DeBerry hits it on the head

This column by Jarvis DeBerry is required reading.

The issues of the poor often intersect with those who are racially oppressed, but not always. We see the conflicts between the two groups when black people with money wage campaigns against those who are without.

Eastern New Orleans has often been a battleground for this kind of intra-racial class warfare because that part of the city has included beautiful mansions and huge unsightly apartment complexes -- one of which I used to call home. Councilwoman Cynthia Willard-Lewis gave the impression soon after Hurricane Katrina that she spoke for the entire area when she trumpeted the phrase "right to return."

She's fought mightily for homeowners -- that is, those who have already acquired some semblance of wealth. However, she has shown herself to be indifferent -- if not outright opposed -- to the interests of low-wage residents who require affordable-housing options to return to the city.

In leading the opposition against a developer looking to build 36 affordable single-family houses near Lake Carmel at an average cost of $200,000, Willard-Lewis said the interests of current residents are her chief concern. So much for everybody else returning.

The City Planning Commission voted 6-2 to approve the legal subdivision developer Harold Foley needs to start his project. The New Orleans City Council, however, voted 5-2 against the project. The only two members to show Foley support were James Carter and Shelley Midura.

In voting against the project, the City Council isn't showing itself to be any different than the St. Bernard Parish Council, which has twice been scolded by a federal court judge for violating the Fair Housing Act.

The judge found that St. Bernard officials have withheld a routine re-subdivision request for a developer planning to build apartments because parish officials are trying to keep out black people.

See Judge Ginger Berrigan's order.

The City Council is employing the same strategy St. Bernard officials have used. It's difficult to imagine a judge looking any more kindly on the city's blockade of this project. The federal court would be unfairly punishing St. Bernard if it allowed New Orleans to do the same thing.

Early Reaction to the Zoning Master Plan

That's right! A much-anticipated draft of the zoning master plan from Goody Clancy is available online.

This past November, I was pretty torn about giving any zoning master plan the rule of law given the nasty legacy of past planning efforts (see Back, Bring New Orleans).

But I reflected after the fact that the zoning master plan enshrined in law might be the only way to rebuild the sagging neighborhoods of places like New Orleans East, which has otherwise seen way too little institutional investment since Katrina.

So this is the area that I was most interested in upon the release of the plan.

Check out what's in store for New Orleans East on this pdf map.

The most remarkable decision was to zone for high density mixed use urban development around Read Blvd. This, to me, is precisely the kind of thing that the East needs. Without some sort of urban core, I don't see how the East attracts the kind of population it needs to continue to beat back the resistant footprint shrinkers who still advocate for the razing of that entire section of town. One example of what this kind of new urban development could look like is Atlantic Station in Atlanta. Given the rather nasty medium term outlook for the East, I think this kind of urban anchor would be a huge victory.

So I was disappointed but not surprised by the initial reaction of Councilwoman Cynthia Willard-Lewis, who "represents" the East. In a two paragraph response distributed via Vincent Sylvain's political consultancy email listserv, Willard-Lewis' primary message is a quite pathetic complaint that she was not given an advance copy of the draft before the public:

The Council President announced at the Recovery Committee on last Wednesday, that she wanted Council members briefed on the draft of the Master Plan developed by Goody-Clancy before there was public discussion. This was to take place before the draft was released to the community and press. Unfortunately I was never contacted by anyone regarding this briefing. Needless to say I was surprised to read in the local newspaper that the draft is on the website and the press had a copy before my office had access.

Of a greater concern to me were the recommendations in the draft regarding the development of eastern New Orleans. The consultants are recommending commercial and multifamily land uses. That is a major concern considering that eastern New Orleans already has high density multifamily projects which are not in proportion to the rest of the City. I understand this is a draft and I will be working with my constituents to address this disparity. This again points to the problem with citizens approving legislation, planning and zoning policies into law sight unseen.

Now let's not ignore this second paragraph, which is at least on-topic, though it may ultimately be deemed uninformed. It doesn't take much analytical skill to understand that Willard-Lewis' concern is that the East will become a dumping ground for the city's poor because she equates high density multifamily residential development with poor people. While this might demonstrate the Councilor's unsophisticated view of urbanity, it also underscores the class conflict inherent in a lot of the redevelopment debates that have occurred in the East.

Willard-Lewis should be looking to make sure that the rest of the city is building high density affordable housing as well and that it's not all just being concentrated in the East. This was a problem before the storm and it is certainly fair to be on the lookout for inherent biases in this regard. I have not yet gone into the specifics of the draft plan to see if that's true. But I doubt that Willard-Lewis had finished reading the entire draft plan herself when three days ago, she decided to stake out her oppositional posture.

Ugh, Stacy, Stop it.

Stop doing things like this.

Following the lead of some nearby parishes, the New Orleans City Council voted Thursday to continue using 2006 advisory base flood elevation maps to determine minimum construction elevations in Orleans Parish until at least 2011.

The vote was 5-0, but Councilwoman Stacy Head used the occasion to denounce eastern New Orleans and Lower 9th Ward "activists" who refuse to look at the good of the city as a whole and insist on special treatment for their heavily storm-damaged neighborhoods, she said.

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She then compared her willingness to "do the right thing" with what she depicted as the selfishness of "activists" in eastern New Orleans and the Lower 9th Ward. She said they demand preferential treatment for their parts of the city as "a perceived right" because those areas suffered heavily after Hurricane Katrina, even though many other parts of the city also were flooded and badly damaged.

Head did not include any council members in her criticism, but Councilwomen Cynthia Hedge-Morrell and Cynthia Willard-Lewis, who represent the areas to which Head referred, have in the past complained that their districts have been treated unfairly in the distribution of post-Katrina aid.

Totally inflammatory and 100% unnecessary.

Guess what? Eastern New Orleans and the Lower 9th Ward DO deserve preferential treatment. They do! They do! They totally do!

I don't want to have to go into a long rant about privilege and victimization before, during, and after Katrina right now. I really don't. I hope that my position has been consistently clear.

But even if you've never understood it or still don't buy it, you have to recognize how out-of-touch or intentionally mean-spirited this kind of language is.

The words and tone are explicitly evocative of Reagan-era Republican arguments against helping inner cities and emblematic of why Stacy Head has become such a magnet for criticism from the African American community. "Activist" and "perceived right" are especially insulting code words when used in this context.

I would have thought someone as sharp as Stacy Head would have picked up on this by now.

It's infuriating.

And of all the times for Cynthia Willard-Lewis to hold her tongue...

Politics, Race, Class, and Building Permits Collide in New Orleans East

Yesterday, State Rep. and current Mayoral candidate Austin Badon, State Senator Ann Duplessis, and State Rep. and erstwhile candidate for Congress Cedric Richmond held a press conference to blast Mayor Nagin's decision to halt the issuance of all building permits in New Orleans East for 30 days or more.

Within hours, the City of New Orleans reversed its policy and agreed to once again issue permits.

Very interesting stuff, since the City of New Orleans had originally adopted the policy to halt building permits in the East as a result of a law put in place by those very same group of legislators, with support from Councilwoman Cynthia Willard-Lewis.

It all stems from the controversial Levy Gardens project under construction directly adjacent to the wealthy enclave of Eastover. Levy Gardens is controversial because it is a multifamily, mixed-income development, which means that there will be low income residents directly right next to an exclusive golf course community.

It lead to the establishment of the Eastern New Orleans Neighborhood Advisory Commission and the passage of a state law last year by Duplessis, Richmond, and Badon that gave that commission the power of review for before the city can building permits in the area.

It's a fascinating controversy on many levels. For one, there is the city's acute affordable housing crisis and its impact on poor and minority communities:

James Perry, head of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, said Duplessis is missing the point. The Fair Housing Act covers a policy's impact, not its intent, and blocking multifamily housing disproportionately hurts minorities, he said.

Perry also doesn't buy the argument that multifamily housing causes concentrations of poverty. He said apartment complexes thrived in the east until the local economy, once humming on NASA and oil industry jobs, tanked.

"The role of community leaders has to be to show we're open for business and say, 'If you come here with your business, we have enough rental housing for your employees, ' " he said. "But for now, it's been that New Orleans East is open if you bring homeownership, and that says, 'Don't come here, don't come here, don't come here.' "

But the intersection of race and class doesn't break down into the too-typical poor blacks v. rich whites paradigm. Residents of Eastover, the aforementioned cooperative between Richmond, Badon, Willard-Lewis, and Duplessis, and the Eastern New Orleans Neighborhood Advisory Committee are primarily black but also primarily wealthy. The developers of the Levy Gardens are white and wealthy but the future residents would likely be poor and black.

The other element is planning policy. Aren't residents supposed to have some say over the types of developments built under the zoning master plan being put together by Goody Clancy? Does the fact that building permits for Levy Gardens had already been issued prior to the zoning master plan ordinance make moot the right to review being asserted by Eastover residents?

The whole thing seems wrought with double standards on all sides. How do we solve the city's affordable housing crisis without building affordable housing units? What what are the different development restrictions on multifamily construction in places like Uptown and the French Quarter? With so much hurricane damage in the East, shouldn't all residential construction be welcome? Hasn't New Orleans East been the slowest neighborhood to recover population? Plus how do you handicap the politics of the situation? Badon, Richmond, Willard-Lewis, and James Perry are running for higher office or were running for higher office as this controversy has unfolded.

A lot to consider, no?

New Orleans East and the Master Plan

There have been a couple of interesting articles about the new master plan and the future of New Orleans East over the last week.

From City Business:

The days before the master plan charter change amendment appeared on the Nov. 4 ballot were marked by opposition from black community and neighborhood leaders who feared giving legal license to a land use vision that could ostensibly plan low-lying neighborhoods out of existence.

While television ads and dozens of “Vote No” signs at key intersections in eastern New Orleans, Gentilly and the 9th Ward failed to produce enough voters to defeat the widely supported measure, the campaign succeeded in hitting a delicate public nerve, reopening a conversation about the role race and class play in the development of the city.

“They talked about ‘green-dotting’ neighborhoods and really hit this spot of mistrust, fear, anger and disappointment,” said Pam Dasheill, director of the Lower 9th Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development and an advocate of the master plan process.

I don't think the lingering trauma related to the green dot map can be overstated. People try to pretend like that effort didn't happen but it did. The power players behind it are still big time power players. The inability to heal those wounds has been one of the biggest factors complicating efforts to build biracial progressive coalitions.

That is why it is so understandable that the heart of the opposition to the master plan charter change came from the Lower Ninth Ward and New Orleans East. The very existence of those communities was put in doubt under the BNOB plan. Since then, Mayor Nagin's recovery ideology and the larger edict that neighborhoods must prove their 'viability' instead of their need, have combined to compound the frustration and distrust in these communities.

So for me, the misgivings that many had about the charter change and the whole concept of planning in general are entirely understandable.

Yet, when I think about New Orleans East in the future, I don't exactly envision a series of sustainable communities. Instead, I see miles and miles of neighborhoods suffering from lack of social services, private investment, and public development. That's the direction it's been heading in, at least. I certainly don't see the area regaining substantive political clout given the current pace of repopulation.

For New Orleans East to be sustainable, doesn't it need a master plan more than anywhere else?

Michelle Krupa's article on Saturday was a great read.

Strident remarks in recent days by Councilwoman Cynthia Willard-Lewis, who represents most of the eastern part of the city, have given voice to racially charged suspicions that city leaders might not embrace the area's complete redevelopment. And those suspicions have been stoked by citywide voters' approval of a City Charter amendment that will give a master plan for land use, one not yet complete, the force of law.

Cynthia Willard-Lewis' position is curious to me. She has consistently and vocally complained about the lack of recovery projects in the East and the failure of her ally, the Mayor to provide the resources necessary to help it rebuild. Yet must vote with the Mayor's agenda close to a million percent of the time. I wonder what kind of political leverage she expects to get moving forward that would allow her to transform her district. I'd like to know Councilwoman Willard-Lewis vision for fixing New Orleans East. I don't mean that in a sarcastic or snarky way. I think it would be helpful for her to articulate how we could get a full recovery for her district. What would it look like and how do we get there?

There are 60,000 some people in the East today. There's no turning back.

They really need a plan, right?

Doesn't New Orleans East really need a high density mixed use urban main street? How else does CWL expect to get that?

From the end of the Krupa article:

Nabonne said that with the passage of the master plan amendment, his focus has shifted to another line of defense: "Now, we have to have full and meaningful participation."

That's so true.

New Orleans East needs this process to work. They need a plan.