Housing Issues Raised by Hurricane Katrina and Rita
Since general welfare is the umbrella in which many policies fall under, I want to focus on each topic, and the many debates surrounding them. Since Hurricane Katrina and Rita hit Louisiana, many of these issues have been brought up: education for displaced children, health care, housing for evacuees, child welfare.
There was an article published by the Urban Institute, which is a non-partisan economic and social policy research organization, discussing the housing issues that have been raised during the Hurricanes. The article titled “Issues and Insights after Hurricane Katrina” shed some light on previous events that have shaped the way local and federal government handle disasters and reconstruction.
Lonnie G. Bunch, who is the founding director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture, cited the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. “Those fires destroyed over 25,000 buildings in San Francisco. They left over 270,000 people homeless. They killed 700 people. In fact, it seemed that when the earthquake and fires were going on in San Francisco, the whole city wanted to get out and get to Oakland.” City officials were left with the huge task of reconstructing the city. Two of the main issues that needed to be resolved were the Chinese and African American communities. The officials were going to move both communities further away from the city center, but the Chinese government opposed that, and most African Americans stayed in Oakland.
Through this disaster, the Galveston Hurricane in 1900, the great flood in Mississippi in 1927 and now the recent hurricanes, “America really has struggled to find ways to match its generosity and its interests in these disasters with the needs of a racially and economically diverse populace,” according to Bunch.
Bunch believes that there is one lesson that can be learned from these disasters. When a disaster hits a city, such as San Francisco or New Orleans, the initial thought is to clean up the city: move the poor to less central locations to make that property available for land developers. Bunch believes that this cleaning up process should be looked at as opportunity to “make sure that there is an appropriate tension between what the city needs and what its less powerful, less well-off citizens need.”
The next speaker in this article is Marge Turner, who is the director of the Urban Institute's Metropolitan Housing and Community Policy Center and an expert on urban housing and development.
She believes that housing vouchers are the answer to the current issue with housing displaced citizens and also when they return to New Orleans. Housing vouchers essentially supplement what families can afford to pay themselves to rent apartments and homes that are already available in the private market. She believes that “some temporary housing, such as these RV and mobile-home ideas, might be necessary in some locations or for workers who are going to immediately start cleaning and rebuilding the devastated communities. But this temporary-housing approach poses a very serious risk of creating brand-new isolated ghettos for the most vulnerable families.”
Turner states that when rebuilding these poor New Orleans communities, it is essential that they are “replaced with mixed-income, affordable communities that have a decent quality of life, access to good schools, and access to decent-paying jobs.” It is also important that the community as a whole support these displaced victims. “The active involvement of residents, along with business owners, community leaders, and professional planners is essential if we are going to move toward that kind of equitable redevelopment process.”
Both of these women are experts in the field of African American history and/or development. What they suggest is plausible. Instead of the government moving the poor neighborhoods to an area away from sight and handing out a check, which would completely disrupt what these people are used to, they believe that the neighborhoods should remain in the same location, and in these locations rebuild safer more diverse communities. These solutions are unpartisan and support the Constitution’s phrase “promote the general welfare.”
There was an article published by the Urban Institute, which is a non-partisan economic and social policy research organization, discussing the housing issues that have been raised during the Hurricanes. The article titled “Issues and Insights after Hurricane Katrina” shed some light on previous events that have shaped the way local and federal government handle disasters and reconstruction.
Lonnie G. Bunch, who is the founding director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture, cited the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. “Those fires destroyed over 25,000 buildings in San Francisco. They left over 270,000 people homeless. They killed 700 people. In fact, it seemed that when the earthquake and fires were going on in San Francisco, the whole city wanted to get out and get to Oakland.” City officials were left with the huge task of reconstructing the city. Two of the main issues that needed to be resolved were the Chinese and African American communities. The officials were going to move both communities further away from the city center, but the Chinese government opposed that, and most African Americans stayed in Oakland.
Through this disaster, the Galveston Hurricane in 1900, the great flood in Mississippi in 1927 and now the recent hurricanes, “America really has struggled to find ways to match its generosity and its interests in these disasters with the needs of a racially and economically diverse populace,” according to Bunch.
Bunch believes that there is one lesson that can be learned from these disasters. When a disaster hits a city, such as San Francisco or New Orleans, the initial thought is to clean up the city: move the poor to less central locations to make that property available for land developers. Bunch believes that this cleaning up process should be looked at as opportunity to “make sure that there is an appropriate tension between what the city needs and what its less powerful, less well-off citizens need.”
The next speaker in this article is Marge Turner, who is the director of the Urban Institute's Metropolitan Housing and Community Policy Center and an expert on urban housing and development.
Many of the most vulnerable victims of Katrina were already suffering from the consequences of living in dangerous, distressed, segregated, and high-poverty neighborhoods. Before the storm, one in three poor blacks in New Orleans lived in a neighborhood that was 40-percent poor or more. The average black public school student in the city attended a school where 87 percent of the kids in the classroom were poor. And the city was actually one of the very few in America where racial segregation got worse, not better, during the 1990s… And historically, public policies, including federal housing assistance policies, have helped create these severely distressed neighborhoods. So it's especially important that we not make those horrible mistakes again as we help families find new places to live, both in the short term and in the longer term, whether back in New Orleans or elsewhere.
She believes that housing vouchers are the answer to the current issue with housing displaced citizens and also when they return to New Orleans. Housing vouchers essentially supplement what families can afford to pay themselves to rent apartments and homes that are already available in the private market. She believes that “some temporary housing, such as these RV and mobile-home ideas, might be necessary in some locations or for workers who are going to immediately start cleaning and rebuilding the devastated communities. But this temporary-housing approach poses a very serious risk of creating brand-new isolated ghettos for the most vulnerable families.”
Turner states that when rebuilding these poor New Orleans communities, it is essential that they are “replaced with mixed-income, affordable communities that have a decent quality of life, access to good schools, and access to decent-paying jobs.” It is also important that the community as a whole support these displaced victims. “The active involvement of residents, along with business owners, community leaders, and professional planners is essential if we are going to move toward that kind of equitable redevelopment process.”
Both of these women are experts in the field of African American history and/or development. What they suggest is plausible. Instead of the government moving the poor neighborhoods to an area away from sight and handing out a check, which would completely disrupt what these people are used to, they believe that the neighborhoods should remain in the same location, and in these locations rebuild safer more diverse communities. These solutions are unpartisan and support the Constitution’s phrase “promote the general welfare.”
posted by Casey at 9:56 AM
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