The Redstar Perspective

While my mind churns from the events of the week, and I pace around my house and neighborhood making sense of it all, an uneventful hurricane season slips quietly out the back door.   The city’s collective shoulders drop imperceptibly, but its voluminous sigh of relief is as quiet as a hurricane’s winds. 

Is the title of my latest post on poverty and population shifts at TPM Cafe, and reflective of the Housing Authority of New Orleans’s (HANO) public meeting that I witnessed tonight.  By now, all Redstar Perspective readers are familiar with the struggle over public housing in this city, and obvious champions of redevelopment alternatives to the outright, rapid demolition of 5,000+ proposed by HUD.  Former public housing residents and their advocates are with you. 

Picture a mainly black crowd with a smattering of white faces, journalists crawling everywhere, and two police forces filling an old school high school auditorium.  A screen opened over the wooden stage to capture a power point presentation, with the heavy green drapes pushed to the sides and displaying “JMcD” in gold letters overhead (for John McDonogh High School). 

Essentially, the meeting was a farce - for a public agency to proceed with such a demolition project requires public input, and HANO accordingly explained their presence there tonight as mandatory. (This process “requires residential consultation which is tonight’s meeting.” Please sum up your life’s experience with public housing, poverty, Katrina, displacement and economic and social insecurity in the three minute comment period provided to you, given you signed up to comment when you arrived.  No response will be provided tonight, but your comments will be “duly noted.”  Thank you, and God bless.) 

While activists and residents crowded the central aisle of the high school auditorium where the meeting took place, relentlessly chanting and acting generally obstructionist, HANO employees pleaded with them to sit down so the meeting could begin. The young black woman beside me in a back row decided all the meeting handouts/redevelopment propaganda she was leafing through were lies, and she got up and slid past me to “go with the people.”  (By now marching around the auditorium to accompany the chanting - “No Demolition!” and “Bring People Home!” / “Now!”  This last one had a cool call and response rhythm.) 

HANO eventually gave up and started the meeting anyway, about 15 minutes late, and one small woman gave a rather meek and quick powerpoint presentation of converting 5,000+ units into ~1,600 while the noise and civil disobedience continued.  Another employee spoke after her, again barely audible over the din, and these two portions of the meeting were concluded in about 20 minutes.  At 6:35pm, the agenda turned to the resident comment period.  The second to last and most important agenda item, with still 2 hours and 25 minutes to go. 

There’s a reason I was overwhelmed with despair when I touched down on Monday afternoon.  Tonight was a free for all of desolation, confusion, outrage, righteous indignation, and role play.  An entourage of black women, young and old, one after another - the mostly single mothers who have raised their families in these developments over generations - came up to the microphone to comment on HUD’s plans.  The occasional male resident, politician and activist joined them.  Here’s a highlight of the comments through 7:30, by which point the lack of constructive action and general helplessness of both residents and HANO - despite the former’s energy and passion - became too much for me.

“Where [are] people going to stay if you [are] tearing down everything?”

“The development I lived in is better than the house I rent.”  (HANO has increased the value of their vouchers 120% due to the increased rents for housing in the city.)

“Why can’t you do [development] in phases…to get the people home?”

“….all the units of Lafitte are livable…why can’t y’all open Lafitte and let those people come home?”  (Parts of Lafitte flooded but the water did not reach the first floor units.)

“…the housing developments are the strongest ones in the city…you in power are not being told [what’s really going on]….you are being used…who’s getting the money for the iron and steel coming out of those buildings…”

“why would [you] take those projects and not allow [residents] to come back?  They did not leave of their own volition…they have a right to return…”

From a contractor raised in public housing who was offered a piece of the pie: “why should I tear down what raised me?”

From a housing activist and former resident (I believe): “HUD is in violation of resident participation…[we are] not opposed to redevelopment, we are opposed to this process…we have a right to be involved…our residents are being abused in Dallas, TX, in Houston, TX…crime is a social issue in this city, it is not about those buildings…women live in the buildings…men are on the streets killing each other…”

It was brutal, and completely juxtaposed by the 2 year old toddling around beside me in the aisle, trying to take my notebook and occasionally suggestively laying her hand on my arm while she smiled up at me.  Even though some activists spoke about residents rising up and taking back the housing (leading residents in “I Shall Not be Moved” or telling them not to “wait for permission to return…”  I.e., the lone Iberville project is open because residents “didn’t allow their G-d-given right of having a home be taken away from them.”), generally the sentiment in the room was one of disbelief, bewilderment, and total victimization.  How can HUD/HANO/the government/politicians/people in power do this to us?  How can we not be allowed to come home?  How can they take my home?  We deserve to come home.  Bring us home!  The buildings HUD plans to tear down are merely symbolic of a struggle much much deeper than the publicized rhetoric of de-concentrating poverty. 

The comments indicate residents are not opposed to redevelopment, if it is in phases, reflects their and their families’ needs, and thus offers an affordable place to live in the city now and in the future.  From 5,200 to 1,600 with zero guarantee of one-to-one replacement, there’s nothing in this plan that promises residents any reasonable public assistance in the future.  Using Katrina as the opportunity to terminate without warning the public benefit of affordable housing that over 5,000 households relied on and need particularly during a post-hurricane period of hardship is a fundamental crime here.  (Qualifying for and covering fair market rents with post-Katrina Section 8 vouchers has been notoriously difficult.)  Approximately 5% of the units under question were marked for demolition and renovation before the storm; HUD has used Katrina to take another 4,500 to the chopping block.  In FY2006 alone, HUD will eliminate 50% of the public housing in New Orleans.

Debating the merits of public housing is not the core issue in this fight.  It is about an assault on the poor, what one researcher calls our country’s “politics of disposability.”  It is about who has a reasonable expectation of and right to basic economic security and freedom in this country, including an expectation of government assistance to facilitate economic mobility (such as for the middle class in the tax breaks for homeownership we receive).  It is about who deserves this assistance and opportunity, and who does not.  None of us are immune to casting judgment in this sense, and looking to our own accumulated assets as demonstrative of our success and self-worth.  We are not a country of zen Buddhists by any means.

Nonetheless, this calculated move by HUD to topple the housing-of-last-resort in one of our country’s poorest cities, one now with a demonstrative housing crisis (universally felt by all New Orleanians, as the city and reconstruction industry are both abysmally short on workers), is not only mean-spirited but a complete abdication of government responsibility.  I challenge even those who believe in smaller government and self-reliance to sanction this as a sensible response to the storm.  The city needs temporary housing, host communities don’t want to permanently inherit another’s urban poor, people want to be reunited with their homes and neighbors, and the FEMA trailer solution is costing us $70k - $140k a pop (with 99,000 families currently calling these places home).  Surely this is not the leaner, meaner government we’re looking for?

We don’t have poor people’s movements in this country anymore, and nothing short of such an occurrence is going to reclaim these housing units.  Such energy is found in immigrants’ rights and labor movements these days, and as I’ve written elsewhere, there is a sharp disconnect between the predominantly Latino make-up of this activism and the disenfranchisement of New Orleans and the rest of America’s black, urban poor. 

I know that most of my readers are not leaping from their chairs inspired by these posts to run out and unite with the workers of the world.  But if notions of equity and government responsibility run through your head just often enough for you to wonder for one moment longer about the lives of your grocery deliverymen or hotel cleaning women, and connect those fleeting thoughts to the policies and politicians you support, then I’ve done my job here tonight. 

“They call me bad.  They call you bad.  We’re not.  Keep [your] values…and the love…and spread it…”
-         public housing resident, New Orleans, November 29, 2006
 

I can live without this pic ever showing up on my hotmail home page again:

(meet the new face of celebrity divorce!)

And apparently the rest of America can live without this guy.

Just a few hours ago I wrote about my ambivalence about being back in New Orleans, though I left out the important subtext of having to deal with developer personalities all day that fueled a lot of my alienation.

But now I’m home on Willow St, after some great tapas (including fabulous little whisk brooms of grilled artichokes!), wine and music at Mimi’s in the Marigny.  This place is one of my favorite bars ever.  It’s so chill - cheap, tasty food; a lofty if run-down loungey upstairs decorated with a few old collegy couches and small tables, and balconies that open on to the street below; live music every night; and a tattooed, laidback female staff just make this place one of my all-time favorite spots.  I cruised slowly through the city on my way home, checking out the scenery and the radio dial - it’s amazing how much of the housing is still shuttered and dark (it’s noticeably block-by-block or house-by-house now), but all the abandoned cars underneath the highway are gone.  I couldn’t help but feel a warm and fuzzy Rioja-fueled sensation overcome me as some R&B singer crooned that “tonight was the night you make me a woman.”  True dat.  And now an email that another post-Katrina colleague is relocating here.  The NOLA seduction is immensely difficult to resist.

A long walk around Audobon Park on the phone with the M.A.S. helped.  I don’t want to be here without him - this is more his city to claim between the two of us.  But I’m not immune to the culture, the music and the endlessly fascinating world of how this city and its residents can and will recover.  It’s amazing to ride around still after all this time and pass in and out of dark patches, only to then drive past bustling, brightly lit corners and storefronts and thoroughfares.  It’s totally, still jarring.  I’m looking forward to an unstructured tomorrow, with only an evening public housing meeting on the schedule.  Rancor should ensue.  As my roommate pointed out today, public housing is the dividing line - or one of the brightest lines - in development debates about this city.   Do you keep it up or tear it down?  Oh, so you hate/love poor people.  You are a bigot/capitalist/communist/hippie.  And so on. 

I reclaimed some of my familiarity and knowledge tonight, and I fear by Friday I will once again feel the pull to stay behind as my plane takes off.  It has been such a welcome reprieve being so “rational” about NOLA re-development and politics in the last 3 months!*

*At the end of the 2 modules I co-taught on Katrina to the Masters students this fall, my professor said to me, “You make [rebuilding] sound so rational. I enjoyed that!”  Me too, teach, me too.

Just flicked on the overhead light above my old spot at the dining room table on Willow Street.  Long morning with colleagues and now full and sleepy and trying to decide how to get some exercise - biking around Audobon Park is probably the likely winner.  I always feel compelled in winter months to be outside as much as possible, never knowing when I’ll wake up and it will be 5 deg, or, in the Gulf’s equivalent, a torrential hurricane.

Feeling like I’m sort of checked out on being here.  I had a sense of this already, that to be engaged down here is a full-time commitment.  It’s not merely for my own emotional sanity; the politics are such that one should be present to follow up, follow through, and stand down the conversations and perceptions that follow them around this place.  I’m not fully present here, physically or emotionally, and my professional work suffers for it.  Sure, it’s cool to be singled out by activists, but I haven’t been back since all that went down, and who knows through what my name has been dragged this fall.  (Everybody’s name, no matter how big or small they maybe, is in play at one point or another in all this rebuilding activity.  The larger-than-life “MIT” moniker also trails after me.)  I feel like I need to make a commitment to this place, or not.  For the moment, it looks like not. 

Emotionally, I’m not sure I want to take on post-Katrina New Orleans.  It’s incredibly draining, this post-disaster work, it infuses your everyday.  Any role that I take on would not be one that ended at 5 or 6 or 9pm each day.  In this sense, there’s something to be said for hiding out in cerebral isolation in the academy.   (Though as you can tell, I’m energetically trying to bust out of that shell with my posting all over the blogosphere!) 

Ultimately, I feel like I’m trying to throw my hat in the ring of another city’s private pain and struggle.  They’re not dismissing individuals or groups who wish to take up the fight to rebuild, but they’re rightly demanding a certain level of commitment, and I’m not in a position to donate or give up that kind of time yet.  I like my life in Boston, it’s vibrant and overdue and going somewhere.  I’m happy there.  If I move here in the coming year, it will be because I want to take on a role that I am comfortable in (research and analysis, most likely), one that the city and I accept on mutual terms, and one that includes an agreed-upon place for the M.A.S. (we are jointly figuring out not only our own futures, but New Orleans’s role in both). 

So we’ll see where 2007 takes us all.  I’ll keep you posted on the adventures of the rest of the week.  My father will be pleased to know I’m not moving out of Boston in a month.  Perhaps I should let him know this rather than him having to find out via MIT’s Press office, which is how he learned of my original intentions to relocate here. 

In related news, I got a call today from ABC about one of my TPM Cafe posts.  I passed them on to others, but it’s official, I’m pulling down all the romance and cocktails stuff from this site and will be posting it elsewhere.  I’ll keep you posted, pun intended.

I like this place, and I like to start here when I come back to New Orleans. Tonight was no different, and I’m one blog post from falling asleep on my Willow St bed after 2 glasses of wine and a great meal at the bar. Olive-oil seared gnocci, braised short ribs, some green beans, and an impromptu chat with the Exec Chef Donald Link and his wife. I first met Donald when the M.A.S. was here in July at Cochon, which can only be described as upscale Cajun (and as a result has alienated my more downhome NOLA roommate but brings me back again and again. I’m nothin’ if not upscale local. Eek - I sound like one of those upscale New Urbanist suburban malls that make people think they’re downtown, if amidst a sea of parking.).

I’ve been all over the emotional map in the 6 hours since I landed at Louis Armstrong International Airport (first: despair, second: hopelessness, third: familiarity, fourth: warmth, fifth: pleasure, six: ambivalence, current: curiosity) but tonight’s chat at least reminded me of one of my favorite bits about New Orleans - that everyone knows everyone, me included. Talking at the bar to the woman on my right, turns out she was the chef’s wife - whom I already mentioned I’ve met previously - and that she was a former consultant to one of my non-profit clients/colleagues here. These are the personal-professional circles that engulf you down here, I type as I lounge in an appropriated Saints sweatshirt from a Mardi Gras bbq of another former non-profit client.

Tomorrow and Thursday are my busy days, with Wed and Fri given over to exploring, catching up, and ruminating (and blogging). Army men and women in fatigues joined me on the shuttle bus from the airport to the rental car place. Smoking is banned in restaurants, effective 1/1/07. My roommate has 3 bumper stickers celebrating beer and shrimp on his car, and a bid in on a house in Bayou St. John. Life goes on, for better or worse. Coming into my room this afternoon was like entering the Gulf Coast wing of the Museum of Redstar. I clearly thought I’d be back before this - a half drunk bottle of water stood watch over the room from my nightstand, and discarded bottles of liquids exhumed from my carry-on were littered across my bureau. The water pressure in my bathroom is still abysmal, and my roommate’s still a slob. I’m hoping the M.A.S. and I can take a road trip in late January to clean out this room before this lease ends.

So until tomorrow, to see the changes.

While Wesley owns the film review portion of my little slice ‘o blogosphere, I must carve out my own post to recommend Akeelah and the Bee.  This is the cutest, most uplifting little film I’ve seen in awhile. It’s overt - a heartwarming, family-oriented film about an eleven-year old smarty pants from South Los Angeles who competes to get to the National Spelling Bee and in the process, emancipates a father from the pain of losing his child and his wife, resurrects her mother’s love and unites a community in pride.  A heavy lift for a little girl and a film, but it’s totally worthwhile, especially for those of you who love crescending musical medleys to accompany the hopeful, inspiring moments in your movies, and fear that W.E.B. DuBois and Frederick Douglass are not invoked nearly enough in popular culture.  This film is rad, and especially entertaining if you were ever heckled on the playground for being a “bomar,” geek or nerd.  Spelling is cool.

I’m also amused by the fact that this movie is a production of Starbucks Entertainment, as it brings up an on-going thread of M.A.S. conversation as we engage in our own not-quite-war, but culture-skirmish.  I’m re-introducing my man into mainstream, celluloid society from some sort of murky hippie wilderness, while he teaches me how to eat with utensils and actually pause in my inhalations long enough to taste my food.  We’re classy, and fascinated by the notion of the lifestyle brand, that convinces us it makes sense to package coffee and movies or pop music and perfume.  (Look for the release of Redstar in better department stores near you this holiday season.)

Not to get too Gail Sheehy on you…

I need to be packing (and have laid clothes out all over my bed so I can’t go to sleep until I do so. Unnatural for me, I’m a pack-in-the-morning-when-I-have-to-be-focused-on-getting-out-the-door type.  One time in 8th grade before a ski trip with my mom, I spent the night before on the phone with boys when I should have been packing.  We were in New Hampshire before we realized that my bag had little more than socks in it.)

It’s finally happening - the first trip back to New Orleans since August.  It’s officially been 3 months - practically an entire season has passed since I was last there.  I can’t remember what’s in my closet on Willow Street; it’s also about 25 degrees cooler there at this point (although still a balmy 75 deg during the day).  I have all week to catch up - some meetings, and a lot of wandering around taking stock of the city and my future.  Wish me luck.  I’m nervous and worried about what to expect. 

Expectations - trying to manage them these days as the M.A.S. and I cruise along nicely.  Had a great Thanksgiving with friends and family and have spent today budgeting and planning for some needed kitchen renovations and painting for the apartment.  Came to terms recently with the notion that I’ll be a poor grad student for awhile longer, and with this condo my only material asset and it being a soft real estate market, I’m probably not trading up on this cute little place anytime soon.  Might as well hunker down and stop living with a half packed bag as has been my tradition.  Funny how in order to keep up with life, we do our best to slow it down.  Especially now that we’re going to live to be a 110, we might as well take our time. 

So I’m down with the whole “40 is the new 30” notion these days (glad for it, really, since it’s one comforting trope in the arsenal against people like my mother who like to point out how old I am with little to show for it…on my 28th birthday she remarked, “when I was your age I owned 2 houses!”  That’s nice.  At the time, I was a renter happily living in NYC, but she helped squelch that feeling that afternoon outside Gray’s Papaya on the UWS).  But it seems this slow-maturation process comes only after a plateau somewhere in our mid-twenties (as anyone who’s ever wandered the desert of the 25-27 years knows), prior to which we have anxiously been trying to grow up as fast as we can.  Of course, the media’s right there with us: today they tell us 10 is now the new 15.  Shudder.  I was WAY better lookin’ at 15 than 10, and the boys knew it too.  (Going from glasses to contacts at the end of 7th grade opened those flood gates right up!)  At 10 I was still kicking them in the shins on the playground.

So when do we shift from precocious to immature?  Maybe it’s when you’re sleeping wrapped up in your comforter like a burrito because all week you’ve been too lazy to make the bed in your studio apartment in NYC.  You feel better at a Deis happy hour when another one of your 20-something friends tells you that he was sniffing dirty socks in his laundry basket that same morning because he has no clean clothes left.  Or maybe it’s when you can no longer qualify for student discounts (the cut-off often being 25 or 26) but you’re 5 years past that expiration date still with a student i.d. that’s good until 2009.  Or maybe it’s when you move back in with your dad at 29, commuting to grad school everyday in your mom’s car and storing your Paper jeans in your old pink and white bureau.

This semester wraps in a few weeks and then it’s a new year, with some important hurdles: general exams, a potential one-year anniversary, and writing a dissertation proposal.  Fundraising and planning underpin the day-to-day lately.  It’s difficult to convince the world that you’re maturing and might even qualify as an adult when your professional life values you at ~$20k per year and doesn’t require a daily shower.  But I’m keepin’ at it.  One day, you’ll see, you’ll say you knew me when.

My cousin used to refer to my inter-racial/ethnic/faith dating as my “UN” or “United Colors of Benetton” love life.

Recognizing their high rate of cooperation and contribution to the UN, I have appointed a Swede to serve as Chair of my UN Dating Council.  The open-ended appointment is effective May 2006 until further notice.  As Chair, the M.A.S. must work with the following foreign and U.S. representatives to ensure equitable, cross-cultural dating for all. 

Country Representatives

Must be first or second generation for appointment; We are actively seeking candidates from Canada, Africa and Australia, though we realize that the latter are extremely difficult to pin down for routine meetings, and are best at negotiating treaties in the field, especially in bars, after rugby matches or while on extended globe-trekking holidays

Asia & the Middle East

• Pakistan
• Israel
• Iran
• India
• Korea

Europe

• Ireland
• Czechoslovakia

Latin America

• Ecuador
   

United States

• The Mayflower descendant: Final negotiations with this representative requires disclosure of his famous relative in the Dating Council’s weekly newsletter, The New York Times wedding announcements

• Two Massholes and a New Yorker: Similar to the US Supreme Court, these parties negotiate all their resolutions at one point each year, usually October

• The Texan: This representative is most effective permanently stationed in the Gulf Coast and brought up to Boston HQ for periodic reports.  Areas of expertise include energy, oil, real estate development and negotiating treaties while riding the original mechanical bull in Ft. Worth, TX

• The Midwesterner: Appointment to this seat requires drinking beer out of a glass boot and dancing at a polka hall in Minneapolis

• The Conservative Jew: This representative can negotiate short-term treaties, but is best at communicating Council principles for internal application within his own community

• The Rural Four: These seats tend to be dominated by representatives from Upstate NY and Maine; Other qualified candidates for future appointments are encouraged to apply

• Three White-Ethnics: These are At-Large seats, currently held by a Portugese-American, Irish-American, and an Italian-American

Last night as I was doing my usual evening surfing around the blogosphere, I got very nonplussed by how few comments I get on this site compared to others.  Mainly, it seems as if Wesley is surfing around blogs that link to mine, chitchatting with the other authors.  I’m feeling left out! And whiny! 

Also, my post on TPM Cafe about organizing and the unions in New Orleans has failed to stimulate conversation like my last one of electoral demographics.  Seems both Redstar and TPM readers aren’t too jazzed about conversations on organizing, public housing, and stickin’ it to the ‘man.  Of course, since audiences who care about these topics think I am the man, I’m not really sure where I belong.  I’m an armchair activist without a living room!

So, I’m taking a hard look at my usage stats, trying to understand my readership.  Seems beyond my core fans (i.e., my friends), I appeal to a pretty disparate range of people all over the globe.  Less than 5% of my readership comes from the following places:

Canada, Mexico, Slovak Republic, UK, Argentina, Seychelles, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, South Korea, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Dominican Republic, Norway, Colombia, Brazil, Switzerland, France, Ireland, Japan, and Thailand.

More entertaining is the search strings that lead people here.  Beyond direct requests, the bulk of folks find me via google.  Here are a few of my favorite searches that end at the Redstar Perspective:

• where can you drink from a boot in minneapolis
• which grey’s anatomy character would you sleep with
• wing’s express nutritional information
• how does gender roles in grey’s anatomy relate to sociology
• haitian roots of deval patrick
• drink panty pissa

I had hoped that this blog would be less the annual Christmas letter update and more an interactive blog that stimulates people’s thoughts on topics as diverse as politics, urbanism, relationships, etc.  But apparently this is not how the extremely fragmented blogosphere works.  This is another reason why I’m thinking of breaking this site up into two, so that those of you who’d like to hear more about romance and hangovers don’t have to by-pass the growing emphasis on topics like equity, class and feminism.  And vice versa. 

This bums me out.  Like many, for me the personal is political, and it’s tiresome and passe to keep such conversations separate.  It’s a man’s world, or an ADHD world, or a celebutainment world, I suppose.  Surfing around, there’s too few blogs that mix the personal and the political.  Especially for women - seems we’re either supposed to talk about our loved ones or radical gender politics.  Why shouldn’t the two meet?

Or maybe I’m just not marketing this puppy effectively enough.

Thoughts?

I know, you have none.

(Anyone know comparative hit rates for bloggers who heckle their readership?)

The M.A.S. spent a lovely time in Ogunquit, ME this weekend, celebrating our 6 month anniversary.  Turns out Ogunquit has a hoppin’ gay scene, as we learned Sat night at The Front Porch.  As the middle-aged woman proprietor of the Old Salt in Kennebunkport told me the next day, Ogunquit was started after World War II as an artist colony, and so many “creative” types are of the “homosexual persuasion.”  (Do you also find it odd that people who seem troubled by gays and lesbians like to use the long, formal language of “homosexual,” as if in some perverse pleasure of letting the concept linger in their mind and roll around on their tongue?)  No worries; everyone lives “side-by-side” “in harmony,” she assured me.  Papa Bush and Baby Bush and all the little Goldilocks parading around the streets next door.   I’m sure. 

The M.A.S. indulged in one of its favorite tourist activities, roaming around abandoned institutional structures in decaying towns (the former St. Thomas public housing project in New Orleans, the run-down milltown of Biddeford, ME).  I wondered if the M.A.S. ever produced the super-human race of urban planners as it sometimes imagines, would they love these tourist jaunts as much as I loved the trips to an upstate NY dude ranch and Southern MA houseboat with my rather creative leisure-seeking mother?  I fear so.

 It’s been awhile since I exulted about the M.A.S. on-line, and it may be one of the last.  I’m venturing out into the world of funding and Fellowships to try to get through this PhD program, and I may pull quite a bit of content from this website in our new Googling world.  I hope to create another site for these more personal posts, and if so, I will certainly let you, the Redstar “early adopters,” know.  Keep an eye out for any changes and updates.

New York Times, November 19, 2006 

Architecture 

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF  

NEW ORLEANS 

The ravaged neighborhoods of New Orleans make a grim backdrop for imagining the future of American cities. But despite its criminally slow pace, the rebuilding of this city is emerging as one of the most aggressive works of social engineering in America since the postwar boom of the 1950s. And architecture and urban planning have become critical tools in shaping that new order. 

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s plan to demolish four of the city’s biggest low-income housing developments at a time when the city still cannot shelter the majority of its residents. The plan, which is being challenged in federal court by local housing advocates, would replace more than 5,000 units of public housing with a range of privately owned mixed-income developments.

Billed as a strategy for relieving the entrenched poverty of the city’s urban slums, it is based on familiar arguments about the alienating effects of large-scale postwar inner-city housing.

But this argument seems strangely disingenuous in New Orleans. Built at the height of the New Deal, the city’s public housing projects have little in common with the dehumanizing superblocks and grim plazas that have long been an emblem of urban poverty. Modestly scaled, they include some of the best public housing built in the United States.

So it’s not surprising that many of its residents suspect a sinister agenda is at work here. Locked out of the planning process, they fear the planned demolitions are part of a broad effort to prevent displaced poor people from returning to New Orleans.

This demolition strategy is not new. It is part of a long-standing campaign to dismantle the nation’s public housing system that began in the 1970s.  That campaign was based on the valid belief that the concentration of the poor into segregated ghettos condemned them to a permanent cycle of poverty, crime and drugs. Specifically, it was directed at the large-scale postwar housing developments that became a fixture of American cities in the 1960s - anonymous blocks of concrete housing, like Chicago’s recently partially demolished Cabrini-Green, whose deadening uniformity seemed to strip the poor of their identity, reducing them to repetitive numbers in a vast bureaucratic machine.

The last few decades have witnessed the emergence of a new model for public housing: mixed-income developments whose designs are largely based on New Urbanist town-planning principles. Nostalgic visions of Middle America,they are marked by narrow pedestrian streets and quaint two-story houses with pitched roofs and covered porches. For HUD, they have become the default mode for rebuilding in New Orleans.

But if the sight of workers dynamiting an abandoned housing complex was a cause for celebration in Chicago’s North Side, the notion is stupefying in New Orleans, whose public housing embodies many of those same New Urbanist ideals: pedestrian friendly environments whose pitched roofs, shallow porches and wrought iron rails have as much to do with 19th-century historical precedents as with late Modernism.

More specifically, they were inspired by local developments such as the 1850s Pontalba Apartments and late-19th “Garden City” proposals, whose winding tree-lined streets and open green spaces were seen as an antidote to the filth and congestion of the industrial city.

The low red-brick housing blocks of the Lafitte Avenue project, in the historically black neighborhood of Treme, for example, are scaled to fit within the surrounding neighborhood of Creole cottages and shotgun houses.

To lessen the sense of isolation, the architects extended the surrounding street grid through the site with a mix of roadways and pedestrian paths. As you move deeper into the complex, the buildings frame a series of communal courtyards sheltered by the canopies of enormous oak trees. Nature, here, was intended to foster spiritual as well as physical well being.

That care was reflected in the quality of construction as well. Solidly built, the buildings’ detailed brickwork, tile roofs and wrought-iron balustrades represent a level of craft more likely found on an Ivy League campus than in a contemporary public housing complex.

They would be almost impossible to reproduce in the kind of bottom-line developments that have become the norm.

In truth, the collapse of New Orleans’ public housing system had less to do with bad design than with cynical government policies, which were rooted in the city’s divisive racial politics. Up through the 1950s, residents of Lafitte were supported by a network of social services, from nursery schools financed by the Works Progress Administration to onsite medical care, adult education programs, Boy Scout groups and gardening clubs.

But as the middle class fled to the suburbs in the 1960s, these services were gradually stripped away, transforming entire areas of the inner city into ghettos for the black underclass.

By 2002, conditions had worsened to the point that the city of New Orleans agreed to turn control of its public housing over to HUD. Today, the richly landscaped gardens are gone. Many of the lawns have been paved over and replaced by basketball courts. Huge garbage bins, some with fading paintings of balloons, are scattered across decaying lots. Towering floodlights illuminate forbidding concrete pathways.

That neglect has now touched bottom in post-Katrina New Orleans. Most of the city’s public housing was boarded up a few months after the storm - long before most residents were able to claim their possessions or clean out their refrigerators. Many are now rat-infested. And while HUD has promised that anyone who comes back will be provided housing in the same neighborhood, those residents that have managed to return have had little voice about what their housing will be. (By comparison, the city has set up numerous town meetings to help homeowners decide how to rebuild their neighborhoods.)

The point is not that projects like Lafitte should be painstakingly restored to their original condition; nor are we likely to return to the same spirit of social optimism that created them any time soon. None of the projects rise to the level, say, of the best Modernist workers housing built in Europe in the 1920s, some of which were such refined architectural compositions that their apartments are now occupied by upper-middle-class sophisticates.

But they certainly rank above the level of much of the conventional middle-class housing being churned out today. And it is not difficult to imagine how a number of thoughtful modifications - the addition of new buildings, extensive landscaping, extending the existing street grid to anchor the project more firmly into the city - could transform the project into model housing.

Yet HUD has never seriously considered such a plan. And although HUD says it has studied what it would cost to restore the projects, it has not released any figures. Finally, it has been unwilling to acknowledge the psychic damage of ripping out more of the city’s fabric at a time when New Orleans has yet to heal the wounds of Hurricane Katrina.

HUD officials say they have not yet set a date for demolition, but they have already selected a team of developers - Enterprise Community Partners and Providence Community Housing, an arm of the Catholic church - which are working on plans for the site. Meanwhile, HUD’s vision of the future is already visible several miles away at the New Fischer development in Algiers. Built to replace a decaying 1960s-era housing complex, part of which is still under demolition, the neighborhood’s rows of two-story houses, painted in cheery pastel colors, will be occupied by a mix of low-and middle-income families. Its porch-lined streets are straight from a Norman Rockwell painting of small-town America.

But in many ways, the development is also an illusion. Conceived as an internalized world, with the majority of its narrow streets dead-ending into nowhere, the development is virtually cut off from the lifeblood of the surrounding city - the shops, streets, parks and freeways that weave the city into an urban whole. And its uniform rows of houses represent a vision of conformity that has little to do with urban life. Instead, it replaces one vision of social isolation with another.

In its broadest sense, that approach is part of the continued assault against cities as places of contact and friction, where life is embraced in its full range. By smoothing over differences, it seeks to make the city safe for returning suburbanites and tourists.

This is a fool’s game. The challenge in New Orleans is to piece together the fragments of a shattered culture. 

Sadly, HUD’s plan manages to trivialize the past without engaging the painful realities that have shorn this city apart.  

Department stores make a come-back!  In our new world of mass market luxury, this may come as little surprise to many of you.

But, for any of us who’ve ever tried to shop at the Bloomingdale’s on 59th & Lex only to abandon the piles of clothes in our arms because we couldn’t brave the long lines snaking towards the 85 degree fitting rooms, we must especially chide these male execs for this belated discovery:

 “We have been on a tremendous roll here,” said Mr. Lundgren, who credited years of research into what consumers want in a department store. The surprise answer: “Fitting rooms,” he said, “was the No. 1 issue.”

I’m sayin’.

Suspected drug lab shut down in Brighton apartment
 

By O’Ryan Johnson, Boston Herald
Friday, November 17, 2006 - Updated: 06:02 AM EST

Police and federal agents raided a Brighton home yesterday and arrested a man when they uncovered a suspected basement drug lab operating in a neighborhood that residents say is known for families and gardening.
    The apartment house on Surrey Street was blocked off by police tape while agents from the federal Drug Enforcement Administration dismantled the lab, police said.