New Orleans tussles over public housing

To some, the four sprawling three-story brick complexes may not look like real estate worth fighting over.

But with inhabitable housing of any kind at a premium here, the fate of New Orleans’ four largest public housing complexes -- St. Bernard, C.J. Peete, B.W. Cooper and Lafitte -- is at the center of another battle in the city’s turbulent efforts to reshape its future.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Housing Authority of New Orleans have approved plans to demolish these complexes, landmarks in their neighborhoods, and replace them with lower-density apartment clusters for mixed-income residents.

Their decision has brought relentless opposition from former tenants who insist they want to restore their lives in their old homes.

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Residents storm gates

Last week, residents ignored “No Trespassing” signs and stormed through unlocked gates and torn barbed-wire fences into the St. Bernard complex to clean their units.

But Monday, lawyers for the city’s public housing agency filed illegal-entry and property-damage claims against those trying to halt the public housing demolition. They are seeking a court order to bar entry into any of the projects without the agency’s approval.

Housing officials argue that the apartments are too badly damaged to repair. They insist that redevelopment would improve tenants’ lives by eliminating crime-infested dens of concentrated poverty.

“People deserve better than this,” said Jereon “Jerry” Brown, a Washington-based spokesman for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, as he showed reporters flood-damaged and ransacked units at Lafitte last month. “If they could just be patient. A mixed-income neighborhood can better attract businesses and better schools. It’s all tied together.”

“It’s not just about bricks and mortar,” said C. Donald Babers, the New Orleans housing authority’s federally appointed administrator, who accompanied Brown. “We’re looking at quality of life for our families.”

Dressed in a tailored suit and a hat, and wearing a diamond-studded gold ring on each hand, Babers did not enter the mold-crusted apartments, citing respiratory concerns.

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‘It’s definitely about race’

But advocates for public housing -- where about 5,100 people lived before Katrina, and where some 1,200 have since returned -- insist that the complexes were safe during past hurricanes because they were solidly built of steel, concrete and brick. Many apartments escaped flooding from Hurricane Katrina.

The advocates also argue that tearing them down prevents a key segment of the city’s workforce from returning, and excludes thousands from the city’s rebuilding process.

Nearly all the families who lived in New Orleans public housing were African Americans on low incomes.

“It’s definitely about race and class,” said Judith Browne-Dianis, co-director of Advancement Project, a Washington-based civil rights and racial justice group that is also representing tenants in a class-action lawsuit seeking to restore them to their apartments. “If you look at what happened after Hurricane Katrina, the people who were residents of public housing were the people who were left behind at the Superdome and Convention Center, and now they are the same people who are being locked out.”

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‘It’s affordable housing’

For former Lafitte tenant Jeffrey Hills, 31, a tuba and sousaphone player, the desire to return to the projects is simple.

“It’s affordable housing,” said Hills, who used to pay $400 a month rent, which included utilities, for a two-bedroom apartment with a balcony and parquet floors. “I’m a young man with three kids. I can’t afford to pay $1,500 in rent.”

The sense of place, community ties and social networks are also what former tenants say they miss most.

“Every single person still displaced is constantly reevaluating wishes to come home with the unfolding reality they are not welcome at this point,” said William P. Quigley, another attorney for the plaintiffs.

But Babers said tenants were swayed by nostalgia and had been isolated in such communities for so long that they were unable to consider alternative, viable living arrangements.

“It’s a 1940s mind-set,” said Babers, a reference to when many of the projects were built. “Change is difficult for people. They’re afraid of the unknown.”

Brown, his colleague, recalled how plans for demolishing and rebuilding public housing in other cities, such as Chicago and Atlanta, had met similar resistance.

But once tenants moved into new, modern units in mixed-income neighborhoods with easy access to shops and schools, the opposition quickly waned, Brown said.

Jacquelyn Marshall, 36, a former resident of C.J. Peete, said tenants’ reluctance to forsake their old units stemmed from distrust that the authorities would do right by them.

The experience of residents of the city’s former St. Thomas housing project has bred further skepticism, advocates say. The complex, originally designed to house around 1,500 families, was demolished in 2002. So far, 296 units have been constructed, 122 of them as low-income housing.

“We are not against the redevelopment of public housing,” Marshall said. “We are against the process. I’m not for tearing down something that’s livable when it will result in thousands of families being homeless. They need to start renovating before they demolish.”

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$140,000 loss cited

Linda Lockhart, one of the few dozen residents who have been allowed to move back to the B.W. Cooper complex, wept as she spoke of losing an estimated $140,000 worth of household goods and personal belongings, acquired through decades of scrimping and saving.

“If we had been allowed to return home sooner, I could have saved some things,” said Lockhart, 51. Tenants were shut out for several months after Katrina, allowing vandals to ransack and steal possessions not destroyed by the storm.

Lockhart, a security company worker who raised two college-educated children at Cooper, shares a cramped one-bedroom unit with her daughter. Both sleep on the floor. They have one bamboo chair and no dining-room set. The view from the back porch is rows of dark and deserted flats, some with missing doors and shattered windows.

“If somebody had given me a house, I wouldn’t be back,” Lockhart said. “But I can’t make it out there. When I lived [at Cooper] before, I was able to save money because the rent was reasonable, and I had a steady paying job.”

Few public housing residents deny that crime was sometimes a problem, but they say troublemakers were typically outsiders. And Quigley, the lawyer, said that given the recent surge of murders in the city -- 15 killed since Jan. 1 -- it’s clear that criminality is not confined to public housing, since most of the complexes are closed.

Babers, however, pointed to the Iberville complex, near the city’s French Quarter: Over seven months through December, the complex was the site of 12 murders, he said.

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A reoccupation

Iberville residents forcibly reoccupied their complex after Katrina. Former St. Bernard residents are following that example.

Relatives helped Stephanie Mingo, a mother of four, pry off a steel cover sealing her front door so she could start washing and disinfecting the apartment.

Power and water have been shut off at St. Bernard, and rodents inhabit the filth. But diehard residents said they would continue to clean the complex until authorities allowed them to return.

“Soon you’re gonna be sittin’ on my porch while I braid your hair,” Mingo shouted to a neighbor as she raced across the compound to reclaim her unit.

“Girl, just like the ol’ days,” the woman shouted back.