Given Times Picayune Reporter Katy Reckdahl's propensity to usually fair and balanced writing, something sorely lacking in post-Katrina Times Picayune, I was suprised at the slightly disingenuous tone of her recent article on the closure of the homeless encampment at the intersection of Canal St. and Claiborne. Perhaps though, Katy didn't see the recent City Business article that documented how the NOPD is staging entrapments of homeless folks in the downtown area. This was obviously used as a tactic to intimidate and frighten the homeless from the area.
So you see, it wasn't only the comforting "social workers from Unity of Greater New Orleans" clearing the area. It was also extreme tactics by the NOPD, that resulted in felony charges for some homeless folk for stealing candy and beer from cars with the windows purposefully rolled down. Does this sound familiar? The use of bogus felony charges to discourage folks from gathering and protesting? Two women continue to face felony charges for protesting the demolition of the B.W. Cooper Housing Development, back in December, 2007.
Make no mistake about it. This homeless encampment was a form of protest, yes, replete with problems associated with homeless folk, but nevertheless, staged in defiance of the wishes of elected city "leaders", and the NOPD. With the support, at times, of members of the activist community here in New Orleans, and the community at large with important donations of food and clothing, the homeless folk, most from New Orleans (something we've been saying all along), were able to maintain a very visible community protest encampment, first at City Hall, then Canal and Claiborne.
Bogus reasons were used to clear the encampment at City Hall. Demolition still has not begun of the state office building there. Clearly, it was time, simply, to repress the exploding homeless movement that had taken over the entire grassy area of Duncan Plaza, a movement that resulted in international attention to the exploding homeless population here and embarrassed our elected "leaders".
But the homeless folk, taking their newly earned lessons from the City Hall encampment, stuck together and simply moved to Canal and Claiborne. There is power in numbers, and nowhere more evident than this encampment, as many in the community responded with food, clothing, some shelter, and Unity at least had to scramble to explain why they couldn't do their jobs and place these folks in adequate shelter.
This encampment was destined however, to be cleared as well, using repressive measure, because this encampment was an indictment of the entire, failed recovery program, both local, state and federal, that refused, with its massive resources, to respond to the needs of ordinary, working class folks.
There stood the encampment, in the shadow of demolition at the Lafitte Housing Development, just blocks away, a development that could have easily been reopened and used as housing for the homeless for those units that residents didn't return to. Reopening Lafitte and all of the other public housing developments, over 4500 units, would have taken the pressure off of the scarce supply of affordable rentals in the city right now. Even Katy Reckdahl, to my knowledge, has never acknowledged this inconvenient fact in her articles. The Times Picayune refuses to connect the dots between the demolition of public housing and the exploding homeless population in the city. The Road Home's failure to address the needs of renters, in a city whose majority inhabitants depended on rentals prior to Katrina, throwing crumbs to a few landlords instead, was also part of the problem.
Now we learn by word of mouth that homeless folk are being harassed out of Jackson Square in the French Quarter. This smacks of Jackie Clarkson's style of justice, and isn't suprising given that she is back in office on the City Council. Simply harass the problem out of your neighborhood and hope it will simply disappear and go away. But it isn't going away, not now, and not in the near future.
There are too many homeless folk in our city now for this issue to remain invisible for long. Conservative estimates of the homeless in New Orleans post-Katrina put numbers at 12,000+. When there are this many folks in the same boat, they tend to gather for the sheer issue of survival. Invisibility of the issue is what city, state and federal leaders are counting on though. Much like the collapse of the mortgage industry in this country and its effects on Americans, it is not going away any time soon.
We all know that what is needed is a massive, public works program, not only to rebuild our city and the Gulf Coast, but to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure in our nation. We need to put the wealthy, greedy CEOs, whose salaries and bonuses continue to escalate in the face of another Great Depression, out of work, and redirect those resources towards paying Americans to rebuild our country. And there is the task of ending both American wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, and redirecting war resources to rebuilding those countries, and our's.
Perhaps the truest note struck in Katy Reckdahl's article was this quote by Mike Miller, outreach worker for Unity, when he said, "We play cleanup for the whole, broken system".
Perhaps as illustration of this "broken system", is the young, native New Orleanian I spoke to, at the encampment at Canal Claiborne, on the uptown side, before it was cleared. I spoke to him during the Essence Festival. He was working the festival clean-up duty at night. He proudly told me he was placed in charge of his crew, and resisted efforts by supervisors to do more than their share, and clean-up after crews that didn't do an adequate job.
This young man also reported to me evidence of the collusion between Unity for the Homeless and the agenda of the city to use repressive tactics to clear the area. He said his own Unity case worker was harassing him for several weeks now by going into his tent, uninvited, and telling him he couldn't have certain types of furnishings. He witnessed folks' belongings being thrown out by Unity workers while the folks were away or working.
This young man, an African American native New Orleanian, didn't attend any of the self-improvement seminars or concerts at the Essence Festival, but he cleaned up at night so that the show could go on. Then he returned to his tent at Canal and Claiborne, to his community and new-found friends.
There in a nutshell is the "broken system" Miller hinted at. An economic structure the exploits the working poor, so that the show can go on for the middle and upper classes. Only now in the atmosphere of a mortgage and housing crisis in our nation that is threatening the status of the middle income folks, more and more folks are joining the ranks of the working poor.
Rogue bank and mortgage companies are taking Americans for everything they own, and the state is set to "rescue" these rogue companies, while Americans struggle to keep afloat. In the end, it will take many more repressive measures by the state to keep a lid on the types of protest that will develop to address economic injustice.
Obama was no dummy when he supported the so-called FISA compromise, which makes legal, warrantless wiretapping of Americans. The state is preparing for the massive unrest that accompanies national depression economic conditions.
In the spirit of the Homeless Encampments, for the working class, it will always be, that there is safety in numbers in solutions and protest. It is now, more than ever, important to stick together.