evacuees.

Of about 55,000 families who were given long-term housing vouchers,
nearly a third are receiving notices that they no longer qualify,
FEMA officials said. For the rest, benefits are also being cut: they
will have to sign new leases, pay their own gas and electric bills
and requalify for rental assistance every three months.

The process has been marked by sharp disagreements between the agency
and local officials, and conflicting information given to evacuees
about their futures. Although agency officials say they never
promised a full year of free housing, many local officials around the
country say yearlong vouchers were exactly what FEMA agreed to
provide.

“They’re going to bum rush the city when the FEMA vouchers run out,” one public housing resident said several weeks ago, ” and while the “bum rush” has yet to occur, residents are coming back. I just spoke to a public housing resident, an elderly woman in Iberville, who is illegally occupying her apartment.

“They are putting people in jail for illegaly occupying their apartments,” she said. “I guess I’ll be an elderly person in jail.”   . Indeed, word is spreading that panic-stricken evacuees in Houston are packing, even as we speak, to return to a still devastated New Orleans, because they can’t afford the rents in Houston without assistance.

Already, in the partially reopened Iberville Housing Development in downtown New Orleans, HUD is enforcing a rule that only lease holders are allowed to live in the apartments, and HUD has begun evicting family members and friends of the lease holders.

Evictions in New Orleans’ private stock of housing is nothing new post-Katrina, with rents sky-rocketing, and landlords taking advantage of the devastated housing situation and gauging tenants.

Now evictiion notices are being used to insure that the Iberville community remains largely closed, with just 166 families back, out of the 850 that lived there pre-Katrina.

Some of the families that are back and are waiting to come back are receiving notices that they have to remove all of their belongings from their units, under the guise of a mold problem. Only problem is, HUD isn’t offering alternative housing to those who are being asked to leave.

New Orleans had the largest population of people in public housing and Section 8 housing pre-Katrina, in the United States. 49,000 people lived in HUD subsidized housing pre-katrina. Nearly half of those were in public housing. Low income housing provided shelter for those who created and fed the unique culture of the city. Now, with the city’s rent stock drastically depleted from flooding, without low-income housing, New Orleans will become what some white developers, and the Times Picayune, basically have proposed: a museum to the culture that once was.

From demolishing Iberville to build a Jazz City (I thought New Orleans was a “jazz” city), to containing the former home of Fats Domino in a “living museum”, the liberal and conservative, white elite of New Orleans want a sanitized version of the Big Easy, with a drastically reduced population of working class African Americans. And they have national help to bring this about from liberal urban planners.

Black Commentator has an article right now on its front page, by Adolph Reed and Stephen Steinberg, on the collusion between liberals and conservatives, on the continuing efforts to scatter and displace neighborhoods of poverty in New Orleans, and all over the country.

On closer examination, the campaign against “concentrated poverty” is a scheme for making poverty invisible. The policy is based on an anti-urban bias that is as frivolous as it is deep-seated, as though the romanticized small towns across the nation are not plagued with the litany of “urban” problems. Wherever there is chronic joblessness and poverty, and no matter its color, there are high rates of crime, alcoholism, drugs, school dropouts, domestic violence, and mental health issues, especially among the poor youth who pass up the option to rescue themselves by joining the army and fighting America’s imperial wars. To echo C. Wright Mills, when poverty is spread thin, then these behaviors can be dismissed as individual aberrations stemming from moral blemishes, rather than a problem of society demanding political action.

Besides, what kind of policy simply moves the poor into somebody else’s back yard, without addressing the root causes of poverty itself, and in the process disrupts the personal networks and community bonds of these indigent people? Contrary to the claim of the petition, the “careful studies” that have evaluated the “moving to opportunity” programs report very mixed results, and why should one think otherwise?  Unless the uprooted families are provided with jobs and opportunities that are the sine qua non of stable families and communities, “move to opportunity” is only a spurious theory and an empty slogan.

Residents of public housing pay rent, $350 and up. Many have strong neighborhood communities and ties, in particular, the St. Bernard Housing and the B.W. Cooper developments.

Residents of the St. Bernard development have a lengthy history of activism, and are determined, vocal and passionate in their efforts to reclaim their neighborhood. Sharon Jaspers, long-time resident there, said at the May 3rd HANO meeting,

“Do something now,” said Sharon Jasper, a former St. Bernard complex resident living in Houston. “I’m tired and sick of all this here. It’s time for you to get on your job. We want something done. We’re going to fight.”

Using cell phones and word of mouth as tools for organizing, displaced residents have come in from Texas for protests on chartered vans and buses. In their efforts to destroy public housing, HUD bureaucrats have run into a brick wall of grass roots support that’s gaining strength, and numbers.