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The problem, asserts Marchand, is that the city is not using consistent methods to assess home damage, and that some of the homes they’ve tagged for removal may, in fact, be salvageable. “I live in the heaviest hit area,” she says, adding that, while she currently sleeps at a temporary residence in Baton Rouge, she has already gutted her Ninth Ward home after she and her neighbors were allowed back in on December 1. When inspectors arrived to assess her neighborhood and place red stickers on houses deemed irreparable, she says, “They didn’t even enter the homes. We have incorrect assessments being done. We can’t arbitrarily assume that a house should be demolished.” Certainly there are homes in the Ninth Ward that are safety risks, she conceded. But even in cases where homes have drifted off their foundations, “we need to give people a chance to see if they can be lifted and put back on their pilings-I have seen this happen.”lots of interesting pictures here also
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“I don’t think that it’s one of the neighborhoods most at risk. Seven or eight flood wall and levee breaks caused the problem there.” He notes that, if executed, the levee bill President Bush signed in late December would mitigate the environmental problems in the Ninth Ward.
In the meantime, with no cohesive redevelopment strategy yet in practice, various groups on the ground are acting on their own. Grassroots housing advocacy organization ACORN, for example, is running a program to gut homes in low-income neighborhoods, including the Ninth Ward. ACORN’s New Orleans head organizer Steve Bradbury says that they hope to have gutted 1,000 to 2,000 homes by the end of March.
But the biggest problem in New Orleans right now, Bradbury told The Slatin Report, is that “the local and federal government should be taking greater responsibility for people receiving the clearest and most factual information possible-and they’re not.”
Marchand agrees: “The city needs to first find out who’s coming back before tearing anything down.”