Everything went wrong for New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, except for those private and public interests that extolled mixed income build-anew as a way of ‘de-ghettoizing’ social housing. It certainly seemed a social concern to those who didn’t live in these neighbourhoods. But those who did actually cherished the experience. There were riots against the decision to tear down existing public housing.
But money talks, and the huge amounts of emergency relief funding allowed New Orleans to quickly replace social housing with mixed income projects. As for the former public housing residents, most were forced to trade a home for a section 8 housing voucher, which required that they move away from their cherished communities.
The following article, which accepts the debatable position that ‘New Orleans can’t go back,’ questions whether the reasoning that justifies mixed development satisfied the initial hopes for improvement in the city.
As such, the lengthy article forms a kind evaluation checklist. It helps predict what others with similar ambitions for their community can expect from this kind of renewal. Some may only be getting under way with financing the destruction and replacement of public housing in their communities. New Orleans provides a useful view of initiatives, which offered hope to displaced citizens, such as the difficult-to-implement, notoriously scarce Section 8 rent top-up vouchers. New Orleans itself has not opened its waiting list for voucher support since 2009.
What kind of results can your community expect by condemning rather than maintaining public housing? Read more at Nola.com: New Orleans public housing remade after Katrina. Is it working?
