Open Letter to the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty

Why did the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty (NLCHP) Provide a Platform for a Privatization and Home Foreclosure Advocate ?

NLCHP’s Invitation to HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan raises serious concerns


Dear Eric Tars and the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty,

I always appreciate Eric Tars’ regular reports on efforts to use a human rights discourse and institutional framework to win housing as a basic human right in the U.S. and globally.

Yet, at the same time, I see as very contradictory and deeply disturbing that Tars’ employer, the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, headed by Maria Foscanris, invited Housing and Urban Development (HUD) secretary Shaun Donovan to be the key note speaker at the organization’s annual awards banquet on October 14th in Washington, DC. Donovan’s keynote speech was entitled “Ending Homelessness in Our Time”. Considering the HUD secretary’s attempt to sell off the nation’s public housing stock through the so-called “Choice Neighborhood Program” and the proposed PETRA bill now in Congress, a more apt title for his address might have been, ‘How I Make Appearances to End Homelessness, while actually expanding it through continued public housing demolition and forced evictions”

Indeed, Donovan has an aggressive plan to expand homelessness. He is working with HUD-imposed administrators in New Orleans to demolish the badly needed 800+ public housing apartments at New Orleans’ Iberville development—one that even convicted human rights violator George Bush and his henchman Alphonso Jackson could not get their hands on after Katrina. Donovan and his New Orleans collaborators are promoting the demolition of Iberville as a model for what can be done nation-wide under a generously funded and approved PETRA bill. But Donovan is not happy with just expanding homelessness by demolishing and selling off public housing. He’s an ambitious man. He also opposes any measures to stop the massive home foreclosures that bankers are carrying out, telling the New York Times recently that any measures to stop the forced evictions “would do more harm than good” (New York Times, October 28, 2010). Harm to who — banker’s profits or peoples’ lives?

Why would an oufit named the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty provide a platform to this enemy of public and affordable housing and a friend of bankers and homelessness?

The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty invite is a disturbing sign that they and other NGO’s and ‘tenant leaders” are ready to be ‘realistic’ and sit down with Donovan to provide a fig leaf cover for the handing over of public housing to the banks and real estate sharks—on a larger scale than they already have.


We need to ask NLCHP and other NGO’s where they stand on PETRA and the attempt to demolish New Orleans Iberville Public Housing development?

We at C3/Hands Off Iberville denounce PETRA, Choice Neighborhoods, or any other scam to privatize public housing. We oppose efforts to ‘improve' the bill that some NGOs and sell-out tenant leaders are advocating. These bills and plans are rotten to the core. We also call for an immediate moratorium on all home foreclosures. On top of these defensive demands, we call for the creation of a massive, direct government employment Public Works plan , open to all workers, including immigrants and the formerly incarcerated, to rebuild housing, schools, hospitals and a infrastructure. This is what we need to fight for. Join the growing campaign!

In addition, call and/or email these officials and demand that HUD not approve funding for the Housing Authority of New Orleans' application for a "Choice Neighbrohood" grant to demolish and 'redevelop' the Iberville public housing development. We demands instead that all the 800+ apartmwents are repaired and maintaied as Public Housing, in which tenants pay 30% of their income for rent and utilities.

HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan.
Email: Secretary.Donovan@hud.gov Phone: (202) 708-0417

New Orleans Mayor- Mitch Landrieu.
Email: mayor@cityofno.com Phone: (504) 658-4900

U.S. President-Barrack Obama.
Email: president@whitehouse.gov Phone: (202) 456-1414



Jay Arena
Hands off Iberville