The removal of people of color and the gentrification of New Orleans

now i have a better understanding of why so many poor, disadvantaged people of color who couldn't afford to evacuate on their own were scattered across the country... if they couldn't afford to evacuate, they can't afford to return...

In Mississippi's ruined coastal cities, as well as in metro New Orleans, Landlords--galvanized by rumors of gentrification and soaring land values--are beginning to institute mass evictions. (Although the oft-cited Lower Ninth Ward is actually a bastion of blue-collar homeownership, most poor New Orleanians are renters.) Civil-rights lawyer Bill Quigley has described how renters have returned "to find furniture on the street and strangers living in their apartments at higher rents, despite an order by the Governor that no one can be evicted before October 25. Rents in the dry areas have doubled and tripled."

Secretary of Housing Alfonso Jackson, meanwhile, seems to be working to fulfill his notorious prediction that New Orleans is "not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again." Public-housing and Section 8 residents recently protested that "the agencies in charge of these housing complexes [including HUD] are using allegations of storm damage to these complexes as a pretext for expelling working-class African-Americans, in a very blatant attempt to co-opt our homes and sell them to developers to build high-priced housing."

the stench of greed is overwhelming...

(thanks to alternet...)

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