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Old 12-28-2005, 03:25 AM
LittleOldLady LittleOldLady is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2005
Posts: 72
Default Re: update: new orleans

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The leadership IS pandering to the demands of the wealthy. What the wealthy want is a richer and especially whiter New Orleans. That's what all this NIMBY-ing about the trailers is all about, preventing the housing project and Lower Ninth Ward people from coming back.

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That seems like a good thing to me. It seems these people were never productively involved in the economy of the city in the first place. They've been relocated, why in the world would anyone want to make an effort to bring them back? As the OP put it -

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pvn: The public housing residents won't be brought in until later (and apparently many of them have decided not to come back).

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I don't get it. Public housing residents get to choose where they will live, and be returned at someone elses expense? Those that can afford to return will.

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Until the storm it was customary to send buses round to the projects on election day to bring the residents to the polling places. That was, for example, how bond issues and millage increases got passed. (Public housing and section 8 residents did not pay the increased millages either directly or indirectly; they just voted for them.) The busloads from the public housing projects also formed the voter base of many of our elected officials. Those officials would like to see their voter base return.

Just as some people and their political representatives would like to see a whiter, richer city, others have a vested interest in maintaining a large African-American majority.

It should also be remembered that while the Lower Ninth Ward was the least desirable neighborhood in the city, and it did contain (infamous) housing projects, much of the Lower Ninth Ward consisted of modest homes which had been passed down from generation to generation. These homes were owned and occupied by many of the lower-paid workers on whom New Orleans' service-based economy depended. These people have as much interest in coming home to their properties and rebuilding as the people in the big houses on the lakefront. And the economy as it revives will need their labor.
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