Bring The Evacuees Home, Mayor Nagin

Naomi Klein used the Census 2000 vacancy rates in the neighborhoods Mayor Nagin has declared habitable to identify 23, 267 uninhabited apartments that could be rented to New Orleans evacuees right now.

Available Housing Units by Neighborhood
Neighborhood	Vacant Housing Units
Central Business District	252
French Quarter	1,736
Uptown/Carrollton	2,383
Algiers	2,713
New Aurora/ English Turn	115
Central City/Garden District	4,418

Adding them all up equals 11,617 vacant housing units in New Orleans' dry zones. When we include neighboring Jefferson Parish to the west of the city, the total jumps to 23,267.

If each unit houses three people, that's 70,000 out of the estimated 200,000 left permanently homeless in the aftermath of Katrina. That's over one third. Bringing them home is only a matter of political will.

Democratic Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, whose Houston district
includes some 150,000 Katrina evacuees, says there are ways to convert
vacant apartments into affordable or free housing. After passing an
ordinance, cities could issue Section 8 certificates, covering rent
until evacuees find jobs. Jackson Lee says she plans to introduce
legislation that will call for federal funds to be spent on precisely
such rental vouchers. "If opportunity exists to create viable housing
options," she says, "they should be explored."

Malcolm Suber, a longtime New Orleans community activist, was
shocked to learn that thousands of livable homes were sitting empty. "If
there are empty houses in the city," he says, "then working-class and
poor people should be able to live in them." According to Suber, taking
over vacant units would do more than provide much-needed immediate
shelter: It would move the poor back into the city, preventing the key
decisions about its future--like whether to turn the Ninth Ward into
marshland or how to rebuild Charity Hospital--from being made
exclusively by those who can afford land on high ground. "We have the
right to fully participate in the reconstruction of our city," Suber
says. "And that can only happen if we are back inside." But he concedes
that it will be a fight: The old-line families in Audubon and the Garden
District may pay lip service to "mixed income" housing, "but the
Bourbons uptown would have a conniption if a Section 8 tenant moved in
next door. It will certainly be interesting."

Equally interesting will be the response from the Bush
Administration. So far, the only plan for homeless residents
to move back to New Orleans is Bush's bizarre Urban Homesteading Act. In
his speech from the French Quarter, Bush made no mention of the
neighborhood's roughly 1,700 unrented apartments and instead proposed
holding a lottery to hand out plots of federal land to flood victims,
who could build homes on them. But it will take months (at least) before
new houses are built, and many of the poorest residents won't be able to
carry the mortgage, no matter how subsidized. Besides, it barely touches
the need: The Administration estimates that in New Orleans there is land
for only 1,000 "homesteaders."

The truth is that the White House's determination to turn renters into
mortgage payers is less about solving Louisiana's housing crisis than
indulging an ideological obsession with building a radically
privatized "ownership society."

Aside from the assured ideological opposition from the Bush administration, local racism and economic opportunism further impede the political will to bring a third of the homeless evacuees back home to NOLA. It is this racsim that calls the lie of local business leaders who speak of mixed income utopias that will rise from the ashes of New Orleans.

Before Mayor Ray Nagin called for a second evacuation, the people streaming back into dry areas were mostly white, while those with no homes to return to are overwhelmingly black. This, we are assured, is not a conspiracy; it's simple geography--a reflection of the fact that wealth in New Orleans buys altitude. That means that the driest areas are the whitest (the French Quarter is 90 percent white; the Garden District, 89 percent; Audubon, 86 percent; neighboring Jefferson Parish, where people were also allowed to return, 65 percent). Some dry areas, like Algiers, did have large low-income African-American populations before the storm, but in all the billions for reconstruction, there is no budget for transportation back from the far-flung shelters where those residents ended up. So even when resettlement is permitted, many may not be able to return.

As for the hundreds of thousands of residents whose low-lying homes and housing projects were destroyed by the flood, Drennen points out that many of those neighborhoods were dysfunctional to begin with. He says the city now has an opportunity for "twenty-first-century thinking": Rather than rebuild ghettos, New Orleans should be resettled with "mixed income" housing, with rich and poor, black and white living side by side.

Strike while the iron is still hot, Mayor Nagin. Hold a press conference with Jefferson Parish President Broussard, at which you each present your respective city governments with ordinances authorizing Section 8 vouchers for 35,000 homeless New Orleans residents. With the whole world watching, how could anyone say no?