Residents and community groups in New Orleans demand that St Bernard Parish housing project re-open.
Earlier today, at 12:30pm CST, a group of residents from New Orleans and community group leaders from New Orleans and throughout the South, stormed the Housing and Urban Development department offices in New Orleans, demanding that the St. Bernard’s Parish housing project be re-opened. Currently, US military vehicles, including armed Hummers, are surrounding the building with 25 non-violent protesters inside.
As New Orleans is rapidly becoming a developer’s playground, with corporate developers transforming the landscape into a wealthy white elite community, New Orleans’ black residents are being shut out and shut down. A community whose heritage and economy and culture relies on a diverse community, led by long-term black residents including those living at or below the poverty line, is turning its back on those who are now most in need. As the recovery from Katrina drags along, nowhere is the lack of progress more evident than in low-income Black neighborhoods, where residents were already neglected by business and government before and are now altogether discarded.
Yet residents have been fighting for their right to the city, a right as great as anyone else who has lived in New Orleans, was displaced and now longs to come back. New Orleans is everyone’s city --- and the government, including HUD, should prioritize everyone’s right to return and rebuild. Public housing residents who have tried to return home and put their homes and lives back together have been criminalized, demonized or otherwise discouraged by the very political institutions and leaders who claim to be lending a helping hand. St. Bernard’s Parish housing project has been empty since the evacuation two years ago, with the government refusing to fill vacant housing units and residents consistently blocks from rehabilitating and filling the units themselves.
In the aftermath of a hurricane that taught that, in life as in nature, everyone is in it together, HUD must prove to New Orleans and the world that “everyone” includes communities of color in public housing. New Orleans must be rebuilt for the entire community. HUD must re-open St. Bernard’s Parish housing project now.