Razing rents

While there’s a certain appeal to roughing it—sleeping in tents, heating a can of beans over an open fire, realizing you’re ineligible for the vote due to your lack of a fixed address—the novelty has certainly worn off for the thousands of New Orleans poor left homeless by the Bush administration’s pre-Katrina incompetence and post-Katrina indifference.

A scant two years later, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is ready to take care of 4,600 Gulf Coast now-vacant subsidized housing units. Their attention, however, won’t do much to help the poor. Rather than deal with public need, they’ve opted to demolish all of them, and rebuild only 744 subsidized units, with the balance of the soon-to-be-freed space going to market-rate and luxury condos.

Although the Senate had voted to replace subsidized housing on a one-for-one basis, that bill was stymied by Louisiana Republican Senator David Vitter. Bulldozers are scheduled to move in on Dec. 15.

Activists argue that the existing structures were only minimally damaged, and HUD and Vitter are manoeuvring solely in the interests of running out the poor, garnering profits for land developers and solidifying a wealthy, Republican base in a district formerly occupied by Democrat-friendly African-Americans.

by Scott Saxon