Posted on 12/21/2007 2:07:05 PM PST by Lorianne
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.
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
ghettos, what a wonderful example of governments helping hand.
I presume they want to tear them down and build new ones so they can guzzle their gravy coming and going.
That’s what I figure. There’s lots of money to be made off of rebuilding public housing (and providing services thein). Potential welfare recepients aren’t the only snouts at the trough.
Katrina might have been the best thing that ever happened to New Orleans — because it was a city with tremendous inertia perpetuating a lifestyle and consciousness shaped hundreds of years of years ago — and only a total devastation would cause it to be rebuilt from the ground up with today’s consciousness and values.
Otherwise, that culture of poverrty and segragation would have persisted forever; they needed that kind of shock to totally destroy that community so that a better one could be reconstructed. Otherwise, things can drag on forever because of the tradition to perpetuate the old culture — with all its supporting props.
While the world has changed greatly, a lot of people haven’t changed in their attitudes, perspectives and reflexes — so that they still live in a world that time and progress forgot. That is the problem of the ghettos everywhere — that people are not living the life possible to all, mainly because of the culture of hopelessness and despair.
Razing them and starting all over so that they have the wonderful opportunities available to them is preferable to the liberal misguided intentions of preserving their (impoverished) way of life of what they think “enlightened” people need to choose for them.
As a Buckeye fan, I was truly disappointed we are going to the National Championship in NO.
Damn!
PJ’s.....projects.......PJ’s......projects.........
[and only a total devastation would cause it to be rebuilt from the ground up with today’s consciousness and values.]
The trouble is, down there in NO, the today’s consciousness is to live in slums. Their values are the bux in the next welfare check.
I wouldn’t give you a dime for NO, its music, people, heritage or future. Sorry, that is just me.
I have this idea floating around in my head.
Somewhere, there's a bunch of drug dealers talking to the Chocolate Mayor and saying,
"Tear down these ghettos and we will rebuild them again in three days."
Yep, that is what I meant to say. The meaning ought to be clear to most.
I advocate turning New Orleans into a giant garbage tip.
Because of it’s location at the mouth of the mighty Mississippi, it is ideally located to accept garbage from the entire Mississippi basin and Gulf Coast.
Fill in the entire Crescent City area with enough garbage, mine tailings, slag, and fly ash to build it up to 30 feet above sea level.
Cover it with 10 feet of dirt, incorporating underground utility grids, a few feet of topsoil, and rebuild on top of that.
Tel New Orleans would become the South’s new ‘Shining City on a Hill’.
Fund the entire project with fair market rate disposal fees.
What music?
The only place you can hear any good New Orleans style jazz is on the radio.
There's more jazz being played in Winston-Salem, NC than there is in New Orleans.
Actually, I understand that they want to build “multi-level income” housing in the area, and that is one of the reasons the previous residents are so upset—they claim it will drive out “the poor.” From all I’ve heard so far, this does seem like a good thing to do.
It would work equally well for NYC and LA. Of course, NYers and Californians would object—as I object to such suggestions for New Orleans, a city that (thanks to Katrina) now has a chance to become something more than a welfare town.
[There’s more jazz being played in Winston-Salem, NC than there is in New Orleans.]
Probably so. I was in NO about 5 years ago and decided I need never go back. If I wanted to see slums, I could go to our local Indian reservations.
this same tactic is being used in the DC area.
the price of real estate is so high the poor blacks can not afford to rent or buy and this is the way the local gov. is running the blacks out of town. They all are heading South from DC trying to find a place they can afford to live and Virginia is being flooded. Around the Hampton Roads area. I am not a racist but, how this will pan out I have NO IDEA.
A new New Orleans, with an updated name - Tel New Orleans - that pays tribute to the old city, but emphasizes that it it quite literally a city that has risen above its roots.
The 40 or 50 foot tall mound gives the city a spectacular view of the Delta and the Gulf, and elevates it above the mosquitoes and into the gulf breezes.
Rather than becoming a reborn welfare pit, it would become some of the most desirable real estate for hundreds of kilometers in any direction.
And the project would be totally self funding, not needing a single red cent from the taxpayers.
In spite of the fact that the environazis want us to believe we are going to drown in our own garbage, it would take 50 years to do accomplish what you suggest.
Interesting idea though.
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