For the last couple of weeks I've had an unfinished draft of a post on housing and redevelopment in NOLA. Jordan Flaherty's latest email hits a number of the major points I was going to make:
And with poor people out of the city, the developers and corporations are grabbing what they can - but there are no shoot-to-kill orders on these well-dressed looters. NPR and other media have portrayed developer Pres Kabacoff as a liberal visionary out to create a Paris on the Mississippi. The truth is that Kabacoff represents the worst of New Orleans’ local disaster profiteers. It is Kabacoff who, in 2001, famously demolished affordable housing in the St Thomas projects in New Orleans’ Lower Garden District and replaced it luxury condos and a Wal Mart. “New Orleans has never recovered from what Kabacoff did,” one housing activist told me. “It was a classic bait and switch. He told the city he was going to revitalize the area, and ended up changing the rules in the middle of the game and holding the city for ransom. He made a ton of money, the rich got more housing, and the poor got dispersed around the city.”
This year, Kabacoff has had his eyes on razing the Iberville housing projects, a site of low-income housing near the French Quarter. While Iberville residents were in their homes, they were able to fight Kabacoff’s plans, and held numerous protests. Now that they are gone, their homes (which were not flooded) are in serious danger from Kabacoff and other developers seeking to take advantage of this tragedy to “remake the city.”
The story of Kabacoff's redevelopment of the St. Thomas projects is a story of corruption at every level. You can get more of the fine points here.
For extensive documentation of the disastrous redevelopment of the St. Thomas projects by Kabacoff's company, Historic Redevelopment, Inc., read Brod Bagert's 2002 Masters thesis for the London School of Economics, HOPE VI and ST. THOMAS: Smoke Mirrors, and Urban Mercantalism, Executive Summary (PDF), Whole Thing (PDF).
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