City leaders hailed the post-Hurricane Katrina decision to demolish and redevelop New Orleans’ largest public housing developments
City leaders hailed the post-Hurricane Katrina decision to demolish and redevelop New Orleans’ largest public housing developments as the opportunity to fix the wrongs of the past and provide a better life for the residents who once called B.W. Cooper, St. Bernard, Lafitte and C.J. Peete home.
Former Mayor Ray Nagin said the 2007 decision by the City Council was one of “compassion, courage and commitment to this city,” calling it an “incredible day.”
Arnie Fielkow, who was council president at the time, said it was an “opportunity to make our home a place that all New Orleanians can point to with pride. Every citizen deserves a safe and affordable place to raise a family,” he said.
While some public housing residents backed the plan, others railed against it, calling it a land grab designed to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.
That December 2007 meeting in which the council voted 7-0 to demolish the so-called “big four” housing complexes erupted into chaos as police officers used pepper spray and Tasers to push back a crowd of protesters who tried to force their way into the packed council chambers.
Eight years later, as the city approaches the 10th anniversary of the storm, the massive brick buildings that made up the old housing developments are all but gone, replaced with the multicolored pastel houses and fourplexes of Marrero Commons, Columbia Parc, Faubourg Lafitte and Harmony Oaks, among others.
These new mixed-income communities sitting on the footprints of the old complexes have come to symbolize the sweeping changes that took place in New Orleans after the storm.
But that’s only a fraction of the story.
To determine whether the city’s new housing strategy is working, the best place to look is the Section 8 program that has all but taken the place of public housing, said Stacy Seicshnaydre, a fair housing expert with Tulane Law School.
The move away from the old model of concentrated housing projects and toward a heavier reliance on housing vouchers is not necessarily a bad thing, Seichsnaydre said. The housing developments — while beloved by many residents who called them home for generations — were racially segregated public health hazards, often riddled with lead and asbestos, infested with rats and pockmarked with hundreds of vacant units creating dangerous environments for children, she said.
The move to tear them down and replace them with mixed-income communities was part a national trend and not unique to New Orleans, though the storm accelerated the process as it brought in millions of dollars in federal assistance and forced the evacuation of the residents, creating the opportunity to bulldoze and rebuild.
The question now is not whether it should have been done, because it’s too late to go back to the way things were pre-Katrina, Seichsnaydre said. The real question is, did the city achieve what it set out to accomplish?
“My problem with this is the justification for the demolitions was always resident centered, but the implementation is rarely resident centered,” she said. “The reason you’re going to tear (the housing developments) down is theoretically because concentrated poverty is a bad thing for the residents. It supposedly breeds crime. It breeds intergenerational poverty. It breeds a lack of opportunity and many people are just not able to break out.
“OK. So when we demolish it, what are we going to do to make sure that doesn’t replicate itself in the next phase?”
The replacements
At the time of the storm, the Housing Authority of New Orleans was serving 14,129 families. Out of those, 64 percent, or 8,981, received vouchers, while 36 percent, or 5,148, were in public housing.
The gap between those percentages grew into a chasm after Katrina when the city closed down and fenced off many of the public housing developments. The displaced residents were given vouchers while their old homes were demolished, clearing the way for the construction of new mixed income communities.
By 2014, the number of households HANO assisted ballooned to 19,175 with 91 percent in the voucher program and just 9 percent, or 1,820, in public housing.
A closer look at the old developments compared with their replacements show where the losses were felt the most.
St. Thomas, where redevelopment began well before the storm, had 1,510 public housing units. Its replacement, River Garden, has 182.
St. Bernard had 1,464. Columbia Parc has 221.
C.J. Peete, also known as the Magnolia, had 1,403. Harmony Oaks has 193.
Desire had 1,860. The Estates has 283.
Not every development experienced such drastic losses.
Guste originally had 993 public housing units when it was often referred to as the Melpomene. Today it has 577 in addition to 61 housing voucher units.
And Iberville, which is under construction, is required to replace all 821 of its public housing units that were present at the time of demolition as part of its Choice Neighborhood Initiative federal grant. Gregg Fortner, executive director of the Housing Authority of New Orleans, said they hope to have all of the public housing units built, both onsite and in the surrounding community, by 2017.
Many of these new communities also include dozens of affordable housing units, which are defined as non-subsidized housing for families making 80 percent or less than the area median income — or $44,000 in New Orleans.
Despite the loss of thousands of public housing units, the new mixed-income communities appear to have accomplished the goals of decentralizing poverty, at least on the footprints of the old developments.
However, they serve just 9 percent of HANO households. What about the remaining 91 percent who are using Section 8 vouchers, including thousands of former public housing residents?
Recent studies indicate the voucher program — which is supposed to give people greater choice where they live, allowing them to choose better neighborhoods and ideally provide safer environments for their children – has fallen short.
A large percentage of Section 8 families are clustered in low-income, largely black neighborhoods, many in eastern New Orleans, according to a Data Center report. This creates a particular problem for people who depend on public transportation and work in the service industry in the French Quarter. A report by Ride New Orleans found that only 35 percent of the city’s bus service has returned in the past decade.
“We know they are being pushed out into the suburban areas, far away from the places they called home for generations, the neighborhoods that in some cases they helped build,” said Cashauna Hill, executive director of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center. “They’re commuting for well over an hour every day to get to work. Is that the life we want for the people that support and sustain our service-based economy and the people that contribute to our reputation as a cultural mecca?”
There are a number of reasons why former public housing residents find themselves grouped in poor communities miles from downtown, according to the studies by the fair housing center.
They include racial discrimination and prejudices against people in the Section 8 program in so-called high opportunity communities with better schools, jobs and less crime. One report found that 82 percent of landlords in New Orleans refused to accept vouchers or placed unreasonable requirements on the tenants.
Councilwoman LaToya Cantrell, who has made housing one of her signature issues, said that the increased use of Section 8 vouchers has been a “mixed bag” mostly because of the “fear and stigma” attached to the people in the program.
“That makes it harder for those vouchers to be accepted in high markets. And New Orleans East, they don’t want them. They’ll say it. Seriously, they don’t want them,” Cantrell said. “Where there’s a concentration of them, there’s a level of unrest among the residents who have been living in those communities for a long time who are not Section 8.”
Further exacerbating the problem, people were thrown into the voucher program at a time when nearly 50 percent of the New Orleans rental housing stock had been destroyed. At the same time rents were increasing throughout the city, making it more difficult to find homes that were affordable through the Section 8 program.
The rent for a two-bedroom apartment in New Orleans has climbed from an average of $676 in 2005 to $950 in 2015, a 40 percent increase — and notably higher than the 22 percent average in comparable southern states, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The Section 8 program can be a useful tool in helping people leave deeply subsidized public housing, but it hasn’t been effectively administered at the local or federal levels, Seicshnaydre said. Instead of creating opportunity, the increased use of vouchers after the storm seems to have perpetuated poverty and segregation.
Bill Quigley, director of the Loyola Law Clinic and the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center, said this doesn’t come as a surprise because the city and HANO never had a comprehensive plan to fulfill the promise of improving the lives of the public housing residents. Their plan, he said, amounted to handing out vouchers to the displaced public housing residents and sending them on their way.
“They don’t care where people went,” Quigley said. “They had a vision from the top down saying the (housing developments) will be demolished, land will be given to private developers.
“And from the beginning, everyone was clear: It would be 10 percent of the public housing residents who could get back in. That’s it. They were the least powerful, most vulnerable people. They were the easiest pieces to move on the checkerboard.”
“For those families in Section 8, what I’ve heard, people appreciate that they’re not homeless,” he added. “But I don’t think they think it’s been a successful transformation.”
Supply far short of demand
This is why people resisted the demolition of the public housing complexes, said Constance Haynes, president of the resident council at the Fischer Housing Development. They didn’t believe what city officials were telling them, that they were committed to making their lives better.
“When we were fighting after Katrina, we know what we was fighting for,” Haynes said. “To make sure our people would be able to come back, our families that were living there before Katrina. We knew that the mayor and the city, they had their own agenda. They were looking at all these market rate rents. What about the public housing? What about affordable housing? It’s a fight. We always have to fight. We knew what their agenda was.”
The majority of the new housing developments are mixed-income communities with a third of the units reserved for public housing residents, a third for affordable housing and a third for tenants who pay whatever rents the market dictates. The goal was to improve the lives of public housing residents by surrounding them with services and placing them in small neighborhoods populated by teachers, police officers, attorneys and other professionals.
The same principle largely drives the Section 8 program, giving people more freedom of choice and flexibility, allowing them to move as opposed to being tied down to a particular development.
But it comes with downsides that prove especially difficult for people who make $20,000 a year at minimum wage jobs and are trying to raise families, said Cynthia Wiggins, president of the Guste Homes Resident Management Corp., a resident operated organization that manages the Guste and Fischer housing developments.
Unlike in public housing, Section 8 residents have to pay deposits and utility bills, making it more expensive. And there tends to be more security in public housing for people with jobs in the tourism industry where the hours fluctuate according to the season, she said.
Public housing residents are required to pay 30 percent of their income in rent. If they lose their jobs, they won’t be forced out of their apartments. But if the same happens to Section 8 tenants and they can’t pay their portion of the rent, they can get evicted, lose their voucher and get kicked out of the system, Wiggins said.
People come into her office every day, Wiggins said, many of them single mothers and former public housing residents, begging for help to find a permanent home.
“Some people are staying in houses with families and friends. But after a period of time, people want you to leave,” Wiggins said. “They’re almost trapped. Where am I going to go if I leave here? There’s nowhere for them to go, except under the expressway.”
HANO’s Fortner acknowledges there is a desperate need for more affordable and subsidized housing, and that Section 8 is not enough to absorb the incredible demand. There are more than 13,000 people on the wait list to receive a housing voucher — with less than 1,000 made available through turnover each year — and another 5,000 waiting to be placed in public housing.
The Section 8 wait list hasn’t accepted new people since 2009. If it were opened up today, Fortner said he would expect an additional 50,000 people to sign up.
But he rejects the premise that Section 8 hasn’t bettered the lives of the residents or that it has simply moved pockets of poverty around the map. There is a significant difference between 1,000 people living in a housing complex on a few acres of land and 1,000 people using housing vouchers in eastern New Orleans, he said.
“People have a choice of where they want to move. We can’t steer them in any given direction,” Fortner said. “I’m not sure why there’s this notion now that the Section 8 program has failed because people are living in the same zip codes. It’s no different than people who wanted to come back to that public housing development. People are concentrated in neighborhoods they’re familiar with.”
If voucher holders are being prevented from moving into certain neighborhoods because of discrimination, then those landlords need to be punished according to the law, Fortner said. But there’s not much HANO can do about giving residents access to the more expensive neighborhoods unless it receives more money from the federal government.
“I don’t know how that’s any different than you or me,” he said. “There are certain neighborhoods we can’t afford to live in. That’s just the way it is in certain neighborhoods.”
In an attempt to address that problem and open up better neighborhoods to voucher holders, HUD created a pilot program that is being tested in six cities, including Dallas.
Currently, HUD determines how much its vouchers are worth based on a regional rental average. This often results in vouchers that can pay for apartments in eastern New Orleans but not in Uptown. The pilot program changes the dynamic, determining rents based on the averages in zip codes, making the vouchers more targeted to certain neighborhoods.
“This should allow tenants to have more choices in where they locate in a metropolitan area,” said Peter Kahn, director of the Economic and Market Analysis Division at HUD. “In Dallas we’re seeing tenants generally moving to areas of better schools, lower crime rates. We want to make sure that the voucher is providing a true choice in terms of where voucher holders can choose to live and one impediment to that choice is the amount of subsidy the voucher will provide.”
HUD is seeking public comment on the pilot program after which it might be expanded into cities where Section 8 participants are concentrated in high poverty areas, such as New Orleans.
Seeking guidance
One of the biggest issues facing former public housing residents transitioning to the Section 8 program is that the majority have never rented a home outside of the HANO system. They don’t know what to look for in an apartment or how to deal with landlords, said Kim Piper, who lived in Iberville for 32 years but is now in a Section 8 home in the Lower 9th Ward.
HUD requires housing authorities to provide some form of counseling to prepare residents, but it doesn’t dictate the intensity of the counseling, which can range from brochures to in-person classes or caseworkers.
In the wake of Katrina, when vouchers were being handed out en masse, there was little to no counseling. But with the most recent developments such as Iberville and Harmony Oaks, HANO hired St. Louis-based Urban Strategies to assist displaced residents transitioning to Section 8 housing.
Piper, who acts as an advocate for public housing residents, said despite the presence of Urban Strategies, some residents feel as if they have been left on their own with little help. Not knowing how to navigate the process of searching for an apartment, many settled for the first house they came across, regardless of its condition, she said.
“I came from public housing and nobody filled me in about paying for lights or water. They just gave me a voucher and told me to go find a place,” Piper said. “They didn’t educate us. So I’ve been helping a lot of residents, doing assistance for their light bills, calling different agencies, Catholic churches, trying to help people, seniors, pay their utilities.”
Fortner defended the efforts of HANO and Urban Strategies
“There were extensive meetings with people who were displaced. So I’m not quite sure how someone who was displaced from (Iberville), I can’t see how they did not know about these services,” he said. “They all got Section 8 vouchers. There was extensive outreach.”
This seems to be the disconnect between city officials and some public housing residents, stretching back nearly a decade — intentions versus experience, Quigley said.
The intention might have been to improve lives, to decentralize poverty and integrate the public housing residents into better neighborhoods. And it might have been accomplished for those in the new mixed-income developments.
But for many of the people placed into the Section 8 program, without a comprehensive plan on the city’s part on how to best assist them during a period when much of the housing stock was destroyed and rents were increasing, their outcomes didn’t match the intentions.
“Those 5,000 families in public housing are the only families who were told we do not want you to come back to your neighborhood,” Quigley said. “Every other neighborhood was encouraged to come back. But as a group of people, those 5,000 families, mostly working poor and disabled, they were told, ‘We don’t want you back. We don’t think it’s good for you to come back …’ and that continues to hurt to this day, when neighborhood after neighborhood keeps saying, ‘We’re back and better than ever.'”