Bishop Jenkins On Public Housing In NOLA

Thanks to Ormonde at Through The Dust for the tip on the statement by Bishop Charles Jenkins on the plan to tear down public housing in New Orleans. Ormonde says:

My bishop, Charles Jenkins, has issued a statement opposing FEMA's decision to evict refugees from trailers and HUD's decision to bulldoze federal housing in New Orleans (already a city with many homeless).

This is, as Bishop Jenkins says, very much a moral issue. Bishop Jenkins' statement is here.

In this holy season, the decision has been made by FEMA that tens of thousands of families or individuals must leave their trailer homes by the spring of next year. Eviction notices are being posted even now. At the very same time, it has been decided by the Housing Authority of New Orleans and HUD that the bulk of the Federal Housing Projects in New Orleans are to be bulldozed to the ground this month. Many of those living in FEMA trailers do not have the resources to find other housing in the notoriously expensive New Orleans housing market. The Case Management system, which is designed to help citizens of the diaspora and those returned home deal with such challenges, is scheduled to end in March of 2008.

As a Christian, I am compelled to speak of the morality of these decisions. The issue is not simply one of housing or even subsidized housing. Rather, the issue before us is primarily a moral issue. The issue before us is not buildings, but people. As the Christ Child had no place but a manger to lay his head, so it is that many children in New Orleans and of the New Orleans diaspora have no place to call home. Shall America by policy treat our citizens as mere statistics or shall we respect the dignity of each person as a child of God? The numbers are huge, but as we were reminded by a thoughtful rabbi in the immediate aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center, each number represents a human being. It is not that tens of thousands shall be further displaced but that multitudes of human beings shall again be put out - one human being at a time.

The buildings are in disrepair, but they are well-built. They have good bones and could be repaired for much less money than rebuilding from scratch. The New Orleans Housing Authority was corrupt, and they mismanaged public housing in New Orleans for a good number of years. The feds, through HUD, took over management of the housing and didn't do much better in maintaining the buildings and keeping them safe for the residents who lived there. HANO is now back in charge.

Yesterday the bulldozing of the B. W. Cooper project was to begin, but protesters got in the way, and the operations were suspended. The New Orleans Times-Picayune has the story.

Dozens of protesters stalled plans by the Housing Authority of New Orleans to begin demolition of vacant buildings at the B.W. Cooper public housing development Wednesday, signaling the start of a contentious battle between what the government calls progress and dissenters view as an attack on the poor in post-Katrina New Orleans.
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That fact meant nothing to the protesters, who managed to claim a victory, if only for one evening, as HANO and the city attorney's office agreed to halt demolition late Wednesday and possibly start fresh today.
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Many residents of public housing reacted to the sight of the excavators with expressions of sadness and voiced distrust of the government's plans for "revitalization" of HANO's properties.

'It's home'

"It's not the lakefront, but it's home," said Ralph Lewis, 51, who was born and lived at Cooper until he evacuated before Katrina struck.
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Tanya Davis, 44, said many of her missing neighbors are stuck in Texas or Georgia or Arkansas, waiting to come home.
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Davis applied for her first "project," a one-bedroom apartment, more than a quarter-century ago, when she was a young mother. She got it.

"I started from there," she said. She's been working steadily ever since like most of her neighbors, she said. The ones who didn't work were disabled or senior citizens on a fixed income, people whom she and others helped by paying cab fare or fixing meals. "It was a tight-knit community. Everybody was close," she said.

The majority of the residents were working people, or they were elderly or disabled. The were not the deadbeats that we hear so much about. The powers have said that there is public housing that is now sitting vacant, but Bishop Jenkins addresses that point too.

Beware the claim that low cost housing is available and going unclaimed in New Orleans. There is more to this than empty apartments. The capacity of the growing homeless population in New Orleans and those of the Diaspora to qualify for these apartments, should they exist, is compromised. Without assistance, without case management, many do not have the ability to qualify for these apartments. So, if FEMA is putting people on the streets, many will decide that if they are going to be homeless, they would rather be homeless in New Orleans than in Houston or Atlanta. We face the potential of an extended situation not unlike that we saw in the Superdome immediately after Katrina.

Altogether, this statement from Bishop Jenkins is excellent. I admire greatly his advocacy on this issue. We need to hear from the leadership in the churches on matters of justice such as this. Thank you, Bishop Jenkins. Thank you, Ormonde, for calling attention to the bishop's statement.