Ignoring local protests, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development last week started demolishing historically valuable public housing in New Orleans.
In a city pummeled by government incompetence, the department's intransigence has become surreal. HUD was stopped days later because it had failed to seek required approval from the City Council, and Judge Herbert Cade of Orleans Parish Civil District Court halted most of the demolition until the council agrees to let them proceed.
HUD has threatened to withdraw hundreds of millions of housing reconstruction dollars and thousands of rent vouchers if the council doesn't approve its plan in a meeting on Dec. 20.
Losing the vouchers would mean that poor people entitled to live in public housing -- and no party to the controversy -- would be thrown into the street. Does the council have a choice?
More housing is needed in a city with a serious rental- housing crunch since Hurricane Katrina. Adapting the historic structures on four huge sites -- three adjacent to historic- landmark neighborhoods -- is worth doing because of their sturdy construction, sensitivity of design and quality of materials. That's why these 4,500 units were deemed worthy of listing on the National Register of Historic Places.
The New Orleans projects suffer from a stigma which I think is well represented by these guys, yuh-hurd-me?
While the knuckleheads represent a small percentage of the given population for any of the Big Four that are being considered for demolition (CJ Peete/Magnolia, Lafitte, BW Cooper, and St. Bernard), it is not really debatable that they reign with an influence much greater than that of the majority working poor who reside in the projects, those who ideally most of us would like to see aided in a country as rich as this one.
It has been proved out this year that the projects themselves are not the cause of crime, as the murder rate of roughly 100 dead for every 100,000 residents is as high as it has ever been in New Orleans at the same time the projects citywide are mostly still shut, so the crime is happening around them and elsewhere, actually pretty much as it always has. But still there persists the idea among many that if you tear down the projects you will get rid of the thugs. This I can say for certain will continue to not be true.
But I'm not sure that 30 or 40 protesters or letters to Bush from Nancy Pelosi will be enough to stop the buildings from coming down and being replaced with newer versions.
That there will continue to be much political posturing seems certain but I think in the end the feeling of the worst Louisiana racist and the average well meaning liberal will be the same on this issue, the projects, most of them, should come down and be replaced with the mixed income version of public housing, although I suppose the racist doesn't want them replaced at all.
While I can see how wasteful it seems to keep those vast complexes boarded up in a city that has a housing shortage, I think it would be a huge mistake to fill them back up to capacity.
As for their architectural importance, I think the Iberville projects (not slated for demolition) will more than suffice as example of the style.
Anyway, another not easily solved New Orleans issue. But why should it be easy?
And why the protesters chose this woman to represent the model of a needy New Orleanian, I am not sure.
Sharon Jasper, a former St. Bernard complex resident presented by activists Tuesday as a victim of changing public housing policies, took a moment before the start of the City Hall protest to complain about her subsidized private apartment, which she called a "slum." A HANO voucher covers her rent on a unit in an old Faubourg St. John home, but she said she faced several hundred dollars in deposit charges and now faces a steep utility bill.
"I'm tired of the slum landlords, and I'm tired of the slum houses," she said.
Pointing across the street to an encampment of homeless people at Duncan Plaza, Jasper said, "I might do better out here with one of these tents."
(I don't think that TV would fit in a tent.)
Jasper, who later allowed a photographer to tour the subsidized apartment, also complained about missing window screens, a slow leak in a sink, a warped back door and a few other details of a residence that otherwise appeared to have been recently renovated.
Oh, this was driving me crazy but I am all but sure this woman Sharon is the same one from across the street, vintage Dumaine Days, as in Sharon stabbed Greg today.
Riot in the chambers
Live Feed
whoa!
Ever since it took over the public housing projects of New Orleans more than a decade ago, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has been itching to tear them down.
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Protesters at a candlelight vigil outside the Lafitte housing.
Now, after years of lawsuits and delays, it looks as if the agency will finally get its Christmas wish. The New Orleans City Council is scheduled to vote on Thursday on whether to sign off on the demolitions of three projects. HUD already has its bulldozers in place, engines warm and ready to roll the next morning.
Arguing that the housing was barely livable before the flooding unleashed by Hurricane Katrina, federal officials have cast their decision as good social policy. They have sought to lump the projects together with the much-vilified inner-city projects of the 1960s.
But such thinking reflects a ruthless indifference to local realities. The projects in New Orleans have little to do with the sterile brick towers and alienating plazas that usually come to mind when we think of inner-city housing . Some rank among the best early examples of public housing built in the United States, both in design and in quality of construction.
On the contrary, it is the government’s tabula rasa approach that evokes the most brutal postwar urban-renewal strategies. Neighborhood history is deemed irrelevant; the vague notion of a “fresh start” is invoked to justify erasing entire communities.
This mentality also threatens other public buildings in New Orleans that can be considered 20th-century landmarks. If the government gets its way, a rich architectural legacy will be supplanted by private, mixed-income developments with pitched roofs and wood-frame construction, an ersatz vision of small-town America. That this could happen in a city that still largely lies in ruins is both sad and grotesque.
Scattered across the city, the housing complexes involve more than 4,500 units. HUD plans to complete the demolitions within the next six months.
Despite the rush to raze the complexes, none of the designs for new housing are complete. And federal officials did not give developers the option of preserving part of any of the complexes in plotting the new projects.
Few would argue for preserving every one of the projects as it exists today. The facades of a 1950s section of the B. W. Cooper housing complex, for example, are monotonously repetitive. Its claustrophobic lobbies are in sharp contrast to the more private, individual entrances found in some of the older apartments, and the overall quality of construction is low.
But the best of the projects, built as part of the New Deal’s progressive social agenda, feature many elements that are prized by mainstream urban planners today.
At the Lafitte housing complex, a matrix of pedestrian roads fuses the apartment blocks into the city’s street grid and the fabric of the surrounding neighborhood. Low-rise apartments and narrow front porches, set around what were once beautfully landscaped gardens, are intended to encourage a spirit of community.
The quality of the construction materials would also be unimaginable in public housing today: Their concrete structural frames, red-brick facades and pitched terra cotta roofs would seem at home on a university campus.
The problems facing these projects have more to do with misguided policy and the city’s complex racial history than with bad design. The deterioration can be attributed to the government’s decision decades ago to gut most of the public services that supported them.
In the last few months the public has been able to judge firsthand how hollow HUD’s argument for demolition is. Just a few miles from Lafitte, the developer Pres Kabacoff is completing a renovation of the five remaining two- and three-story apartment blocks at the St. Thomas housing project, a complex that was partly demolished before the storm. The apartments, which are similar in scale to Lafitte’s, were renovated at a cost of under $200 per square foot — roughly what new construction with lesser materials would have cost.
Their handsome brick facades, decorated with wrought-iron rails and terra cotta roofs, are a stark contrast to the generic suburban tract houses that surround them on all sides. (And they are likely to be far more durable in the next storm.)
The point is that HUD’s one-size-fits-all mentality fails to take into account the specific realities of each project. The agency refuses to make distinctions between the worst of the housing projects and those, like Lafitte, that could be at least partly salvaged. Nor will it acknowledge the trauma it causes by boarding up and then eradicating entire communities in a reeling city.
In an eerie echo of the slum clearance projects of the 1960s, government officials are once again denying that these projects and communities can be salvaged through a human, incremental approach to planning. For them, only demolition will do.
The difference between then and now is what will exist once the land is cleared. If the urban renewal projects of the 1960s replaced decaying historic neighborhoods with vast warehouses for the poor, HUD’s vision would yield saccharine, suburban-style houses. And the situation is likely to get worse. The government has identified some other historically important public buildings for demolition as part of its push for privatization. Charity Hospital, an Art Deco structure built downtown in the late 1930s, was abandoned after Hurricane Katrina, and its fate is uncertain.
The Thomas Lafon Elementary School, a sleek Modernist structure from the 1950s, is destined for the wrecking ball. And there has been talk of tearing down the Andrew J. Bell Junior High School, an elegant French neo-Gothic building completed in the late 19th century.
Blow after blow, in the name of progress. Cast as the city’s saviors, architects are being used to compound one of the greatest crimes in American urban planning.
demolition approved / tasers and pepper spray Many Democrats, including presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and John Edwards, have said they would like the Bush administration to stop the demolitions. Louisiana's Democratic senator, Mary Landrieu, has also supported overhauling the redevelopment plan.
By contrast, Republicans have come out in favor of demolition. On Wednesday, Sen. David Vitter and three Republican congressman wrote a letter to a Senate committee considering the redevelopment plan, saying it needs to be left alone because overhauling it would delay and even derail redevelopment.
"Public housing in New Orleans has for many decades served almost no other purpose than to warehouse the city's poor and disenfranchised," the letter said. "That generations of our fellow citizens were allowed to live in government-operated and sanctioned slums is offensive and intolerable."
I believe this was an instance of the Democrats being totally out of touch with the majority of their (probably mostly silent) constituency and acted from that easy political standpoint of having nothing to lose and maybe a tad to gain by being anti-demolition. I will personally sort of miss the Lafitte projects, but I will get over that. There were not but a very small handful of actual project residents at the city hall protest yesterday. Not a single project resident is without a housing voucher since Katrina. People are not just being thrown out into the street. It is unfortunate for some that they can't move back into the same building they've grown up in, raised families etc., but in New Orleans the boo hoo of that is a hard sell. People from all strata of the demographic map have suffered and are suffering in the post-k. That Republicans are sometimes right might be a bitter pill for some, but hopefully that is not the only pill in your medicine cabinet. Looks like a d*m*rol over in the corner there.
In my presentation to the council, my points were:
There was a limited amount of serious consideration that was given by HUD and HANO to alternatives to demolition during the Section 106 consultation process, and
The city is going down a “planning by demolition” path in not just this but other aspects of redevelopment.
I called on the Council to demand that the City Planning Commission (as required by the City Charter) step up to the plate to prepare and recommend to the Council plans for the public housing developments. City planning has been notably absent in the whole process.
I also urged the Council to find a middle ground that incorporates retention, remediation, rehabilitation and re-use of the old, with the best of the new. Five buildings of the same vintage from the old St. Thomas developments were rehabbed in 11 months and opened last month.
Notes from the Field: New Orleans
by Walter Gallas on December 26th, 2007
I have been spending considerable time reflecting on what happened last week with that vote of the New Orleans City Council to demolish about 4,500 units of 1930s/1940s-era public housing. Any arguments I tried to make for the retention and continued long-term use of any of the buildings on the basis of historic preservation, architectural merit, structural soundness or sustainability were fruitless in a public arena filled with rhetoric about the evil nature of the buildings, their dilapidated appearance, the alleged high cost to remediate and repair, and the success of national developers at showing examples of their work in other communities.
Council members were eager to state that they had visited redeveloped communities in Atlanta and St. Louis—all based on new construction. We never succeeded in getting enough information on anyone’s radar screen about the redevelopment and continued use of buildings of the same era by the Chicago Housing Authority, and so rehabilitation was never a consideration by the Council or the local media.
The Times-Picayune discounted any claims that the loss of the buildings now would create a shortage of affordable housing, pointing to the hundreds of apartments HUD and HANO say are available but unoccupied. I had joined a number of anti-demolition advocates earlier in the week in a meeting with the Times-Picayune editorial board trying to get them to understand some of the reasons against wholesale demolition, but it was clearly impossible. Sunday’s paper carried an editorial headlined “A vote for a better life.”
It continues to intrigue me that taking a position in favor of rehabilitation and modernization of these old structures—even a position that includes calls for selective demolition to reconnect buildings with neighborhoods by restoring street grids—is automatically seen as favoring a return to the bad old days of public housing mismanagement.
There is clearly a visceral reaction to these inanimate structures, which is so strong that people want them eliminated. A leader of the local Unitarian congregation put his finger on it, when at the Council meeting he observed that the passion to destroy the buildings seemed to emerge out of bad theology and a mystical belief in atonement—that the buildings’ destruction would somehow wash away the sins of the past.
All I can say is this guy Gallas is a much better man than me to be able to live (I don't actually know where he lives), walk and drive by these structures everyday when they were occupied (in my case, the Lafitte, which in my opinion will be the greatest loss) and not have a visceral reaction to them. In this case, FEAR. Sure they are inanimate objects now that they are vacant, but I'm telling you those buildings were ALIVE when occupied. I wish I could agree with him that cutting streets through them would be an effective solution to the problems that existed in and around them for so many years, but I can't feel it. Intellectually though, I totally agree with his consideration of these buildings (although surely he isn't talking about the Magnolia/CJ Peete projects) and wish there was an easier solution than tearing them down. And, it's that word "visceral" (dealing with crude or elemental emotions; not intellectual) that seems wrong, because to me it is precisely that type of emotion that defines what it is to love New Orleans, or any place. I wish I knew how long and where in New Orleans this guy lives because it just doesn't sync with me just how intellectual his argument is.
i dont have any answers for your questions. but here is my take: with so much of NO terminally damaged by katrinas flooding why choose for additional loss. my stance on preservation is not to mandate it through legislation but build a dialog and hope for a more informed public who would resist and resent more loss through the rebuild. i would imagine that it was a bankrupt and broken welfare system would allow all these projects to become so run down. that becomes a downward spiral when no proper respectable place is there when respect of place (home) is a necessary component of keeping a place respectable. rehabbing and repopulating these empty brick building would go a long way in rebuilding a broken system. its quite possible that nicely rehabbed projects would be trashed in short order. a nice rehab however could make them very desirable to deserving families and individuals. call it a renaissance or a metamorphosis transformation program. take the necessary actions to insure it doesnt slide into the previous decline. it could be a symbolic turning of a corner for the city. offer respect and it will (should/could) be returned. i think your saying that a return to squalor is inevitable or still endemic. if it is endemic then it will happen where ever and in what ever you rebuild. i dont think the problem is the buildings them selves so why punish the buildings?
i think they could find (and should find) devastated (unsalvageable) lots to develop for low income-mixed income, welfare (section 8 ?) peoples. my point is keep and rehab what is salvageable. try to salvage and rehab as much as possible. shed a tear for that which cant be salvaged, rebuild and develop there. and thanks for the input jl.
Funny you should say endemic because I edited that out of my previous post, but yes, that is what I think, any (or most) government run operation(s) is/are doomed to failure. These are just my opinions, I don't pretend by life spent around these projects to have more insight into what is right or wrong. And I love old buildings more than I love dogs and I love dogs more than I love most people but sadly I think the buildings must be punished, and torn down, which is not an argument anymore because the vote was a skunk, 7-0. There is literally nowhere you can go in New Orleans, within 5 blocks of a project where the soil is not stained with blood. Lot's of blood. Relentless murderous behavior. Gunshot after gunshot after gunshot to the head. It is not the project's fault, clearly. But they are witness to it. And truly, if you study the murder maps, it is not just areas in proximity to the projects that suffer this stain, but unfortunately the projects are an easy symbol for it in many peoples minds. And there are certain high profile events that doom the projects. The failed carjacking of a French woman that ended with her baby being shot dead was the last straw for the St. Thomas projects, in the Lower Garden District. The Lafitte, if left, will always have the memory of a feud that ended with one man setting another man on fire, in a courtyard in front of a 150 people. The BW Cooper has the carnival-like celebration under a live oak after the assassination of one of its most violent criminals. There is, in my mind, no renovation that will erase these images. And these are only a brief sample of the day to day horror in the big four. To consider this only a matter of historical preservation without at least taking into account the day to day history of these buildings, is insane to me. The coverage of New Orleans, thanks largely to the New York Times, has been great in these months after the hurricane, but the bad shit has been going on for too many years with nobody noticing. You have to try to see the bullet and the mess it made of the back of that baby's head and multiply it by thirty years to truly appreciate what many people feel about the projects. I'm going to miss the Lafitte, like a battered wife misses her dead husband. And thank you for the forum.
i hear you. it may seem trivial to fix on bricks and mortar when its flesh and blood
(blood and guts) thats really at hand. i think we have three issues here (1) HUDs renewal policy, (2) historic preservation in general , and a factor effecting both of the first two points: (3) to use your term "stain" (ill call it "pall" which allows the possibility that it could be lifted in time - but not to minimize the factor) associated with the new orleans projects but probably applicable to any scene (locus) of a serious atrocity. in this case a stain which because of the sustained persistence of the condition is deeply set in the social fabric and physical landscape.
im going to dig a little deeper since i havent been following the new orleans public housing issue very closely and will post related links as i find them. please feel free to post links as well.
tom paine - no housing crisis 8/25/06
wa-po / no to raze public housing 12/08/06
Lafitte fights on.
This week, bulldozers are chipping away at three historic public housing projects in New Orleans, and workmen are doing preparatory demolition work at a fourth.
The B.W. Cooper, St. Bernard, and C.J. Peet housing complexes, and part of the Lafitte complex, built in 1941, all of which contain 4,500 units, will become landfill fodder.
In a Mar. 10 op-ed column in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the National Trust for Historic Preservation urged the city to suspend the demolitions.
Nagin OKs demolition of Lafitte.
This is roughly one block of the Lafitte, which continues on in this fashion for seven more blocks.
|
- bill 12-19-2007 6:20 pm
The New Orleans projects suffer from a stigma which I think is well represented by these guys, yuh-hurd-me?
While the knuckleheads represent a small percentage of the given population for any of the Big Four that are being considered for demolition (CJ Peete/Magnolia, Lafitte, BW Cooper, and St. Bernard), it is not really debatable that they reign with an influence much greater than that of the majority working poor who reside in the projects, those who ideally most of us would like to see aided in a country as rich as this one.
It has been proved out this year that the projects themselves are not the cause of crime, as the murder rate of roughly 100 dead for every 100,000 residents is as high as it has ever been in New Orleans at the same time the projects citywide are mostly still shut, so the crime is happening around them and elsewhere, actually pretty much as it always has. But still there persists the idea among many that if you tear down the projects you will get rid of the thugs. This I can say for certain will continue to not be true.
But I'm not sure that 30 or 40 protesters or letters to Bush from Nancy Pelosi will be enough to stop the buildings from coming down and being replaced with newer versions.
That there will continue to be much political posturing seems certain but I think in the end the feeling of the worst Louisiana racist and the average well meaning liberal will be the same on this issue, the projects, most of them, should come down and be replaced with the mixed income version of public housing, although I suppose the racist doesn't want them replaced at all.
While I can see how wasteful it seems to keep those vast complexes boarded up in a city that has a housing shortage, I think it would be a huge mistake to fill them back up to capacity.
As for their architectural importance, I think the Iberville projects (not slated for demolition) will more than suffice as example of the style.
Anyway, another not easily solved New Orleans issue. But why should it be easy?
- jimlouis 12-19-2007 8:46 pm [add a comment]
And why the protesters chose this woman to represent the model of a needy New Orleanian, I am not sure.
Sharon Jasper, a former St. Bernard complex resident presented by activists Tuesday as a victim of changing public housing policies, took a moment before the start of the City Hall protest to complain about her subsidized private apartment, which she called a "slum." A HANO voucher covers her rent on a unit in an old Faubourg St. John home, but she said she faced several hundred dollars in deposit charges and now faces a steep utility bill.
"I'm tired of the slum landlords, and I'm tired of the slum houses," she said.
Pointing across the street to an encampment of homeless people at Duncan Plaza, Jasper said, "I might do better out here with one of these tents."
(I don't think that TV would fit in a tent.)
Jasper, who later allowed a photographer to tour the subsidized apartment, also complained about missing window screens, a slow leak in a sink, a warped back door and a few other details of a residence that otherwise appeared to have been recently renovated.
- jimlouis 12-19-2007 8:54 pm [add a comment]
Oh, this was driving me crazy but I am all but sure this woman Sharon is the same one from across the street, vintage Dumaine Days, as in Sharon stabbed Greg today.
- jimlouis 12-19-2007 9:33 pm [add a comment]
Riot in the chambers
Live Feed
- jimlouis 12-20-2007 9:06 pm [add a comment]
whoa!
- bill 12-20-2007 9:20 pm [add a comment]
- bill 12-20-2007 10:23 pm [add a comment]
demolition approved / tasers and pepper spray
- bill 12-21-2007 3:10 am [add a comment]
I believe this was an instance of the Democrats being totally out of touch with the majority of their (probably mostly silent) constituency and acted from that easy political standpoint of having nothing to lose and maybe a tad to gain by being anti-demolition. I will personally sort of miss the Lafitte projects, but I will get over that. There were not but a very small handful of actual project residents at the city hall protest yesterday. Not a single project resident is without a housing voucher since Katrina. People are not just being thrown out into the street. It is unfortunate for some that they can't move back into the same building they've grown up in, raised families etc., but in New Orleans the boo hoo of that is a hard sell. People from all strata of the demographic map have suffered and are suffering in the post-k. That Republicans are sometimes right might be a bitter pill for some, but hopefully that is not the only pill in your medicine cabinet. Looks like a d*m*rol over in the corner there.
- jimlouis 12-21-2007 5:15 pm [add a comment]
- bill 12-21-2007 6:23 pm [add a comment]
- bill 1-03-2008 5:58 pm [add a comment]
All I can say is this guy Gallas is a much better man than me to be able to live (I don't actually know where he lives), walk and drive by these structures everyday when they were occupied (in my case, the Lafitte, which in my opinion will be the greatest loss) and not have a visceral reaction to them. In this case, FEAR. Sure they are inanimate objects now that they are vacant, but I'm telling you those buildings were ALIVE when occupied. I wish I could agree with him that cutting streets through them would be an effective solution to the problems that existed in and around them for so many years, but I can't feel it. Intellectually though, I totally agree with his consideration of these buildings (although surely he isn't talking about the Magnolia/CJ Peete projects) and wish there was an easier solution than tearing them down. And, it's that word "visceral" (dealing with crude or elemental emotions; not intellectual) that seems wrong, because to me it is precisely that type of emotion that defines what it is to love New Orleans, or any place. I wish I knew how long and where in New Orleans this guy lives because it just doesn't sync with me just how intellectual his argument is.
- jimlouis 1-03-2008 8:06 pm [add a comment]
i dont have any answers for your questions. but here is my take: with so much of NO terminally damaged by katrinas flooding why choose for additional loss. my stance on preservation is not to mandate it through legislation but build a dialog and hope for a more informed public who would resist and resent more loss through the rebuild. i would imagine that it was a bankrupt and broken welfare system would allow all these projects to become so run down. that becomes a downward spiral when no proper respectable place is there when respect of place (home) is a necessary component of keeping a place respectable. rehabbing and repopulating these empty brick building would go a long way in rebuilding a broken system. its quite possible that nicely rehabbed projects would be trashed in short order. a nice rehab however could make them very desirable to deserving families and individuals. call it a renaissance or a metamorphosis transformation program. take the necessary actions to insure it doesnt slide into the previous decline. it could be a symbolic turning of a corner for the city. offer respect and it will (should/could) be returned. i think your saying that a return to squalor is inevitable or still endemic. if it is endemic then it will happen where ever and in what ever you rebuild. i dont think the problem is the buildings them selves so why punish the buildings? i think they could find (and should find) devastated (unsalvageable) lots to develop for low income-mixed income, welfare (section 8 ?) peoples. my point is keep and rehab what is salvageable. try to salvage and rehab as much as possible. shed a tear for that which cant be salvaged, rebuild and develop there. and thanks for the input jl.
- bill 1-03-2008 10:34 pm [add a comment]
Funny you should say endemic because I edited that out of my previous post, but yes, that is what I think, any (or most) government run operation(s) is/are doomed to failure. These are just my opinions, I don't pretend by life spent around these projects to have more insight into what is right or wrong. And I love old buildings more than I love dogs and I love dogs more than I love most people but sadly I think the buildings must be punished, and torn down, which is not an argument anymore because the vote was a skunk, 7-0. There is literally nowhere you can go in New Orleans, within 5 blocks of a project where the soil is not stained with blood. Lot's of blood. Relentless murderous behavior. Gunshot after gunshot after gunshot to the head. It is not the project's fault, clearly. But they are witness to it. And truly, if you study the murder maps, it is not just areas in proximity to the projects that suffer this stain, but unfortunately the projects are an easy symbol for it in many peoples minds. And there are certain high profile events that doom the projects. The failed carjacking of a French woman that ended with her baby being shot dead was the last straw for the St. Thomas projects, in the Lower Garden District. The Lafitte, if left, will always have the memory of a feud that ended with one man setting another man on fire, in a courtyard in front of a 150 people. The BW Cooper has the carnival-like celebration under a live oak after the assassination of one of its most violent criminals. There is, in my mind, no renovation that will erase these images. And these are only a brief sample of the day to day horror in the big four. To consider this only a matter of historical preservation without at least taking into account the day to day history of these buildings, is insane to me. The coverage of New Orleans, thanks largely to the New York Times, has been great in these months after the hurricane, but the bad shit has been going on for too many years with nobody noticing. You have to try to see the bullet and the mess it made of the back of that baby's head and multiply it by thirty years to truly appreciate what many people feel about the projects. I'm going to miss the Lafitte, like a battered wife misses her dead husband. And thank you for the forum.
- jimlouis 1-04-2008 5:38 am [add a comment]
i hear you. it may seem trivial to fix on bricks and mortar when its flesh and blood (blood and guts) thats really at hand. i think we have three issues here (1) HUDs renewal policy, (2) historic preservation in general , and a factor effecting both of the first two points: (3) to use your term "stain" (ill call it "pall" which allows the possibility that it could be lifted in time - but not to minimize the factor) associated with the new orleans projects but probably applicable to any scene (locus) of a serious atrocity. in this case a stain which because of the sustained persistence of the condition is deeply set in the social fabric and physical landscape.
im going to dig a little deeper since i havent been following the new orleans public housing issue very closely and will post related links as i find them. please feel free to post links as well.
- bill 1-04-2008 4:15 pm [add a comment]
tom paine - no housing crisis 8/25/06
wa-po / no to raze public housing 12/08/06
- bill 1-04-2008 4:34 pm [add a comment]
Lafitte fights on.
- jimlouis 3-13-2008 5:33 pm [add a comment]
- bill 3-20-2008 6:10 pm [add a comment]
Nagin OKs demolition of Lafitte.
This is roughly one block of the Lafitte, which continues on in this fashion for seven more blocks.
- jimlouis 3-25-2008 10:08 pm [add a comment]