“It’s [HUD] had problems for years, and it shouldn’t have taken anything happening in NOLA for people to see that.”

Sure, HUD has had problems for years. For the past seven years in particular, the entire structure of our federal government has had more than just “problems” but has been practically dismantled and sold off to the highest bidder.

Yes, you’re right, to demand accountability is talking about public policy.

I don’t know how to explain it to you from the position of someone not from the area but who loves the City of New Orleans for many reasons (most of them very personal). Don’t know how to explain that although I lived only a mile away from Ground Zero on 9/11 I have not blogged about New York City, except in poetry.

I was educated by NOLA posters at Daily Kos about the true story of what had happened — felt personally cheated that I was not being given the truth by our traditional media, not even an approximation of the truth. I went from there to the local NOLA blogs to learn more, as well as speaking with friends I have who live there. It took more than a year of this before I even began to blog about New Orleans.

It’s not just about public housing to me. There are also the demolitions going on of middle class housing, as Karen Gadbois has detailed so thoroughly (along with Matt McBride’s recent writing about this).

It’s about city planning generally. I have no expertise in this area, nor do I claim any. As a blogger, all I wish to do is inform other folks like me, from outside the area, of the real story, to the best of my ability.

My only desire (and I will tell you that desire is shared by many folks who live out of state) is that the people of New Orleans, not federal agencies, get to make the decisions of how the city will be restored and rebuilt. It’s not a big role I play, nor do I claim it is. But spreading the word and debunking the false stories is something any blogger can do if they pay attention — and I do think it makes a difference. Every person who gets educated is one less person that can be duped by the mendacity driving the politicians and the traditional media.

Whether it is public housing, demolition of private homes, the levees, the Saints, insurance companies, the real story deserves to be heard by everyone in this country.

Alan, thank you for your response — I particularly like the “wet-dry” characterization and will no doubt steal that when I write about this subject again.

I would like to read about the Miami debacle. Can you provide some links? Also, you say, “I heard little in the way of nuance or rational discussion during this whole debacle, but instead emotional talk and assumptions about how, oh, that public housing was meant to be temporary.” I’m interested in reading about the history of the intent of public housing. I know that it has swung back and forth from temporary housing to low-income housing.

Kitty, I’m glad that it gives you a place to to take the discussion in New York. It is interesting. I often say that the politics of New Orleans are not about red and blue, or black and white, they are about wet and dry. In the realm of nonprofiteering, there is a thing called outreach. I do my outreach with a simple question, “You on the Road Home?” or “Where you with Allstate?” or simply, “How much water did you get?” There is a common experience that binds us.

(Of course, I need to be careful here because I didn’t loose anything to the storm. My possessions where safely stored on in a second floor storage locker when I spent the summer in Ann Arbor, but the point is that…)

This is common experience. Everyone has a story of this experience. The common experience extends to the trauma and stress not only of the flood, but of the recovery. Road Home, Imminent Health Threat, the murder rate and home invasions, FEMA trailers, broken pumps, and broken schools.

So, Kitty, I’m amazed at how many people have soured on the current administration. Bhutto’s assassination had people talking and people are beginning to see how overextended we are.

There is a common thread, which is the failure of the federal government, the cronyism, the loyalty to the administration and the politicization of the federal bureaucracy, and the contracts. Oh, the contracts.

Ray, we should take it from here. If we don’t like Jay Arena tactics we should form our own think tanks. This is why I’m developing the unconference series, so we have a place to meet and set a neighborhood driven agenda for the redevelopment of the city.

Tom, I’m reading through the UNOP documents. I’m going to post on each of the public housing developments and the UNOP redevelopment plans for each. For all the effort that we poured into the UNOP, I see no indication that we are following it.

I am not trying to change public policy about public housing.

Both of us can only show anecdotal evidence as to what folks from out of state are thinking. I am saying as an individual who has tried to follow what is going on in New Orleans that I used the story as an opportunity alert folks in NYC about what the federal government is doing. And it was effective.

I’m certainly not saying someone in New York is going to help solve the problems of how to provide public housing or assistance to folks with housing in New Orleans. I have never made that claim.

What I AM saying is that folks not only from NY but from all over the country have an opportunity to speak out about what our federal government is doing with federal tax dollars. What is happening now in New Orleans is happening all over the country.

I hope I have made it more clear what I’m speaking of here. This is a national issue and we all are affected by what the feds are doing to our country. If we can bring national attention to what HUD is doing it won’t be so easy for them to get away with bilking the taxpayer by giving out crony contracts and doing shady deals.

Sunlight can be a powerful disinfectant that way. So I still maintain the protesters did bring national attention to this issue and there is an opportunity because of that to keep the story going.

The importance of this story getting national coverage – even under circumstances that New Orleanians would find egregious, is all about accountability.

You say many folks you speak with from out of state have no idea of what is going on in New Orleans. You’re right about that. Our traditional media has done a horrible job in covering this story and often has simply made matters worse with their lack of understanding. So not only do many folks out of state not understand the situation, they have a distorted view of it as well.

This story allowed me, in New York City, to begin dialogue with folks I know. If I had just started talking about NOLA they’d say the same old phrases, “Oh it’s so awful what happened to those poor folks,” all that kind of generalized sympathy.

But this time they had read the story about the protesters, it was the top story in the media — and that gave me an opening to talk about HUD and the federal government, that without real citizen oversight, there will be even more corruption on the order of what happened after the federal flood with Halliburton, etc. That’s something they could understand very well, and I got universal agreement about the bad job our federal government is doing in this area.

The only thing I am saying here is that folks need to watch what happens, where the money goes, on this project. I’m not speaking of the intricacies of public housing. I’m speaking only of where the money is going, who gets the contracts for demolition, consulting, building, all that.

And yes, national attention can make it more difficult for those who operate most effectively in the shadows to rip off yet again the citizens of New Orleans.

The protesters got the attention — it’s up to the rest of us to continue to beat the drum. As a blogger, I am committed to doing that. So yes, I think it was a good thing that the protests got national attention. I also think that no matter what had happened or not happened, the vote would have been the same – HUD leaned hard on the City Council, letting them know they would not get federal money unless they voted for demolition.

It really is up to us. If we don’t get the word out, no one will. Yes, many folks from out of state don’t know what’s going on. But many folks do, they go everywhere they can to get real information, and they want to help.

There are a lot of similarities between how the public perceives the Iraq war and how New Orleanians perceive rebuilding. Most opponents of the war are marking time until January of 2009. I think more and more New Orleanians realize that it’s the same with SeeRay. Nothing substantial is going to get done under this mayor.

Why is getting national attention deemed so important here? What happened? Everyone on the New Orleans City Council, black and white (of course, none of them poor, but rare is the city were you’ll find public housing residents or homeless people, much less poor people, in elected positions, if you can find any at all), voted against the wishes of the protesters. Their actions were not efficacious. Are you saying it’s like Iraq War protesters having an eventual effect? Are you sure it’s just not the fact that things haven’t gone so well in Iraq since that has led to public disillusion (or the “Nobody Loves You When You’re Down and Out” effect)? All the same, the US is still over there, because most people are apathetic or only know in broad outlines that things have gone badly, our system is one in which White House-driven foreign policy is incredibly hard to change, few public figures are calling for anything so dramatic as pulling out of Iraq, etc.

Similarly, most people I talked to from out of state hadn’t a clue as to what all this in NOLA was about. Part of the reason why has to be this: The federal public housing policy of the past 20 years has involved mixed-use housing, attempts to get residents to own their own housing, etc. (It’s the whole Jack Kemp thing. And yes, I know his years at HUD were marked by outrageous scandal. You’re still left with this legacy, regardless, as well as things like tax-free enterprise zones a la the post-K Go Zone, which hasn’t worked well for NOLA much, if at all.) This has occurred in cities large and small, to decent effect in Chicago to disastrous scandal in Miami. As usual, despite apparent support for reform from the American public, very few people concern themselves with the details, the media pays little attention, and the like.

What made the NOLA case more unique was the post-K skyrocketing rents and smaller housing stock angle. And it’s what few people from outside the city that I talked to seemed to understand. Still, serious public housing reform here and elsewhere will continue to be of little concern to most Americans unless, perhaps, a dramatic shift in national housing policy occurs. And as noted, the NOLA case does not represent any such dramatic policy shift, even with large-scale demolitions.

In addition the scattered site concept which was attempted in the late 60s has left us with 100s of empty ugly buildings smack dab in the middle of struggling Neighborhoods, no plan has been announced for these properties.

You say:

“For the rest of the nation, the City of New Orleans has become a truly tasteless racist joke, where the wind up is school buses full of the impoverished rolling across the border into Texas and the razing of 4,500 public housing units is the punch line.”

I think you underestimate “the rest of the nation” a bit. I think there is great sympathy and compassion towards all New Orleanians from citizens across the country. As far as racism, there is no town in America that can hurl that accusation without having the finger pointed back at them.

I also think there’s a great difference between “being there” and “watching it on the tee-vee.” Regardless of your views against the “interlopers,” this story would not have gotten national coverage were it not for their “theatre” tactics. And of course, not all of these folks were outsiders – there were local folks there as well.

The story in New Orleans, as in every city in America, is, in my opinion, the same — our out of control federal government rewards their cronies and greedy businesses are taking their cue from that, knowing it’s a field day now for them to take advantage of people of good will and rob them blind.

If they can turn the middle class and the poor against each other, it will be that much easier to pick all of our pockets clean.

I love the city of New Orleans. And the citizens of New Orleans deserve to know where this federal money is going and how they will be affected by the plans of HUD and FEMA. The citizens of New Orleans deserve to have world class solutions to the problems they face.

And I think a lot of folks around the country, and certainly from my home in New York City, feel the same way as I do about this.

According to that well-thought-out plan, which included local citizen input as well as the expertise of volunteer architects and planners from around the country, the older and sturdier original buildings would be preserved and renovated, while the structurally inferior post-war section would be demolished and replaced by mixed-income housing. MOst significantly, the street grid would have been restored throughout the area, eliminating the common-area “courtyards” of the current layout and providing individual yards around each entryway (i.e., one yard for each set of upstairs/downstairs neighbors) as well as much more direct access to the partments from the curb.

With the restored street grid, every household would have a parking place out front, just like other renters throughout the city have. (Back when the projects were built, poor people didn’t have cars; these days, anyone who has a job, or wants to apply, pretty much needs wheels ~ poor families generally have one older car as opposed to the two or three cars that more affluent households take for granted.)

The “communal” setup of the projects as originally built, while entirely appropriate for an idyllic college quadrangle, has become a breeding place for crime and disfunction. Because the common outdoor area “belongs” to no one in particular, it easily becomes the de-facto property of the gangsters. Dividing the area up into individual yards fronting upon public steets would make it much easier for law-abiding residents to maintain control over their little pieces of land, just like renters of “regular” single and double houses.

The St. Bernard Project proposal was, of course, only part of a much larger plan for an entire district. But it was hardly a secret, was part of the published papers available to anyone interested in the recovery, and was explicitly endorsed by Councilwoman Hedge-Morrell, along with most if not all of the other politicians representing the area.

Of course, all that excellent free advice was ignored and discarded once HUD, Nagin, Blakeley, et. al., got their hands on it. I suppose that wholesale demolition and building anew from scratch provides much better opportunities for profiteering and graft.