Violent Protest Over Housing in New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS — After protesters clashed violently with the police inside and outside the New Orleans City Council chambers on Thursday, the council voted unanimously to allow the federal government to demolish 4,500 apartments in the four biggest public housing projects in the city.

But the council also called on the Department of Housing and Urban Development to reopen some apartments in the closed projects immediately, and to rebuild all of the public-housing units that it bulldozes. The agency plans to replace barracks-style projects, known as “the bricks,” with mixed-income developments.

“We need affordable housing in this city,” said Shelley Stephenson Midura, who proposed the resolution adopted by the council. But, she continued, “public housing ought not to be the warehouse for the poor.”

Advocates for public housing residents contend that the agency’s plan will not provide enough housing for the 3,000 families who lived in the projects before Hurricane Katrina, almost all of whom were black. Many of them have not been able to return to the city, and some protesters say they are being deliberately excluded from New Orleans.

“The issue is and the question remains, who’s in the mix,” said Torin T. Sanders, pastor of the Sixth Baptist Church, referring to the plan for mixed-income housing. He and other speakers at the four-hour hearing that preceded the vote said that previous redevelopment efforts had shut out most public housing residents.

The city’s shortage of low-cost housing is only going to get worse in the coming months, as the federal government tries to move more than 30,000 people out of government-owned trailers, said Courtney Cowart, strategic director of disaster response for the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana.

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