HANO BARS WOMEN & CHILDREN FROM ITS OFFICES

HANO BARS WOMEN & CHILDREN FROM ITS OFFICES

Today, April 26, 2011, HANO police prohibited two homeless mothers and one infant child seeking to apply for housing assistance from entering first the Iberville Development Office on Treme Street and, shortly afterwards, the HANO Building on Touro Street. Chesnian Rixner, Chesnian’s ten month old daughter, Irvian Wells, and Irvian’s one and a half year old son arrived noon today at the Iberville Development Office to apply to live in an apartment in the Iberville Development. The mothers and children are homeless. Disgraceful is the word that best describes how HANO treated these New Orleanians.

When Chesnian and Irvian attempted to enter the Iberville Development Office four HANO PD officers, under the command of an Officer Mercadel, formed a human wall in front of the doors to the office. Mercadel told the homeless mothers that they could not enter the building despite the fact that the office was open for business. When Chesnian informed Mercadel that she and Irvian had come to apply for an apartment at the development the officer told them that they could not enter the building. Instead referred the mothers to the HANO building on Touro Street.. At this point Chesnian, Chesnian’s infant daughter, Irvian and three supporters traveled in the car of a friend to the main HANO office on Touro.

When Chesnian and company arrived at the Touro HANO building, about seven miles from the Iberville Development, four HANO PD officers formed a line front of the Senate Street entrance to the housing authority structure. These were the same four HANO PD officers who had prevented Irvian, Chesnian and infant from entering the Iberville Development Office. Upon approaching the entrance to the HANO building on Touro Irvian, Chesnian, Chesnian’s infant and three friends were told by Officer Mercadel that they could not enter the building! Mercadel and the other three HANO officers situated themselves between the entrance to the office and Irvian and company. Mercadel responded with silence when Chesnian pointed out that he was the one who had just told her to go to this address to apply for public housing assistance.

Mercadel did tell Irvian and Chesnian that a HANO spokesperson would speak to them outside the building. That promise was made at 1:05 pm. The mothers waited in the hot sun till 1:35 pm for the spokesperson but to no avail. At this point Chesnian, who was holding her ten month old, decided it would be best to leave. Chesnian and friends promptly left the scene of the degrading standoff.

Anyone who feels that this injustice should not go unanswered is invited to the 7pm Thursday meeting of C3/Hands Off Iberville in St. Jude’s Basin Hall. The time for silence is over.

Mike Howells 504-587-0080

The Iberville Development: No Murders, No News!

The Iberville Development: No Murders, No News!
By Mike Howells

With the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaching the struggle to defend and expand public housing in New Orleans continues. As part of that effort the local public housing support group C3/Hands Off Iberville held a press conference on August 3rd highlighting the Iberville public housing development’s status as one of the few murder free neighborhoods in New Orleans over the last year. The press conference was held on the date of the national Night Out Against Crime. The press conference was met with a corporate news blackout. The refusal of the corporate news to cover the Iberville press conference is perfectly in line with the longstanding media practice of nurturing an image of Iberville as a spawning ground for criminal violence. The general drift of this news coverage reinforces the widely held view of the public housing complex as a hothouse for violent crime in dangerously close proximity to the French Quarter. Recent crime statistics, however, contradict the widely disseminated view that Iberville is one of New Orleans’s ultra-violent neighborhoods.

The absence of the local press is not due to a lack of notification or media interest in violent crime in the Iberville Housing Development The news blackout happened even though press releases were forwarded the day before the event by organizers to the city desk of the Times Picayune and the news rooms of WWL 4, WDSU6, WVUE 8 and WGNO 26 on August 2nd. These news outlets devoted coverage to neighborhood based Night Out Against Crime in previous years and 2010. And the post-Katrina murders that did occur in Iberville also received media coverage. For example, the Times Picayune, the New Orleans paper of record, carried articles on each of the three murders in the public housing complex in 2008. These same news sources ignored the message the Iberville is a murder free neighborhood. And the fact that Iberville went murder free in a city with the nation’s highest murder rate did not convince the TP and company of the newsworthiness of this development. The New Orleans media is clearly in no hurry to highlight a public housing success story in the midst of the city’s murder epidemic.

A dearth of murders and shootings in Iberville did not stop the corporate news from linking the public housing development to violent crime. A WWL news report broadcast on August 18, 2010 described Iberville as a “hotspot” for crime. The same report makes no mention that the neighborhood went murder free the twelve preceding months. A September 23, 2009 article in the TP put Iberville in the headline of a piece covering a non-fatal shooting that transpired in another neighborhood, the Sixth Ward. And the headline of another TP article, dated October 28, 2009, identified Iberville as the site of a murder on Bienville and North Derbigny. This intersection is actually located in another neighborhood. Even when Iberville is free of murders and shootings the corporate media insists that the neighborhood is experiencing murders and shootings.

The widely disseminated view that Iberville is the French Quarter’s ultra-violent neighbor is contradicted by crime statistics. From January 2008 through July 2010 New Orleans suffered 443 murders. Iberville was the scene of 6 of those murders. This accounts for 1.3% of the city’s murders. And the widely disseminated view that Iberville is a publicly subsidized killing field located dangerously close to the French Quarter does not withstand an examination of murder and shooting statistics. During the period mentioned above the French Quarter, like Iberville, recorded 6 murders. On the matter of shootings in this period Iberville registered far fewer than the city’s oldest neighborhood. A total of 10 people were shot in Iberville..In the city’s oldest neighborhood 21 people were shot. Judging from these figures the high income, privately owned French Quarter is actually a greater source of criminal violence in New Orleans than the low-income, publicly owned Iberville Housing Development!

The media image of Iberville as a haven for criminal violence serves the agenda of the cabal of politicians and real estate developers determined to eliminate public housing from the landscape of post-Katrina New Orleans. HUD responded to the epoch shortage of affordable housing following the storm by first closing and then demolishing 5,000 of the city’s 7,000 public housing apartments. The vast majority of the demolished apartments came out of the storm and flooding in habitable or easily made habitable condition. When HUD finally began demolition of these public housing apartments in late 2007 the size of the local homeless population was double that of the local homeless population in 2005. As of this writing, New Orleans has the highest per-capita rate of homelessness of any city in the nation. This bleak situation did not prevent the Housing Authority of New Orleans from announcing in August that it will seek HUD funding to radically downsize the number of public housing units at Iberville.

No persons were murdered or shot in the Iberville Housing Development during the twelve months that preceded the 2010 Night Out Against Crime. This reality clashes with the media supported image of Iberville as a breeding ground for criminal violence. This caricature of Iberville implicitly sends the message that government support for the neighborhood amounts to taxpayers subsidizing violent crime. This is a false message. Iberville is not a hot house for violent crime. And this is an inconvenient truth for the news establishment of the Crescent City.




Crime Statistics

Iberville/ French Quarter Murders and Shootings.[1]

Murders/ Shootings
2010[2]
Iberville 0 /0
FQ. 1 1

2009
Iberville 3/3
FQ. 4/7

2008
Iberville 3/ 6
FQ 1 /13

Totals
Iberville 6 /9
FQ. 6/ 21

New Orleans Murders[3]

2010 90

2009 174

2008 179

Total 443







[1] From January 1, 2008 through August 3, 2010. Sources examined: Online reports from WWL 4, WDSU6, WVUE8, WGNO26, NOcrimeline.com; and the New Orleans Times-Picayune
[2] Period surveyed for 2010 ends August 3, 2010.
[3] From January 1, 2008 through July 2010. Sources: New Orleans Police Department,
Administrative and Support Bureau for 2008 and 2009 murder statistics. The murder stat for 2010 is 58% of the 2009 murder total. NOPD murder totals for 2010 through July were not available online.

Media Fails to Cover Good News About Iberville--No Murders in Over a Year

For the Night Out Against Crime 2010 residents and supporters of the Iberville Housing Development held a press conference to announce that the neighborhood is one the few in New Orleans to have gone through the last year murder free. The relative safety of Iberville in comparison to most of the city's other neighborhoods contradicts the image, carefully nurtured by the corporate media and real estate developers, that the neighborhood, indeed all public housing developments, is a de-facto killing field. Not wanting to put forward information that challenges the crime friendly depiction of public housing, the Times-Picayune and the television news reports on New Orleans television chanels 4, 6, 8 and 26 passed on invitations to cover the Iberville's Tuesday Night Out Against Crime press conference.

The refusal of the corporate news media to cover the good news on the crime front from Iberville is in stark contrast to what happens when a murder does occur in the neighborhood. When a murder does occur in Iberville, as it does at some point or another in virtually all New Orleans neighborhoods, news crews from the Times-Picayune and channels 4,6, 8. and 26 can be counted on to cover the tragedy. The slanted news coverage of the crime issue as it pertains to Iberville sends a loud and clear message of the type of image of Iberville that the media sends to the general public.

Mike Howells

The Iberville Public Housing and Mass Public Works Movements Make Gains!

The Iberville Public Housing and Mass Public Works Movements Make Gains!

HANO Commits to Repairing All of Iberville--the Mass Movement Must Ensure This Happens

All Out to Defend Sharon Jasper at July 21 Court Appearance

In a major reversal, Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) administrator David Gilmore committed, at the agency’s June 29th hearing on their 2010-2011 annual plan, to repair and reopen all of the over 800 apartments at the Iberville public housing development. Only a few months ago Gilmore had said only 500 would be repaired and that there were “other [privatization] plans” for Iberville. Clearly this change of course is due to the determined and consistent resistance of C3/Hands Off Iberville and other forces that have denounced HANO’s demolition by neglect strategy, and the maneuvering of the Downtown Development District-led Iberville Advisory Committee to demolish and privatize Iberville.

Yet, we cannot be led into complacency by words and promises. Let us remember that in October 2001, after five years of demolishing several thousand units of public housing, then-HANO administrator Ben Bell reassured attendees at a board meeting that, “We have vowed not to build another HOPE VI project without the replacement of one-for-one public housing.” These words, of course, did not stop them from demolishing over 5,000 apartments after Katrina, with plans to only rebuild a handful. Indeed, HANO has more downsizing on the agenda. While committing to repairing all the units at Iberville, HANO’s 2010-2011 annual plan calls for selling-off 500 of the over 700 apartments in their scattered site portfolio, and includes no plans to rebuild the Florida development (that had been over 700 units), nor the Imperial Drive complex. With the two “tenant leaders” for these complexes--Diane Connerly (Florida) and Paula Taylor (Imperial Drive)--both enjoying HANO contracts for the “non-profit” agencies they head, you can be assured that these vetted leaders will not raise many objections.

The only power that can assure that the all the desperately needed units at Iberville are repaired, and that we win the equally needed mass public works plan, is a mass, independent, racially unified, militant, working class movement. The nucleus of that type of movement was present at HANO’s June 29th hearing on their annual plan. In attendance at a pre-meeting press conference and rally were C3/Hands Off Iberville members, Mike Howells, Michele Perez, Cody Marshall, Eloise Williams and Jay Arena, Pax Christi representative Paul Troyano, Joe and Katy Heeren-Mueller from the Catholic Worker house, Sam Jackson with May Day New Orleans, Endesha Juakali with Survivors Village, Public housing leaders Sharon, Kowana and Shannon Jasper, Rose Kennedy and a member of the housing group STAND.

At the rally and subsequent meting activists not only demanded the repairing of all the Iberville units, more public housing and section 8 vouchers, and the creation of a public works program, but also denounced the arrest of Sharon Jasper by a NOPD SWAT team on June 3rd at her home. The arrest and phony battery charge were in retaliation for Ms. Jasper’s heroic and continued defense of public housing and against police brutality. The week before her arrest she protested Columbian Parc’s (the former St Bernard development) continued exclusion of former residents. She also joined other community activists to as they picketed the NOPD’s central city station to denounce the reign of terror the cops have been carrying out in the area, one that has faced massive gentrification since hurricane Katrina. Ms. Jasper made it clear that, despite the repression, she will not be silenced and will continue the fight for justice in the city she loves.

Activists also gathered at the July 1, 2010 city council meeting to denounce Sharon Jasper’s arrest and the city’s plan to expand repression by building the only type of public housing they seem to support—prisons!

C3/Hands Off Iberville invites all friends of justice to join the fight for public housing and a massive public works program. All are encouraged to attend Sharon Jasper’s next court appearance, which will be on Wednesday, July 21 at 3 PM in Municipal Court, Court Room “D”. For more information call 504-520-9521.

Tell the Iberville Advisory Committee:Hands of Iberville! No to Privatization! No to land grabs!

Tell the Iberville Advisory Committee:

Hands of Iberville! No to Privatization! No to land grabs!

Reopen and repair all the public housing apartments at Iberville NOW!
Stop the Demolition by neglect strategy.

Expand don’t destroy Public Housing and other Public Services.
Public Works Now!

The Iberville Advisory Committee (IAC), a sham outfit set up by HANO and developers, will be holding a “community hearing” to “gather input” on “short and long term improvement to the Iberville” on Thursday, June 24. Their real agenda is to justify Iberville’s destruction as a public housing development. We must use this hearing to expose IAC’s real agenda and present a genuine peoples plan to defend and expand Iberville and public housing.

The chair of the IAC is Henry Charlot, an operative of the Downtown Development District (DDD). The DDD, and Charlot’s boss, Executive direct Kurt Weigle, have long sought to destroy Iberville. In a May 21, 2009 interview with WWL TV, reporter Susan Edwards found that from the perspective of “Kurt Weigle….redeveloping and demolishing Iberville removes a barrier to investment, opening the medical district up to more than just retail and residential possibilities.” Weigle told Edwards that “It (the demolition of Iberville) is going to have a positive effect on the medical district, the construction of the two hospitals…will have a much greater potential to attract investments around them.”

HANO’s appointment of a Weigle subordinate the IAC chair is a slap in the face of residents and non-residents alike who genuinely want Iberville to continue to be a source of affordable housing for low-income, working class New Orleanians.

Let your voice heard and demand that the hundreds of empty but badly needed public housing apartments at Iberville be repaired and reopened NOW!

Iberville Advisory Committee Community Meeting
Thursday, June 24
6 PM
St Jude Hall, 410 Basin St.


For more information contact C3/Hands Off Iberville, at 504-520-9521