Another meeting of the New Orleans City Council turned ugly as a couple dozen of the helpless welfare recipients who could not even get out of the way of Hurricane Katrina after being given several days' notice have now managed to get to yet another government meeting to demand more free stuff from that taxpayers who actually work for a living.
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Dozens of public housing residents Thursday protested the federal government's plan to demolish four complexes in New Orleans, saying they are left without homes in a city where rentals are nearly impossible to find.
One day after U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson announced that New Orleans would lose housing complexes but gain a "renaissance" of better low-income housing, some of the families who called St. Bernard, Lafitte, C.J. Peete and B.W. Cooper home cried foul at a City Council hearing.
"By tearing down developments you're not giving me the choice to come back home to New Orleans, where I was forced to leave," said Cherlynn Gaynor, 42, who grew up in the Lafitte complex and was raising her 11 year-old daughter there before the levee failures during Katrina drowned the city. "I pay taxes and I work. Why would you shut us out from where our culture is?"
Well apparently Gaynor doesn't work hard enough to afford her own apartment. Perhaps if she actually took on a full-time 40-hour-per-week job, she could afford to move back to New Orleans. Until then, she needs to be grateful for any public housing that the rest of us provide for her, whether in's in Houston, Anchorage Alaska, or the middle of the Arizona desert. Like my momma always used to say: "Beggars can't be choosers".
Gaynor was joined by about two dozen residents who said they are hurt and frustrated by the plan to tear down complexes with the promise to redevelop them in three years.
"I just need somewhere to stay," said Patricia Thomas, who lost her apartment at Lafitte to the flooding but has lived at Iberville, C.J. Peete and B.W. Cooper over the years.
Fine. Stay in Houston or wherever else HUD put you. If you want choice housing, get off your butt and get a job.
New Orleans' public housing was among the worst in the nation. In fact it was so bad that the federal government stepped in and took control away from the city due to drugs, gang problems, and chronic neglect and corruption. It never really improved though, and Katrina was seen as a blessing by many New Orleans residents because it brought about the removal of many of these people who tended to be responsible for a disproportionate share of the city's crime. However HUD has announced plans to rebuilt many of these projects and repopulate them with the same deadbeats and trouble-makers that blighted the city originally. (If this alone isn't a good reason to disband HUD< I don't know what is.)
"It's important to see everyone be able to come back," said Scott Keller, deputy chief of staff for HUD, who spoke in place of Jackson, who had to return to Washington, D.C., for a meeting. "We don't want gangs. We don't want unsafe conditions. We want single moms to be safe, and their children."
The problem is that it won't just be single moms with their kids and elderly people living there. Anyone who has ever driven through these projects couldn't have helped but notice all of the young males loitering around all day and all night, shooting basketballs at hoops and drinking beer on the stoops. Most of those single moms have taken up with some other guy and most of those guys have either moved into the apartments with them (in violation of federal public housing regulations) or just hang out there all day. Most of them don't work either and to guys like that, a welfare mom with a cheap or free apartment and food stamps is a gold mine. And many of the elderly also wind up with their kids or grandkids living in their units as well. Sadly, to a large segment of our society, working is something that saps and suckers do, and sponging off of someone who is already on charity is seen as acceptable and even admirable.
If the projects are re-opened and given back to the same no-job-having baby-factory mommas that used to live there, you can bet that their boyfriends will all be back in there too, rolling their drugs and shooting each other when not scarfing down WIC food and lounging in the comfort of the air conditioners that we taxpayers put in every unit.
HUD and the city need to back off and just let the market handle housing in the city. Jobs will bring people in to work and working people can afford market-rate housing. The city doesn't need welfare lay-abouts and it's stupid to import thousands of them just because they used to live there once and are now clamoring for new apartments and help moving back. Keep the freeloaders wherever they're at now and turn that land over to private developers who can build housing for working people to buy or retail shops that will benefit everyone.
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