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Merry Christmas to New Orleans from HUD: ON HOLD for now!
by René | December 14, 2007 at 01:55 pm
495 views | 0 Recommendations | 1 comment
Guest Opinion: Merry Christmas from HUDThis Holiday Season, It's Bulldozers for the Poor, Huge Tax Credits for Wealthy Developers By Bill Quigley for the Gambit
On the 12th day before Christmas, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is planning to unleash teams of bulldozers to demolish thousands of low-income apartments in New Orleans. Despite Katrina causing the worst affordable housing crisis since the Civil War, HUD is spending $762 million in taxpayer funds to tear down more than 4,600 publicly subsidized apartments and replace them with 744 similarly subsidized units " an 82 percent reduction.
HUD is in charge here, and a one-person HUD team makes all the local housing authority decisions. HUD took over the local housing authority years ago " all decisions are made in Washington, D.C. The agency plans to build an additional 1,000 'market rate" and tax credit units, which will still result in a net loss of 2,700 apartments to New Orleans. The remaining new apartments will cost an average of more than $400,000 each.
Oh, I am so choked up.
What these rich developers are not considering is that without reasonable and affordable housing, the lowest-paid workforce will not comeback.
Nor is there a high demand for the $400,000 condos they are planning to build.
This is so like the elite of New Orleans who have helped destroy the very fabric of the city they are trying so hard to 'preserve'. "Preserve" is the operative word here, they want to keep it like pre-Louisiana Purchase. 200 years ago!
It ain't happening. The slaves, the wage-slaves, have fled or been forcibly removed, and now there will no longer be anywhere for them to live in New Orleans.
UPDATE: Demolitions on hold for now: news stories in Times-Picayune with readers mixed reactions.
December 14, 2007 at 01:55 pm by René, 495 views, 1 comment
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at 13:24 on December 16th, 2007
Demolitions on hold, for better or worse? Story updated.