NEW ORLEANS, LA - With a small group of protesters jeering, officials with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development broke ground Tuesday on a $190 million mixed-income community being built atop the former St. Bernard housing development. St. Bernard was one of four sprawling mid-century housing developments flooded during Hurricane Katrina and torn down this year.
In their place are four gaping empty lots. HUD says it will redevelop all four sites and that by 2011 it will have doubled the number of New Orleans households receiving federal housing assistance from about 33,000 to 66,000. But skepticism runs deep in a city where housing projects have been neglected in the past and not always redeveloped and rebuilt as promised. "We've been through this before," said the Rev. Marshall Truehill, a Baptist pastor. "I'll believe it when I see it. I don't want to see those large empty tracts of land, that's unproductive for the community."
HUD Secretary Steve Preston said residents have nothing to fear. "The groundbreaking at St. Bernard is just the beginning," he said. Over the next few years, developers will try to use tax credits, federal grant money and private investments to get new homes, community centers, a maintenance building, YMCA facility and low rise commercial strip built at St. Bernard.
Getting the money has not been easy in the current economic climate, but HUD officials say the financing for St. Bernard is in place. Preston said structures should be going up on the other three sites in the next year as financing is arranged. A small and dogged group of protesters jeered the groundbreaking ceremony Tuesday, chanting "Corrupt politicians have to go."
The chant was a jab at, among others, former HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson, who resigned in March after he was accused of political favoritism and became the subject of a criminal investigation. Among other allegations, an FBI probe has examined his ties to work after Hurricane Katrina. No criminal charges have been filed and Alphonso has said he did nothing wrong.
Tuesday's demonstration was low key in comparison to the emotional, and at times violent, confrontations between developers and protesters a year ago when numerous protesters stood in the way of excavators and were arrested. The 2007 protests drew in a wide range of people - residents, clergy, full-time protest groups, academics and preservationists and galvanized support for alternative redevelopment ideas to keep more of the original historic buildings and move hurricane evacuees back into the city faster.
Federal officials, though, favored a raze-and-rebuild strategy and the City Council got on board, approving the demolition plan on Dec. 20, 2007. That date became one of the most emotional days in the aftermath of Katrina after police used pepper spray and stun guns to disperse a crowd of protesters shut out from the City Council chambers.
Source: NOLA.com