A War In New Orleans?

Several weeks ago, NOLA blogger Forgotston posted this quote about protests to the planned demolition of publicly funded, high-crime slums:

“If you bulldoze our homes, we’re going to fight,” Sharon Jasper, who lived in one of the developments shuttered after Hurricane Katrina, said before the council meeting. “There’s going to be a war in New Orleans.”

I wouldn’t call it war, but a few tasings and pepper sprays later, the New Orleans City Council voted 7-0 to knock these moldy, lead-painted, asbestos-filled slums down.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SKdUmcgw_c[/youtube]

Ted Jackson / Times-Picayune Sharon Jasper sits in the living room of her voucher-backed private residence. “I might be poor but I don’t like to live poor. I thank God for a place to live but it’s pitiful what people give you.”

The fact is that the projects were never intended to be long term homes. Nevertheless, subsidized housing and public housing in other neighborhoods are available right now, and much nicer mixed-income housing is already being built where projects have been demolished.

Sharon Jasper admits to 57 years on the dole. (She’s 58.) She still has the time and energy to get out there and protest at every opportunity, including at today’s protests. The fact that she can live in the subsidized apartment pictured at left and call it “pitiful” – is indicative of a serious problem. And the problem is that you don’t appreciate what you haven’t earned.

I’ve been on welfare. I’m in favor of a temporary, limited welfare system for those who need it. People who can furnish their subsidized apartment with nice furniture and a 60 inch flat screen TV don’t need it. Maybe the TV was a gift. If so, she should sell it, and pay that electric bill she’s griping about in the article. That’s how it works for the rest of us. The majority of my Christmas budget was spent yesterday on a hot water heater. That’s life.

Michelle Malkin has the latest on the welfare class we exported to Houston. I wrote about these folks in Houston: We have a problem on the 2006 anniversary of Katrina. At that time, Houstonians were rightly frustrated that a year after Katrina, people were simply not finding jobs. They weren’t showing up at job fairs. They only showed up for handouts. Another year later, nothing has changed for New Orleans’ generational welfare class:

The majority of transplanted Katrina evacuees in Harris County, an estimated 100,000, are not on federal housing assistance and have moved on with their lives, but there is a small minority of people who still are struggling, community activists say.

Those people are not going to support themselves until there is absolutely no other option, and possibly not even then. Part of the current political flap is the so called “right to return” for New Orleans “refugees.” The right to come back and be supported by taxpayers? There are jobs going to spare here. We’ve absorbed tens of thousands of illegal aliens and we still don’t have enough workers. People can return anytime they please, if they’re willing to pay their own way.

Barack Obama and John Edwards are on record as wanting to keep the moldy, lead-painted, asbestos-filled, high-crime slums that these protestors are fighting to keep open. Who’s really doing more to help poor people? Those who would continue warehousing them in places like this?

Or those who push them – however unwilling some may be – into apartments like the one Sharon Jasper enjoys, or this new mixed-income housing?

Sharon Jasper was right about a war going on in New Orleans. It’s a class war – and Obama, Edwards, and the protesters are not on the side of poor people.

UPDATE: A very interesting Times-Pic article, Demolition protests ignore some realities. (h/t Jackson Jambayala) There are so many money quotes in that article I don’t know where to start, but here’s a couple that will raise your blood pressure:

Indeed, federal lawsuits filed in New Orleans before Katrina objected not to demolitions, but to the living conditions in the city’s aging public housing developments, many of which were built in the 1930s and 1940s and were derided for warehousing the poor in dilapidated, inaccessible buildings.

… Part of the resistance to repairing comes down to money: HUD estimates it would cost $130 million to make “the bare minimum” of Katrina-related repairs to St. Bernard, Cooper, Peete and Lafitte, and that correcting all pre-existing code violations and other problems with the aging developments would cost $745 million. The demolition and redevelopment plan would cost $597 million, or $150 million less.

And this one might tend to bring it back down, until you consider how hard liberal activists are fighting against the demolition and mixed-income plan:

One former Cooper resident, April Carter, 28, said River Garden is a far better place to raise her three children. She called the neighborhood clean and relatively quiet.

“I’m better. I’m better off. My children were seeing killings and fights, and I didn’t want that,” said Carter, a single parent who manages a coffee shop. “I call this luxury.”

Carter said that under a subsidized-rent program, she pays about $600 a month at River Garden, including utilities, which is double what she paid at Cooper. She didn’t complain: “I’m budgeting better. I have a savings account now, and I didn’t have one before.”

It reminds me of the howls that accompanied the welfare reform in the 90s which turned out to be unjustified.