How do you like the police state?
"New Orleans to raze 4,500 apartments; Protesters, police scuffle outside as council votes" by Cain Burdeau, Associated Press | December 21, 2007
NEW ORLEANS - Despite occasionally violent protests outside, the City Council voted yesterday in favor of demolishing about 4,500 public housing units, a milestone in the city's effort to balance its heritage and its post-hurricane rebuilding efforts.
The unanimous vote to permit the federal government to tear down four public housing developments - a crucial moment in a protracted fight between the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and residents, activists and preservationists - followed hours of debate and periodic clashes in the street.
Police used chemical spray and stun guns as dozens of protesters tried to force their way into the packed City Council chamber.
One woman was sprayed and dragged from the gates. Emergency workers took her away on a stretcher. Another woman said officers had fired a stun gun at her, and still had what appeared to be a Taser wire hanging from her shirt.
Kim Ellis, the woman who was taken away in an ambulance:
"I was just standing, trying to get into my City Council meeting."
Bill Quigley, a Loyola University law professor who opposes demolition, as he held a strand of Taser wire he said had been shot into another protester, said he believed the crackdown violated public meetings laws:
"Is this what democracy looks like?"
Ummm, AmeriKan "democracy, yeah.
Protesters said they pushed against the iron gates that kept them out of the building because the Housing Authority of New Orleans had disproportionately allowed supporters of the demolition to pack the chambers.
Oh, the STATE PACKED the ROOM, huh?
At the peak of the confusion, some 70 protesters faced about a dozen mounted police and 40 law enforcement officers on foot. Police said 15 people were arrested on charges ranging from battery to disorderly conduct. The meeting itself was mostly peaceful, although a fight in the chambers between protesters and police caused a brief interruption.
Some public housing residents repeated during the daylong debate that they welcomed the plan to replace the decades-old structures with mixed-income housing. Other residents and their advocates said they fear the plan will result in loss of badly needed housing for the city's low-income black residents.
The vote crossed racial lines, with the three black council members joining four whites. The demolition debate has at times exposed class and race divisions in the city - most public housing residents are black, as were many of the protesters, while the City Council is majority white.
Walter Gallas, who is white and the director of the New Orleans Field Office of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, said the apartment buildings should be prized because they are sturdy and well-built:
"I'd like to add a new term to the local dialogue in post-Katrina New Orleans: planning by demolition."
And likely the POINT of the "INCOMPETENT NEGLECT!"
HUD wants to demolish the buildings, most of them damaged by Hurricane Katrina, so developers can take advantage of tax credits and build new mixed-income neighborhoods.
It says the redevelopment, which was in the works before Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005, will mark an end to the city's failed public housing experiment that lumped the poor into crime-ridden complexes and marooned them outside the life of the rest of the city.
Critics say the plan will shrink the stock of cheap housing and drive poor blacks out of the city.
Kali Akuno, an organizer with the Coalition to Stop the Demolition:
"It is beyond callous, and can only be seen as malicious discrimination. It is an unabashed attempt to eliminate the black population of New Orleans."
Yup! Eliminate all the poor black folk first, since they have no power or voice.
I wonder why the Times doesn't give you the picture of the brother with his head being implanted in the hood of a cop car during an arrest.
"New Orleans Council Votes for Demolition of Housing" by ADAM NOSSITER and LESLIE EATON
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 here.
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.
Advocates for public housing residents contended that the agency’s plan would not provide enough housing for the 3,000 families who lived in the projects before Hurricane Katrina, almost all of them black. Many of them have not been able to return to the city, and some protesters said they were being deliberately excluded from New Orleans.
Rev. Torin T. Sanders, pastor of the Sixth Baptist Church, referring to the plan for mixed-income housing:
“The issue is and the question remains, who’s in the mix.”
He and other speakers at the four-hour hearing before the vote said past redevelopment efforts had shut out most public housing residents.
The city’s shortage of low-cost housing was only going to get worse in the coming months, as the federal government tried 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.
The future of public housing in New Orleans has been a subject of debate in this storm-scarred city, involving race, money, history, the right to return and who gets to make the decisions.
What?! New Orleans poor blacks now akin to Palestinians?
No right of return, huh?
That the three black members and four white members on the City Council joined to support the demolition seemed to echo a widely held feeling here, crossing racial lines, that the old housing projects were deeply dysfunctional for their residents and for the people who lived nearby.
Mistrust of the government was voiced by many of the speakers who opposed the demolition. Supporters said most of the protesters were people who did not live in New Orleans, much less in the four housing projects.
Police officers tried to keep protesters out of the Council chambers once all the seats were filled. Demonstrators tried to push through some iron gates to get in when the police used what appeared to be pepper spray and stun guns; at least two protesters needed medical treatment.
Notice how the New York Times minimizes the police brutality, readers?
Wait's until the end of the piece to describe what happened.
But they will save us all when the fascism comes, right?
There was also a brief fight inside the chambers, and the police ejected some demonstrators. About 15 protesters were arrested, the police said, mostly on charges of disturbing the peace."
