AP: Will New Orleans abandon its poor?

[question everything]

Will New Orleans abandon its poor?

Some fear master plan for rebuilding city won't leave room for urban black residents

By Robert Tanner
ASSOCIATED PRESS

October 13, 2005

NEW ORLEANS – Clarence Rodriguez has ripped up the water-buckled floor tiles and is hard at work scraping mold off the walls of his home in the mostly black and impoverished 9th Ward. But as for his neighbors, many have gathered their belongings and left, with no intention of returning.

That worries Rodriguez and others.

They worry that many poor, black residents of this hurricane-ravaged city simply cannot afford to come back. They worry, too, that the politicians, urban planners and developers responsible for the rebuilding of New Orleans will neglect to leave room for the poor in their master plan.

Worse, they fear that civic leaders will see the disaster as a glorious opportunity to try to engineer poverty out of the city altogether. In short, they worry that Hurricane Katrina will prove to be the biggest, most brutal urban-renewal project black America has ever seen.

Those fears are far from unfounded. Tens of thousands of flooded-out homes are slated for demolition, many of them in the hard-hit 9th Ward – and many of the thousands of evacuees scattered around the country are already starting new lives where they are.

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Find this article at:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20051013/news_1n13poor.html

[journalist3072]

1. Unfortunately, not a big shocker here....

Even Alphonso Jackson, that disgraceful Secretary of HUD, said that New Orleans "wouldn't be as Black as it was."