December 30th post on the C3 list on tragic Tuesday, Dec. 28 fire in an abandoned warehouse that killed 8 young people:
Hi Elizabeth,
While Landrieu is forced by circumstances to acknowledge that New Orleans suffers from a homelessness problem, he is also proposing "solutions" to the social problems highlighted by the Ninth Ward fire that in effect trample on the human rights of the city's homeless. Today's Times-Picayune reported the Mayor as saying, "It is, just from my perspective, if someone's in a dwelling and they're putting themselves and other people in danger, it's better for them to be on the street". That people who live on the sidewalks and streets of the city are in danger of dying from exposure to the elements apparently does not register with Landrieu. Another one of Mayor Landrieu's "solutions" to the dangers confronting the homeless who squat in abandoned homes is to have those who are fortunate enough to reside in safe, sanitary and affordable housing to rat out their squatter neighbors to the authorities. Just what the homeless need, new enemies in the form of neighborhood vigilantes! Yeah, you right Mitch. And, finally, another one of Landrieu's "solutions" to problems confronting the homeless, in particular those homeless drawn to squatting, is to step up the mass demolition of the city's true shelters of last resort-abandoned homes. These "solutions" collectively sound like a final solution to me.
So what can those of us who are in a positon to challenge the narrative on squatting and homelessness being spun by Landrieu and the gentrifiers in the wake of the Ninth Ward fire do? Bill Quigley and World Socialist Website have provided a progressive analysis of the tragedy for a national audience. I think it would be a good thing to network with the Crescent City Anti-Authoritarians and interested housing activists to see if there is intererest in organizing collective resistance to the most heinous of the Mayor's proposed "solutions" to the problems facing homeless squatters. Perhaps this networking will lead to a meeting, an educational, a press conference, a protest or something else. Whatever, I do have a gut feeling that the tragedy on Tuesday in the Ninth Ward is putting some fire into the bellies of the often beaten beaten down people of New Orleans.
Any feedback?
Mike Howells
December 29th post on the C3 list:
Today Mayor Landrieu put forward his solution to the acute problem of poor people in New Orleans being compelled by force of circumstances to find shelter in abandoned structures, demolish the abandoned structures! This is the same mayor who would like us to believe that the proposal to destroy the Iberville Housing Development, the city cente'rs single most important source of affordable and safe low-income housing, is an anti-poverty measure. Don't get the wrong idea though. Landrieu is not against all low -income housing close to the city center. He is a booster of that one form of state owned public housing for the poor that every member of the local ruling class supports, Orleans Parish Prison. Sadly, but not surprisingly, the Mayor is now attempting to use the tragic fire in the Ninth Ward as a pretext to promote "anti-bilight" measures that promise only to worsen the city's horrific shortage of low-income affordable housing.
If anything approaching a humane solution to the problem that forces thousands in New Orleans to take shelter in abandoned and unsafe housing here everyday is to be achieved, the first thing that needs to be demolished is the unspoken rule that as far as housing policy goes the government is only in the business of promoting gentrication. As part of this process well intentioned people need to come to terms with the reality that charity and self-help measures are band aids that do little more than partially cover the growing social cancer of homelessness. This is clearly a very hard lesson to learn for the people of a city who have given so much of themselves to self-help initiatives and charitable activities. Still, this is a lesson that needs to be learned. This is a stepping stone to the building of a movement that demands, fights for and achieves the addition of the tens of thousands of units of safe, sanitary and affordable units of housing that New Orleanians need but that politicians like Landrieu and his corpoarate paymasters don't want.
Saturday, January 1, 2011
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Tell HUD: No Choice Neighbrohoods Grant to Demolish Iberville
Secretary Shaun Donovan
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
451 7th Street S.W.
Washington, D.C. 20410
Dear Secretary Donovan,
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
451 7th Street S.W.
Washington, D.C. 20410
Dear Secretary Donovan,
This letter is to demand that the Department of Housing and Urban Development not award a Choice Neighborhoods Implementation grant to the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) and City of New Orleans to demolish and privatize the Iberville Public Housing development. HANO and the City, on behalf of their for-profit developer “partners”, HRI Properties and McCormick, Baron, Salazar submitted their application in October 2010.
The decision of the City of New Orleans and the Housing Authority of New Orleans--the latter led by HUD-imposed director, David Gilmore, of Gilmore Kean LLC--to seek the demolition of Iberville is a continuation of the same demolition and dispersal policies pursued by the Bush and Nagin administrations. The demolition and privatization of Iberville, and forced eviction of residents--what HUD and HANO euphemistically call a “transformation plan”--will only deepen the dire affordable housing crisis confronting New Orleans. According to a study conducted by HUD itself, since the 2005 Hurricane Katrina the city’s homeless population has doubled and mid-priced rental units in the $300 to $600 have fallen from 66,300 in 2004 to 19,300 in 2009, while the average monthly housing cost has jumped from $662 to $882 a month. New Orleans, unsurprisingly, is now the most rent-burdened city in America, with a 2008 study finding that 41% of New Orleans renters spend at least half of their pre-tax income on rent.
Greatly contributing to the affordable housing crisis was the Bush administration’s demolition of 5,000 little-damaged, and badly needed public housing apartments in the aftermath of Katrina. Two investigators appointed by the United Nation’s Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD)--Miloon Kothari and Gay McDougall--condemned the demolition as a flagrant violation of a host of international human rights treaties. In their report they called on federal, state, and local authorities to “protect the human rights of African Americans affected by Hurricane Katrina” by, among various measures, “immediately halt[ing] the demolition of public housing in New Orleans.” Sadly, the Bush administration ignored these calls. Today we suffer the consequences, as even the limited number of public housing units promised have not been built, and Congress’ failure to renew the so-called GO Zone tax credits threatens the few units promised at the Lafitte and B.W. Cooper developments.
David Gilmore told the Times Picayune newspaper that the failure to renew the Go Zone bonds “would represent a tragic loss to New Orleans”. Well, we argue the demolition of Iberville would be an even greater one. It is doubly troubling that Gilmore awarded the redevelopment contract to HRI. This well-connected New Orleans company carried out the displacement of low-income black residents at the former St. Thomas development. The HRI-led “redevelopment” slashed the number of public housing units from 1,510 to less than 200, with even fewer for those that make under 30% of the area median income--the income level of 90% of the former residents, most of whom have never had the chance to return. Further raising concerns is that a decade after HRI demolished St. Thomas they have yet to build the promised and agreed upon 100 off-site 3 and 4 bedroom apartments for displaced residents. This is the same company that is to guarantee the so-called ‘one for one’ replacement at Iberville!
Instead of demolition—32 apartments of which have already met the wrecking ball —we demand the immediate refurbishing of all the 821 apartments at Iberville. It is a crime that hundreds of quickly repairable units lie empty at Iberville while tens of thousands of families are on waiting lists for housing assistance—lists that would grow longer if applications were again accepted for public housing and section 8.
The repairing of Iberville—money which was made available as part of the Federal governments stimulus package, but not properly used for needed repairs—should be part of a massive expansion of public housing in New Orleans and across the country. We do not need nor want an expansion of the “3-D” approach of Demolish, Disrupt, and Disperse, which HUD is contemplating with its PETRA plan to hand over the entire public housing stock to bankers and developers. Instead, we call for a massive expansion of public housing as part of a new, direct government-employment, public works plan. New Orleans’ Iberville public housing development, a land that has witnessed two earlier displacements of low-income African American communities, is a good place to start this renewed commitment to both the public sector and racial and economic justice.
Friday, November 5, 2010
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
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
Monday, October 4, 2010
Lessons of History for Defending Iberville Today
HOW THE PEOPLE STOPPED HANO’S ATTEMPT TO DESTROY IBERVILLE IN 2005 & WHAT THEY CAN DO TO SAVE THE NEIGHBORHOOD FROM HANO TODAY!
The widely disseminated idea that a Big Four style “redevelopment” of the Iberville Housing Development is a done deal fails to account for why HANO and HRI attempted to impose a virtually identical scheme on the public housing neighborhood in 2005 but failed. If anything, in 2005, the position of the forces that wanted to destroy Iberville by way of mixed-income housing reform was stronger than today. Iberville was closed at the time. Its residents were scattered throughout the country. And HANO was under the control of the Bush Administration. Yet Iberville, the conventional public housing neighborhood, reopened despite the opposition of then Mayor Nagin, City Council and HRI.. Why?
Come to a public discussion putting the spotlight on the people’s fight back of 2005 that forced the Administration of George W. Bush to reopen and maintain the Iberville Housing Development. Learn how a grass roots coalition of Iberville residents and non-resident public housing supporters accomplished what most “experts” at the time thought impossible, the reopening of the Iberville Housing Development as a conventional public housing neighborhood. And get insights into what can be done to stop HANO’s new attack on Iberville.
7pm Thursday
October 14, 2010
St. Jude’s Basin Hall
410 Basin Street
Sponsor: C3Hands Off Iberville. 504-587-0080
Please forward.
The widely disseminated idea that a Big Four style “redevelopment” of the Iberville Housing Development is a done deal fails to account for why HANO and HRI attempted to impose a virtually identical scheme on the public housing neighborhood in 2005 but failed. If anything, in 2005, the position of the forces that wanted to destroy Iberville by way of mixed-income housing reform was stronger than today. Iberville was closed at the time. Its residents were scattered throughout the country. And HANO was under the control of the Bush Administration. Yet Iberville, the conventional public housing neighborhood, reopened despite the opposition of then Mayor Nagin, City Council and HRI.. Why?
Come to a public discussion putting the spotlight on the people’s fight back of 2005 that forced the Administration of George W. Bush to reopen and maintain the Iberville Housing Development. Learn how a grass roots coalition of Iberville residents and non-resident public housing supporters accomplished what most “experts” at the time thought impossible, the reopening of the Iberville Housing Development as a conventional public housing neighborhood. And get insights into what can be done to stop HANO’s new attack on Iberville.
7pm Thursday
October 14, 2010
St. Jude’s Basin Hall
410 Basin Street
Sponsor: C3Hands Off Iberville. 504-587-0080
Please forward.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
C3/Hands Off Iberville member Malcolm Willison: Letter to Editor Denounces Demolition Plan
To the editor:
Your recent editorial on News Orlean's housing crisis (September 2, 2010) is much appreciated by those in the city faced with a continuing crisis in af-fordable housing.Rental housing scarcity, as you point- ed out, means that a major part of the income of low-pay workers and of those retired or handicapped or oth-erwise unable to work full time or at all, has to be de-voted to rent. Far too many pre-Katrina New Orleans residents are stuck far away, unable to come back to their city. In abandoned housing, shelters, or on the streets are between three and twelve thousand home-less, many veterans, twice the number before Katrina. Yet HUD continues its recent mass demolition of loc-al public housing: the HUD-run Housing Authority of New Orleans is pursuing federal funding for demoli-tion and radical downsizing of conventional public housing at the Iberville Development, the last of the sturdy, repairable public housing aimed for the low-income, retired, and disabled. The “mixed-income” housing redevelopment HANO has sought is part of the disastrous post-Katrina HOPE VI “revitalization” of the city’s Big Four housing developments, eliminating 5,000 crucial public housing units after Katrina. Yet Congress has sharply reduced funding for HOPE VI, and private corporations involved struggle to sell bonds for the building, while long waiting lists bedevil those seeking inadequately funded Section 8 housing, with constant difficulties with landlords and evictions.The administration needs to improve its housing policies.
Yours sincerely, Malcolm Willison
Your recent editorial on News Orlean's housing crisis (September 2, 2010) is much appreciated by those in the city faced with a continuing crisis in af-fordable housing.Rental housing scarcity, as you point- ed out, means that a major part of the income of low-pay workers and of those retired or handicapped or oth-erwise unable to work full time or at all, has to be de-voted to rent. Far too many pre-Katrina New Orleans residents are stuck far away, unable to come back to their city. In abandoned housing, shelters, or on the streets are between three and twelve thousand home-less, many veterans, twice the number before Katrina. Yet HUD continues its recent mass demolition of loc-al public housing: the HUD-run Housing Authority of New Orleans is pursuing federal funding for demoli-tion and radical downsizing of conventional public housing at the Iberville Development, the last of the sturdy, repairable public housing aimed for the low-income, retired, and disabled. The “mixed-income” housing redevelopment HANO has sought is part of the disastrous post-Katrina HOPE VI “revitalization” of the city’s Big Four housing developments, eliminating 5,000 crucial public housing units after Katrina. Yet Congress has sharply reduced funding for HOPE VI, and private corporations involved struggle to sell bonds for the building, while long waiting lists bedevil those seeking inadequately funded Section 8 housing, with constant difficulties with landlords and evictions.The administration needs to improve its housing policies.
Yours sincerely, Malcolm Willison
Friday, August 27, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
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 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
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