The Redstar Perspective

UPDATE (10:55 p.m.): Apparently I’m not the only one quitting. HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson is expected to resign tomorrow. Wahoo!!! Ok, now I’m done. Read on.

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It’s with some sadness and some relief that I write this post: I will not be blogging anymore at The Redstar Perspective. This has been a difficult decision, and I’m still unsure what it means. I may retire this site entirely, or I may resurrect it at an unknown point in the future. I’m still sorting out the details.

Here’s what led to this decision, somewhat in order of importance:

a) It’s time to write my dissertation. After meeting with two of my advisors recently, it’s clear I can finish this thing in the next 12 to 15 months and GRADUATE!!! Especially since the New Year, but generally speaking, blogging has become my primary activity, and an enormous time suck for me. Yes, my stats are SLOWLY growing, and, according to readers, my writing is improving. But, in addition to feeling like I’m losing my way re: the content of this blog (more on that in a minute), I also feel like I’m investing so much time and energy in this blog and not generating the returns I want to get. It’s not ok with me that my readership grows when I discuss the general election, because that’s not my preferred content focus. The hours I’ve been spending on posts about Obama v. Clinton, etc., is distracting me from really focusing on the writing I need to be doing NOW - that is, on issues of social justice, urban recovery and contentious politics in post-Katrina New Orleans. In other words, my dissertation.

b) I no longer feel comfortable blogging without anonymity in the ’sphere. Given where I’m at in my still-emerging career, I’m not ok with folks’ ability to track down my thoughts and opinions on-line.  I regret not blogging anonymously, and any blogging I do in the future will strive for greater anonymity. For someone with deeply personal intellectual interests, the current context of the Democratic primary and the empassioned and often heated on-line discussions of race, racism, gender, sexism and misogyny, privilege and prejudice have left me feeling that the web is an even less safe space to really grapple with these issues. In our splicing and dicing interpretative world, I know my thoughts and perspectives on the primary, on poverty, on my family, etc. are up for grabs for appropriation and re-interpretation. Nonetheless, I plan to remove some of the content from this site, but will leave the rest up for the history books.
c) The RP has run its course. This blog began in part because of my work in New Orleans, because my buddy Jake urged me to blog rather than send long e-mails to everyone I knew about what I was experiencing in the city beginning in January 2006. With this dissertation, my work in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast is coming to a close. This blog has grown from that original reporting, to cover topics of development, poverty, housing, inequality, activism, cities, and politics more broadly, but all of this has been mixed up with odes to my boyfriend, Grey’s Anatomy, and random (hopefully amusing) stories about my childhood and roots. Frankly, I’m not interested in writing a general interest blog that’s a mix of analysis and journaling. I need the latter for my mental health, but I’ll find another outlet. My priority is to examine urban inequality, especially as it impacts low-income women, households, and neighborhoods. This is what I want to be blogging about (and working on in my lifetime), and I know there’s a niche audience who wants more of this. I’ve got all kinds of ideas for blogging, but I need a new and fresh venue. That will come in time.

So there you have it. Just in time for what would have been the second annual RP History Month. I’m still figuring out how to keep my original New Orleans posts and select others on-line and available. I’ll probably make an announcement about that in the future.

If you’d like to stay in touch, please leave a note in comments. That will give me an e-mail address for you (remember, others can’t see it) if/when I launch another blog.

Thanks to all my readers and champions over the last two years, especially NYC Weboy, and other blogging allies such as Professor Zero, DonnaDarko, Pizza Diavola and Pocochina. It’s been fun, instructive, exhausting and mostly my pleasure. I have become a blogger. Look at me.

Until we meet again, I leave you with some highly recommended reading:

Please read this disturbing, enraging and graphic coverage of the brutal rape and assault of a woman and her kids in Dunbar Village in W. Palm Beach, FL, and how you can let the NAACP know where their legal, PR and activist resources really belong.

A pregnant man challenges people’s ideas about gender, sexuality, and reproductive rights. And shakes up the healthcare profession. (H/t Echidne.) Meanwhile, pregnancy discrimination complaints from women reach record levels.

A refreshing comments thread that asks bloggers to cool it re: their election coverage. Instead of all the collective hyperventilating, let’s all check out Insurgent American’s 35-Point Practical Guide for Action. (H/t Corrente.)

Read Brownfemipower’s WAM conference speech about centering feminist activism around questions of citizenship and the problems this creates for advocating for immigrant women. (How I missed this conference - held at MIT, the irony! - is beyond me.)

Be well, have fun, and stay safe.

As the housing market goes to complete sh*t, Gulf Opportunity (GO) Zone tax credits intended to spur housing development in the Gulf rapidly are losing value for investors, threatening to stall already precarious housing recovery in New Orleans and across the region.

Homeowners are not the only one at risk in our crashing housing market.  Renters looking for affordable homes in redeveloping areas like New Orleans (and other urban areas seeing a complete shutdown of the last few years of affordable housing construction) face a serious shortage of housing opportunities. 

Across the nation, affordable housing deals are crumbling as investors, hurt by the economic downturn, lose interest in purchasing tax credits and lenders pull out of projects. But nowhere is the situation worse than in Louisiana, where Congress created an extra $168 million in tax credits after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita — nearly 20 times the state’s regular annual allocation of tax credits — to spur the development of 27,000 affordable and mixed-income housing units. All of the Gulf Opportunity Zone tax credit projects must be ready for occupancy by the end of 2010, which means developers can’t afford to wait until the market improves for tax credits.  

This further dampens the economic recovery of the city, as workers continue to be shut out of the area, and industries and sectors limp along without those necessary workers.  On and on the cycle goes. 

The rosy, mixed-income futures of those large former public housing sites that are already becoming zones of rubble?  Not so promising either:

In the New Orleans area, about 31 of 77 projects have not yet closed on their financing, and may find it more difficult to make the numbers work. Those projects, including the replacements for the public housing developments that are being demolished, represent about 46 percent of the 9,779 units that are on the drawing board for the five parishes that make up the New Orleans area. 

Congress is working on some corrective legislation, and, I’m thrilled to see, calling for HUD Secretary Jackson’s resignation.   I know we’ve only got about 8 months to go of Bush et al., but maybe they could throw in some articles of impeachment with that resignation request. 

Of course, Jackson’s more than welcome to take his $100,000 portrait home with him.  He does deserve a souvenir of his important accomplishments of the last few years. 

This spring, keep an eye out for abandoned construction projects and tent cities coming soon to your community!

UPDATE, 3/13/08: NAGIN WON’T SIGN DEMOLITION PERMIT FOR LAFITTE.  GOOD FOR HIM.  I’M MOVING THIS 3/10/08 POST ABOUT MY RECENT TRIP TO NOLA BACK UP TO THE TOP. 

I am sitting at Sound Cafe in the Marigny in New Orleans.  I have a full disposable digital camera in my free conference bag that contains two very depressing photos of the partially demolished St. Bernard housing projects in Gentilly.  I am drinking iced tea and enjoying the 60-ish degree breeze coming through the open door on my last evening in NOLA.

This post is dedicated to Professor Zero, who recently meme’d me for my “excellent coverage of New Orleans.”  After being gone for six months, I have been out of the loop here, and her shout out and this recent trip are signals of my renewed involvement in recovery through ‘08.

This visit I was in the Marriott on Canal on the edge of the French Quarter.  I have stayed in the Quarter once before, but at a smaller Holiday Inn on the northern (?) / upriver edge of the neighborhood, not quite in the heart of things.  Until I rented a car today, I did not leave the FQ/Central Business District/Warehouse District areas, taking dinner the last two nights in upscale spots like Luke and Herbsaint, and spending yesterday afternoon walking around the Quarter, dropping in and out of clothing boutiques. 

As you might imagine, the trip started to feel like a vacation, not only because of my own activities, but because the streets and Jackson Square and restaurants and my hotel lobby were crowded with tourists.  On this trip I particularly feel the loss of never having visited the city before the storm, because these neighborhoods’ weekend vibrance left me wondering if this was what this area was like prior to Katrina.  I’ll never know.  All I know is that wandering around yesterday, I felt better about my post-professional relationship with the city, meaning that I could see myself returning here just for pleasure after my work here ends.  Disaster recovery work is so emotionally draining that I was not sure I’d ever find peace with the city.  Yesterday I found myself thinking how fortunate I was that I knew well many of New Orleans’s neighborhoods, so that if I did come back for a vacation, I would not be confined to the charming yet touristy FQ.

This morning a colleague picked me up and took me out to the airport to pick up my rental car.  3 minutes up river from my FQ hotel is a multi-block tent city of homeless folks living beneath the highway.  And I was back in the New Orleans I’ve come to know through my work.  My 24 hour vacation was over.

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First, let’s thank NY Gov. Spitzer for reminding us of Vitter’s sexual indiscretions.  Both men rule on platforms of fighting vice. I say, if we’re going to oust Spitzer, let’s make sure Vitter’s sitting beside him in the back of the Lincoln Town Car as they both get the hell out of town.

(As an aside, check out this pro-legalization of sex work piece from Cara at The Curvature.  Brings up some great points re: women’s rights and gender equity.)

I hear MS has a primary today?  But let’s not overlook this little nugget from The American Prospect (registration), summed up at Racewire:

Mississippi’s Black labor groups are organizing alongside the state’s growing immigrant population to fight for driver’s licenses for all residents.

Throughout the 1990s more immigrants arrived looking for work. Some guest workers overstayed their visas, while husbands brought wives, cousins, and friends from home. Mexicans and Central Americans joined South and Southeast Asians and began traveling north through the state, finding jobs in rural poultry plants. There they met African Americans, many of whom had fought hard campaigns to organize unions for chicken and catfish workers over the preceding decade.

It was not easy for newcomers to fit in. Their union representatives didn’t speak their languages. When workers got pulled over by state troopers they were not only cited for lacking driver’s licenses but also often handed over to the U.S. Border Patrol. Sometimes their children weren’t even allowed to enroll in school.

As someone who’s had the honor to work occasionally with activists for Latino immigrants and African-Americans in the Gulf Coast since Katrina, it’s thrilling to read news like this.  The AFL-CIO unions are named specifically in the Prospect piece.  From what I’ve seen of their work the international and some of the locals are really making an effort to bridge long-standing divides and build strong coalitions in the post-Katrina Gulf Coast.  

This is great news. 

Finally, here’s a round-up of links to the UN’s comdemnation of human rights abuses via the racially and economically discriminatory plans to demolish much needed public housing in New Orleans.  The UN treats post-Katrina government failures as the ultimate example of enduring racial discrimination and inequity in the U.S.:

The UN Committee calls for adequate, affordable housing in Katrina-affected areas, and also for the remedying of housing conditions in racially segregated areas across the country.

Right on. 

This afternoon in NOLA I saw a car with both Clinton and Obama bumper stickers.  Part of the Anything But McBush movement, no doubt. 

If I lived in this city I would certainly finally move up into the next pants size I am currently just below.

I passed what looked like an enormous Baptist group on my way back to my hotel tonight.  I think Jim Wallis may be right about this place being a “converting ground.”

There was a parade or protest this afternoon; I saw it from my car near St. Bernard and Claiborne.  I need to find out what it was.

Home tomorrow!  Yay! Wish me luck trying to get on some earlier flights, and not getting stuck forever in ATL.  In my absence, do check out my thoughts from the past few days.

I loathe this man.  Read on.

With 8 days until the March 4 primaries, this is how I feel. Exhausted of the he said/she said. Tired of sifting through the various charges leveled at candidates, campaigns, their supporters, the media, bloggers, at me. A week ago I was fired up - This is participatory democracy! - and NYC Weboy and I laughed about how the blogs need a mediator to keep the place civilized. I was spending all day on the web, and at one point exchanged emails with a dear friend of mine about the rise of social isolation in contemporary society and how I am one of those people who have *traded* face-to-face interaction for virtual socializing.This dear friend, a young black woman married and raising an interracial child, has so far been a voice of reason for me in this campaign. While the clunky media-driven debate over “Race v. gender” has raged for months, searching greedily for The Biggest Loser between our two Dem candidates, she said to me in an email that this has been her “dream” primary - she’s supporting Obama, but would have happily supported Clinton. With Obama she gained a role model for her daughter and theoretical future sons, but she got teary at both Obama’s “Yes We Can” and Clinton’s “This One’s for the Girls” videos. This friend is who I think of when I see The Obamas grace three magazine covers in one week (he on The Economist and US News, and Michelle on Newsweek) and am struck by how cool and overdue that is for this nation. It is her that I think of when I feel pride watching these two candidates share the debate stage and make the Democratic Party look great. And it is this friend who I am now pulling into the blogosphere, at her own peril.

Because now this my lovely friend is spending more time than usual on-line, discovering for herself how f***ing obnoxious so many of the blog comment threads are about the candidates. And my experiments in consciousness-raising here at The RP suddenly feel especially unpleasant. I’m taking her down with me! Oh No!

My support for Clinton has origins in her qualifications for the Presidency - she’s the smartest and the realistic best the Dems have to offer, I think, and her gender firmly pushes me into her camp. But I don’t think I’m alone when I say that her candidacy has taken on a whole new level of meaning for me, divorced from the candidate. This has become a fight for me about gender equity, a battle I’ve long waged, whether aggressively or sometimes just silently in my head. I feel like I’m fighting for Clinton in honor of my mother and her peers, in honor of the women’s lives I’ve had the privilege to study for school, and for myself and my and my peers’ future. Watching the attacks on Clinton this primary season has unleashed an anger in me that I’d either been ignoring or resisting until now, one that I’m hoping will last for the rest of my life.

The problem is that Clinton - of course - is not a perfect candidate on which to mount my fight for justice. No single woman would be; the fight to reduce oppression and domination of women is a battle to be waged across campaigns, political and economic and social structures, and on behalf of and with a range of activists committed to social equity.

The meta-narrative of this campaign, and electoral politics more generally, have pretty much prohibited such a coalitional struggle, as the false choice between the “black man and the white woman” exploits and reinforces the already fragile relationships between activists representing different social groups and struggles. As a Clinton supporter, in the time and space available to me in my current on- and off-line life, I’ve sacrified depth of analysis about this race for qualified support of my candidate. I say qualified because most everything I post in her favor is casually vetted and posted at a deliberately partisan site for other Clinton supporters. I’ve characterized this site as a safe space that I think legitimately has its place here in the ’sphere. And I love being a part of it.

But I cannot stress enough that this Clinton support is not my politics as usual. The reason I rarely get fired up about elections or candidates is because I think politicians are pretty much all the same, and the system is set up such that their self-interest always comes first. I believe that to get things done you need to be willing to negotiate with a pretty varied range of people and groups, and that conflict (versus violence) is fundamental and necessary, and difference is to be tolerated and embraced, not suppressed. I think change comes incrementally, due to a variety of intertwined external and internal pressures, including movement politics, protest, behind-the-scenes deal-making, and policymaking.

Clinton and Obama both represent different pieces of the scenario I just described. They comprise different coalitions of voters, different tactics (between them and within their campaigns) to land the nomination, different narratives of how they’ll lead, different leadership styles, yet very similar political positions and stances across a wide range of issues that matter to various voters. Neither of them will really change our power to influence the system, regardless of how much both camps of supporters believe they will (beyond the diffuse and thrilling symbolic empowerment many of us will feel should our preferred candidate take that oath in January). Only we can do that, and once either of them is in office, both become more representative than they are now of all the legislative, regulatory, distributive, and participatory changes we need in our government.

What has been a real loss for me this campaign is how divergent I feel from my usual stances of a) trying to better understand the intersectionality of various forms of oppression that women, people of color, LGBT, and others feel, and b) fighting for greater anti-poverty policy and equity in the U.S. I don’t believe that loss would be vindicated by participating in the Obama campaign either. What I’m hoping is that at the end of this primary, rather than tripping over deepened gendered, ethno-racial, sexist and classist divides, our mutual desire to heal our (re-) opened wounds is stronger than ever.

After Hurricane Katrina, there was a national outcry for an honest conversation about the persistence of racial and economic inquity in the U.S. Some folks actually began that conversation, picking up where they left off before the storm struck, and are still talking and agitating to this day. May the 2008 Presidential elections leave us with a similar mandate, and may more of us engage with it than the many-but-still-too-few who are fighting for justice in the Gulf Coast now.

Because just like Katrina evacuees in TX, all of us matter well beyond March 4, November 4, and January 20, 2009. Pretty soon Clinton or Obama or even McCain will be behind the gates of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’ll still be sitting here at our desks, in our cars, on the bus, or behind the counter. Staring down the same old shit.

UPDATE: The LA Justice Institute and The Children’s Defense Fund (Sen. Clinton’s former employer, I might add) have released preliminary data from a survey of families living in the 38,000 FEMA trailers still spread out around the Gulf Coast. They found that approximately 100,000 people live in those trailers, or an average of 3 people per unit. (FEMA trailers are about 400 sq ft, IIRC.)

Other findings include (their emphases):

Most families have been in the trailer for over 2 years, since the fall of 2005 or spring of 2006.

The majority of people living in FEMA trailers are employed. Many are retired.

15% report depression, anxiety, other symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health issues. 10% report that their mental health problems are their biggest obstacle to getting out of the trailer.

55% report that if they are evicted from their FEMA trailer in the next few months they have no family they can turn to for help and they expect to be homeless.

29% reported rashes, itchy eyes, breathing problems and other symptoms usually related to high levels formaldehyde in their FEMA trailer.

“Our presidential candidates must understand the plight of FEMA trailer residents and answer the tough questions those conditions present concerning affordable permanent housing for Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita survivors. This is no way to treat our people!”

HERE ARE THE DETAILS ON SEEING A FEMA TRAILER FIRSTHAND AT TONIGHT’S DEM DEBATE IN AUSTIN :

Though the Democratic debate in Austin on Thursday has limited space for the public, there is an opportunity for folks in the vicinity to visit the KatrinaRitaVille Express: The National FEMA Trailer Tour. From krvexpress.org:

This is a rare opportunity to place our region’s unaddressed recovery/justice needs squarely before the candidates, media and US electorate. Our FEMA Trailer and a caravan of survivors/speakers from coastal AL, MS, LA and TX would certainly help raise the region’s national visibility.

Friends at UT Law School’s Justice Center are currently looking into a day-long exhibit and speak-out at some campus location not far from Thursday night’s debate.

With your help, the event will feature the trailer, human testimonials, video, and the distribution of information on housing, environment and other social justice/policy needs for gulf coast communities.

Click here for more debate info.

Meanwhile, legal activists have filed another lawsuit to halt demolition in the on-going public housing struggle in New Orleans, even as buildings at C.J. Peete, B.W. Cooper, and St. Bernard have come down (No word on any demolition at Lafitte). In DC, Sen. Landrieu has again marked up S. 1668, the Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Act, to renew the negotiations with her colleagues and staunch opponents, Sens. Shelby (R-AL) and Vitter (R-LA), on this critical affordable housing bill.

This fight is far from over! ! !!

$20M Gift Planned for Gentilly.

There’s a press conference next week.

Wahoo!

Say what you will about private sector development - I’ve certainly done my fair share - but bringing 100 homes to a neighborhood with only 25% of its population back is a noble effort.

I’ve effectively narrowed my Google reader these days that if the blogs aren’t talking about the elections, I’m not reading them. But I feel compelled, obligated even, to talk about the shootings at NIU yesterday.

The most up-to-date reporting has two parallel threads: that the student was a well-liked, respected student (link above), and that he had recently stopped taking his medications (scripts not yet identifed). Especially after VA Tech, we’re familiar - if still unprepared to deal with - the *plotline* of untreated or *mis-managed* mental illness that weaves through these tragedies. At NIU, people seem mystified that this accomplished student deemed a contributing member of academic society could turn up and fire into a crowd of his peers at random and then kill himself. Nonetheless, I’m sure as the days pass the usual story of “we should have seen it coming” will continue to develop.

Listening to right-leaning talk radio the other night (here in MA that means Republicans arguing in favor of gun control), a former school board member and trustee was trying to explain that often this level of atrocity is not preventable. If MIT is any guide, I’m inclined to agree. Most campuses, sometimes surprisingly so, are accessible 24/7. MIT is a large, sprawling urban campus, with no clear borders and some doors that are never, ever locked. Most of the time, the few violent assaults (not necessarily on students) in the area of or around campus, whether by strangers or folks associated with a transitional house adjacent to one of the dorms, are minimized in formal release statements from MIT or Harvard police or the university administrations. Finally, last year, an eventful one in which MIT repeatedly showed up in the local and national press for one crisis after another, one of our students was stabbed in his dorm 10 times by an ex-girlfriend who was a student at Wellesley College; the major lesson learned from that experience was to belatedly tighten security at the dorms.

But I think this notion of “good kids gone bad” is under explored in this tragedy. (more…)

The original post is here.

To reinforce my point that the ire of this primary season is getting totally out of hand, I, blogger un-extraordinaire, got my first hate mail today.  It came after I commented on Ezra’s posts (links below), which I’ve reprinted here:

Ezra,

I’m surprised by this post from you. You’ve been pretty equinimical (sp? word?) thus far.

My reading of this MI/FL debacle is so different, and both campaigns are gunning for it to come out in their favor (obviously) - Obama’s caucus suggestion, anyone?

MyDD has a post today about how it’s the FL/MI politicians who are, again obviously, campaigning to have their votes count. Few seem to be covering this fiasco from the perspective of the states; it’s only one campaign’s shenanigans versus the others.

http://www.mydd.com/story/2008/2/13/223556/592

The email is as follows:

What does rationalizing and making lame excuses for people who are blatantly unethical and dishonest make you?  Answer?  A pathetic ass.

Have a nice day!

 

Amazing. 

Moving on.

I’m blown away by another campus shooting.  No words.

I’ll be back in calmer times with some thoughts.

I’m late on this announcement from Sens. Clinton and Schumer (D-NY), but I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring together two of my major issues here at the RP: supporting the recovery of the Gulf Coast and Sen. Clinton’s presidential candidacy.

S. 1668, the Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Act, is by no means dead, but rather is subject to on-going negotiation and revision now that local Gulf residents, former tenants, and their activist allies lost the battle over demolishing public housing in New Orleans.  Sen. Landrieu (D-LA) and her supportive colleagues continue to try to find a way to push through this much needed legislation, and break down the resistance of AL and LA Sens. Shelby and Vitter, respectively.  I’ve written extensively here about the struggle to rebuild the Gulf Coast and win passage of this critical bill.  Without further adieu, Sens. Clinton and Schumer’s statement in support of the Act:

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I said to the M.A.S. on the last night of our L.A. vacation: “you’re the image, i’m the words.”  A metaphor for our relationship constructed of his photography work and my writing. 

He’s recently uploaded hundreds of his photos of New Orleans on Flickr - the majority of which were taken during joint visits to the region since January 2006.  His work is foremost a testament to the city, and is accompanied by a moving essay describing his love affair with it, including his mourning and desires for the place since Katrina hit in August ‘05.  He writes: (more…)

My time is almost up here (I’m hoping to fit in one or two more pithy thoughts), but I’d like to discuss my main task this week: housekeeping.  Red asked me to fill in, in part, to help keep her comment queue clean.  Unlike my comments section over at nycweboy, Red is inundated with spam comments of all sorts (the fact that it’s a sign of popularity, of course makes me wildly jealous), and left unchecked, almost 100 messages can be lined up in a matter of hours.

What I noticed, in fact, was that since last year, things have gotten exponentially worse.  Dozens of comments show up afer only 3 or 4 hours, and because I don’t want to miss any real ones, I’ve been scanning through the material.  And it’s awful - there’s a repeating porn message I’ve been deleting all day that’s really just unbelievably nasty.  And that doesn’t mention the ones who try “Nice post!” and some sneaky link as a way in. And I’m not trying to goose Red’s readership by bringing this up (it’s not like I posted a gratuitous shot of Pam Anderson or anything), but I feel like someone needs to say something, and I haven’t seen a lot of people remark on this.

There’s been some effort to control spam messages on e-mail boxes (there kind of had to be, because people were getting furious, and businesses were struggling to keep firewalls operational), but I think the governemnt response was entirely backwards: rather than make the problem the spammers, it made the probem us, by making us sign on to “do not mail” lists of dubious usefulness. The problem isn’t the fact that we have e-mail addresses or websites; the problem is that all sorts of dubious enterprises - financial scams, porn sites, car salesmen and God knows what else - seem to think all’s fair in the pursuit of audience and sales.  It’s that behavior that’s the problem, and that’s the thing that needs to be addressed.

It’s easy to let this discussion get bogged down in the nature of our 1st Amendment and in looking like… I don’t know… some sort of fascist, maybe? … by complaining.  But I don’t know anyone - no one - who is a fan of this stuff.  Like “thank goodness I got another message from some bank scam trying to access my information” or “gee, I had no idea big blonde women were so versatile!”  No, mostly we know what this is - a nuisance and where we want it to go - away.  And the dirty secret is, no one’s doing a damn thing about it.

Okay, I did put it off for a while on top of my original plan… but even so, the first day back to the gym really sucked.

If you want to know why no one starts with the man in the mirror… it’s because it’s painful and it leaves you nauseous.

And really there’s no less fun feeling at the gym than feeling like the biggest loser.

Yes, I’m being a whiny little beyotch, but I’m also sore.

More upbeat posts in a bit…

That’s about right for what I can contribute to the official ‘08 horse race that kicks off with the Iowa caucuses tonight.  See The Curvature for the “I have no idea what’s going to happen” perspective, NYC Weboy for the “this system is a skewed and unproductive mess” p.o.v., and RaceWire for the “it’s policy, not politics, that matters” lens.  And Louisiana 1976, g-d luv her/him, reminds us at Daily Kos not to forget about the on-going crisis in NOLA this election season.  But perhaps the most timely report is the “F*CK it’s COLD out here!” one from Ezra Klein in New Hampshire.

With the exceptions of my competitive hate-to-lose streak that fuels my desire to see Clinton clinch the nomination despite admitted ambivalence about some of her positions, and my work in the Gulf, my general orientation towards politics and elections is most akin to RaceWire’s.  (Although sitting in my Boston kitchen in flannel pj’s while WBUR describes the -15 degree wind chill factor outside, I’m hearin’ Ezra right now.)  The M.A.S. reminded me that perhaps tomorrow morning I’ll actually have something to say about Iowa.  Good point, my genius beau.  For now, it’s catching up on bills and Xmas returns and avoiding the looming dissertation proposal that hangs over this post-general exam January break.

May your candidate of choice win tonight - unless he is different from my candidate of choice, of course.  In the interim, enjoy TPM’s Great List of Scandalized Administration Officials.  As Al Green would say, for the good times.

Support S. 1668!!!

 

With a call for phased redevelopment of Lafitte in Treme, and St. Bernard in Gentilly - “where practicable.”  They also demand a replace of hard units with hard units, but allow for “affordable housing consistent with the mixed-income model,” which typically drastically reduces the overall number of housing affordable to extremely low-income individuals, which is who qualifies for public housing in the U.S.  Thus, don’t be fooled, the overall number of needed deeply subsidized units will be reduced.  The full text of the City Council motion is after the jump. 

Here, here and here is coverage of the police clash with protesters this morning at the Council meeting.  As I hear from the activist listservs, etc., I’ll do my best to update here, though Xmas officially starts tonight and runs through Tuesday with all the extended family.

I am so so sad about this. 

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The Times-Pic reports that a “majority” is prepared to vote to demolish the Big Four.  This four person majority - Fielkow, Clarkson, Midura, and Head - represents the four white Council members, and four of the five representatives elected after Hurricane Katrina.  Along post-storm and racial lines, the fundamental shifts in New Orleans governance and city life are unfolding in front of us. 

The Council meets at 10am Central Time this morning.  I predict that Carter and Willard-Lewis will vote against demolition. UPDATE, 12/20/07, 5:57 PM est: This morning I erased the second half of the preceding sentence, where I wrote: “…or the Council will unanimously approve demolition.”  I should have gone with my gut.  The unanimous motion to demolish was approved today.  (See the predictions of The Coalition to Stop Demolitions here.)

Feministe and Feministing disseminated yesterday the Coalition to Stop Demolitions’s proposal and demands, The Curvature (among others) has where you can send financial support, and NOLA Indymedia has coverage of direct action at B.W. Cooper - an activist who chained herself to one of the buildings early yesterday morning.  The WaPo and TP took advantage of the coverage to publish anti-demolition editorials this morning, and Villanous Vitter appropriated pro-poor language and accused anti-demolition activists of wanting to warehouse and forget about public housing residents, or some such b.s. rhetoric.  He also accused Landrieu et al. of being beholden to “extremists” - gotta love the vituperative accusations from the hard line right-wingers.  (not linking to any of these, editorial discretion)

Stay tuned for updates on this fight, and of course, the on-going coverage of the aftermath of the vote, which likely will include more activists chained to buildings, more arrests, more official and public wars of words and empty rhetoric, and a renewed fight to pass S. 1668 once the “public housing issue” is theoretically laid to rest.  

As for re-patriating former public housing residents in New Orleans, well, that’s not likely to happen anytime soon.  Check out Black Amazon for more about “the power of Community and the fucking blindness of privilege to the needs and loves and desires of people who they for some reason can talk about all the time but can not see.” And READ THIS ARTICLE in the Houston Chronicle re: the fates of the displaced due to bureacratic bungling, government neglect and sheer exhaustion and despair on the parts of displaced families and the philanthropic/social service community.

Just so we’re clear. 

PolicyLink has released a brief analysis of HUD’s plans to replace subsidized housing for extremely low-income households, those making 30% of Area Median Income ($15,9k).  This includes many households in New Orleans with minimum wage employees working full-time (40h) per week in the service and hospitality industries earning just over $12,000 per year.  Overall, HUD plans to replace about one-third of the 12k pre-storm units.  Separate from the overly villified and spotlighted public housing developments, which face a 59% net loss, less than one-third of the deeply subsidized housing specifically set aside for seniors, the disabled, and low-wage workers will be rebuilt.  Check out the graph on page 3 to see the comparative reductions in public housing, scattered site housing, and supportive/senior housing.

I’m deliberately preying on the cultural distinctions we make between the worthy and unworthy poor here, a false dichotomy, not least in the reality of neighborhood composition.  I’m doing this because I know the assumptions we all make about who lives in public housing, including the assumptions held by public housing residents themselves about their neighbors.  But I want to make clear that the housing specifically built to enable our grandmothers or disabled relatives - those we can’t or won’t care for, or those who, like us, seek independent living that meets their needs - to live on their own is also being destroyed by the federal government in New Orleans, whether by deliberate and corrupt demolition choices, or because of a willful and callous lack of reinvestment to bring these properties back on line.

I originally wrote this post last night, only to have my blog crash.  It was much more personal and rhetorical, if no less strident.  I linked to this very personal and clear post from kactus, about her experience as a mother, disabled woman, and community member in public housing, and I wrote about my own experiences growing up visiting family in South Boston public housing.  I wrote about eating corned beef and cabbage on tv trays at my grandmother’s, and how I thought tv trays were the coolest thing ever.  I wrote about how excited I was on these visits to cross the pedestrian bridge over the 2 lane road in front of the projects, and I distinctly remember the snazzy leather Members Only type jacket my 80s mustached dad was sporting on these visits.  I remember the specific language my grandmother used to describe her home, words like “rubbish” instead of trash, which went into the “incinerator” chute outside in the hall, and how our visits were in the “parlor” versus the living room.  I remember playing with my cousin Clare’s new Easy Bake oven during one of many Christmas’s visiting her and her sibs and parents and grandmother in the notorious D St projects, which went through phased redevelopment around that time, starting from the back towards the street, per the insistence of the residents, who knew that the housing authority would be more likely to prematurely stop development once improvements were visible from the street.  I remember more recently my aunt, who raised 5 kids and not a few grandkids at D Street on AFDC and worked her way up from a clerk to a property manager at the Boston Housing Authority, complaining that the redevelopment of D Street failed to reflect some of the daily realities of how people lived, for example, in its awkward placement of utility hookups that made it difficult for families to do their laundry.  And I wrote about how, more recently, the M.A.S. listened to 2 of my cousins his age laugh about how they shoveled some snow at D Street one winter, only to receive a check from Housing for their services several weeks later. 

In 2005, my uncle gave up the McCormack property that once belonged to my grandmother, an apartment we had in the family for over 40 years.  My cousins still live in other developments in Southie.  And my many cousins and aunts and uncles who have moved out to the suburbs continue to battle problems of poverty, including poor health and healthcare, addiction, homelessness, and insecure housing tenure.  Last night, before my blog crashed, I asked, whose quality of life are we talking about when we debate the ills of concentration and the benefits of dispersion, and the pathologies of public housing and the problems of poverty?  We’re talking about my family, my cousins, my aunts, my uncles. 

I’m sure glad they don’t live in New Orleans. 

In the news this weekend:

I’m late on this one: Pres. Cand. John Edwards speaks out against demolition.  Even better: Majority Leaders Pelosi and Reid send a letter to Bush asking him to halt demolition for at least 60 days while an alternate plan is worked out.  The text of the letter is here, and includes data on the doubling of the homeless population in NOLA, the new loss of affordable units in the city, and the (at least) 45% rise in rents.  But here’s the excerpt I like the most (my emphases and $.02 throughout):

Given the City’s housing needs and the current availability of these affordable housing resources, we are extremely disappointed by the Department’s insistence on moving ahead with this demolition despite insufficient resou