Letter to the Editor

Here is my letter to the editor of the Washington Post. The article I'm responding to is no longer available-it was basically a decent article that looked at progress in New Orleans without considering race or class:

Dear Post Editors,

In contrast to the picture described in your article "New Orleans: A City Gets to Its Feet, Slowly;" a picture of universal, if slow progress in New Orleans reconstruction, stymied by lack of federal funds, there is another framework with which to understand the situation here, and part of that framework includes the city government’s complicity in the destruction of homes and the refusal to allow residents to come back and rebuild, especially in regards to the Housing Projects throughout the city.

I am a volunteer with a relief organization here in the Lower Ninth Ward. Last week we witnessed the demolition of a church located near the infamous spot where a barge had crashed through the levee and into the Lower Ninth. The city did not attempt to repair the damaged church; it simply demolished the entire structure and hauled it away in trucks. A week before that, the city razed a home next door to a home that our organization uses. What is happening in the Lower Ninth, and what the author fails to point out in his article is that the demolition of homes is proceeding apace as other parts of the city are being rebuilt.

It is under the euphemistically-named "Good Neighbor" policy that residents have to gut their homes, or after an allotted amount of time the city will gut the houses for them. For residents who cannot pay the cost of house gutting or for those exiled residents who have not even been notified of the status of their house (which is not an insignificant number), eviction is the next step. The pink eviction notice nailed to abandoned homes alerts residents to the thirty days they have before the city comes to carry away their demolished house in trucks.

Aside from the fact there has been no support for reconstruction in the Lower Ninth Ward by any level of government, and aside from the ludicrous nature of the “Good Neighbor” policy, the fact is that many of the homes currently targeted for destruction are not blighted homes. Many are homes that have been gutted and have been certified structurally sound by contractors. Still the residents of these homes find their houses on the city’s demolition lists.

Several Housing Development Projects around New Orleans share a similar story: structurally sound and having sustained relatively minor damage from Katrina and the flood, the Housing Projects, instead of being opened up for occupation and restoration by residents, many Projects remain boarded up and surrounded by barbed-wire fence 19 months after Katrina. Notices on these buildings tell residents to get permission from the city before entering the premises to claim their possessions. New Orleans citizen groups are still trying to save four of the largest Housing Projects from being razed by the city.

Residents here feel that no one cares about their existence; that their history is being erased via the creeping demolition of their built community; that this erasing of a community is actually what “restoration” means for the Lower Ninth Ward. Given the slow yet perceptible moves towards gentrification, and a media that conveniently excludes the viewpoint of unequal rebuilding support, I am starting to see why.