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Violent Protest Over Housing in New Orleans    [

    Dozens Protest Projects' Razing
    By Cain Burdeau
    The Associated Press

    Friday 21 December 2007

New Orleans units set for demolition.

    New Orleans - Police used chemical spray and stun guns Thursday on protesters who tried to force their way into a City Council meeting, the latest strife over plans to demolish 4,500 public housing units in a redevelopment project that council members unanimously supported.

    The vote to permit the federal government to tear down four public housing developments was a critical moment in a protracted fight between the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and residents, activists and preservationists.

    Police said 15 people were arrested on charges including battery and disorderly conduct. Four people were taken to hospitals - two of them women who had been stunned with Tasers - and five others were injured and treated on the scene, police said. All four in the hospital were stable, police said.

    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. Dozens tried to force their way in.

    At the peak of the confusion, 70 protesters were facing about a dozen mounted police and 40 more law enforcement officers on foot.

    One woman was sprayed by police and dragged from the gates; emergency workers took her away on a stretcher. Another woman said she was stunned by officers, and had what appeared to be a Taser wire still hanging from her shirt.

    "I was just standing, trying to get into my City Council meeting," said the dazed woman, Kim Ellis, who was taken away in an ambulance.

    "Is this what democracy looks like?" Bill Quigley, a Loyola University law professor who opposes demolition, said as he held a strand of Taser wire he said had been shot into another of the protesters.

    Quigley said he thinks the crackdown violated public meetings laws.

    After 30 minutes of struggle to get into the meeting, protesters fell back, continuously chanting with bullhorns. An afternoon storm thinned the demonstrators, some of whom had been waiting since 7 a.m. to enter, and the crowd disappeared altogether shortly after the afternoon vote.

    The meeting was mostly peaceful, although an early fight in the chambers between protesters and police caused a brief interruption.

    Some public housing residents repeated during the daylong debate that they welcome the plan to replace the decades-old structures with mixed-income, mixed-use development. Other residents and their advocates said they fear the plan will result in the loss of badly needed housing for the city's low-income black residents.

    The vote crossed racial lines, with the three black and four white members agreeing.

    Most of the units HUD plans to demolish are vacant, and many suffered heavy damage in Hurricane Katrina, but those who oppose their demolition say they should be improved instead.

    Critics of the plan say it will drive poor people from neighborhoods where they have lived for generations, but HUD denies that and says the plan will create an equal amount of affordable housing as existed before Katrina hit.

    The council promised to monitor the redevelopment and make sure the poor have places to come back to, but those assurances did little to assuage opponents.

    "The vote was already a done deal," the Rev. Marshall Truehill said. "There were no concessions."

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    Violent Protest Over Housing in New Orleans
    By Adam Nossiter and Leslie Eaton
    The New York Times

    Friday 21 December 2007

    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 in the city.

    But 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.

    "We need affordable housing in this city," said Shelley Stephenson Midura, who proposed the resolution adopted by the council. But, she continued, "public housing ought not to be the warehouse for the poor."

    Advocates for public housing residents contend that the agency's plan will not provide enough housing for the 3,000 families who lived in the projects before Hurricane Katrina, almost all of whom were black. Many of them have not been able to return to the city, and some protesters say they are being deliberately excluded from New Orleans.

    "The issue is and the question remains, who's in the mix," said Torin T. Sanders, pastor of the Sixth Baptist Church, referring to the plan for mixed-income housing. He and other speakers at the four-hour hearing that preceded the vote said that previous redevelopment efforts had shut out most public housing residents.

    The city's shortage of low-cost housing is only going to get worse in the coming months, as the federal government tries 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.

    But representatives of the residents' councils at three projects spoke earlier in the hearing, describing the poor conditions at the complexes before the storm and expressing their support for the new plans. "It's about being able to walk into a house and say this is a house, not a project," said Donna Johnigan, a resident at the B.W. Cooper Apartments, which the government began to demolish last week.

    The future of public housing in the city has been a subject of passionate debate in this storm-scarred city, involving race, money, history, the right to return - and who gets to make the decisions.

    That the three blacks and four whites on the council joined to support the demolitions seemed to echo a widely held feeling here, crossing racial lines, that the old housing projects were deeply dysfunctional, both for their residents and for the people who lived around them.

    Mistrust of the government was voiced by many of the speakers who opposed the demolitions, while supporters said most of the protesters were outsiders who did not live in New Orleans, much less in the four housing projects.

    Police officers on foot and horseback 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 into the chambers when the police used what appeared to be pepper spray and stun guns; at least two demonstrators needed medical treatment.

    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.

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    Adam Nossiter reported from New Orleans, and Leslie Eaton from Dallas.