Driven from New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization

by John Arena

In the early 1980s the tenant leaders of the New Orleans St. Thomas public housing development and their activist allies were militant, uncompromising defenders of the city’s public housing communities. Yet ten years later these same leaders became actively involved in a planning effort to privatize and downsize their community—an effort that would drastically reduce the number of affordable apartments. What happened? John Arena—a longtime community and labor activist in New Orleans—explores this drastic change in Driven from New Orleans , exposing the social disaster visited on the city’s black urban poor long before the natural disaster of Katrina magnified their plight. Arena argues that the key to understanding New Orleans’s public housing transformation from public to private is the co-optation of grassroots activists into a government and foundation-funded nonprofit complex. He shows how the nonprofit model created new political allegiances and financial benefits for activists, moving them into a strategy of insider negotiations that put the profit-making agenda of real estate interests above the material needs of black public housing residents. In their turn, white developers and the city’s black political elite embraced this newfound political “realism” because it legitimized the regressive policies of removing poor people and massively downsizing public housing, all in the guise of creating a new racially integrated, “mixed-income” community. In tracing how this shift occurred, Driven from New Orleans reveals the true nature, and the true cost, of reforms promoted by an alliance of a neoliberal government, nonprofits, community activists, and powerful real estate interests.

344 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2012

Reviews

[Gabriella · Rating 3 out of 5]

***Note: this is a book review/reflection for my course, City Planning (CPLN) 624: Readings on Race, Poverty, and Place.

John Arena’s Driven from New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization recounts the demise of New Orleans’ public housing, which occurred before and after Hurricane Katrina. This book moves away from our class’ previous study of “FUBU gentrification” by focusing on black politicians in the age of Chocolate City governance, private developers in the age of downtown redevelopment, and nonprofits in the age of diminishing state assistance.

Arena discusses how the “age of black mayors” coincided with the revanchist agenda, elites’ retaking of cities from their low-income inhabitants. At a certain point in New Orleans, this became centralized in public housing developments, which elites saw as obstacles to economic regeneration, standing in the way of redevelopment plans. This background helped me think critically about the sensationalism of public housing projects as “doomed sites.” Arena reminds us that many projects were in fact doomed because the state abandoned them, but like a lot of media coverage on black Americans, HANO’s explicit vacancy and maintenance schemes got left out of the news, so that the revanchist agenda seemed more noble, and public housing’s failures seemed inevitable.

Yesterday, I read about a new book on planners’ roles in gentrification, due to their facilitation of real estate interests at the local level. New Orleanian planners and preservationists pushed de-densification as a solution to inner-city problems, despite our knowledge of the inherent conflict between sprawl and equity. In the Irish Channel/Garden District, changing neighborhood names, successful avoidance of highways, annoyance with homeless-serving institutions, and reclamation of properties’ “historical glory” mirrors Society Hill’s development in Philly, and shows how design-centric approaches to planning can leave new urbanism inaccessible to the masses. Today, I think we’re nearing a discussion of how a professional field with an identity as “nice people” isn’t enough to solve entrenched, place-based problems—this, of course, is also true of the nonprofits taking center stage in this tale.

Sadly, I think Arena’s coverage of the nonprofit industrial complex is actually his weakest work. I understand his pessimism around the strategy of insider negotiations and professionalization of activists, but he leaves many questions about what should have been done. First, who should be in charge of public housing? So many people have a deep, warranted mistrust of the state, so it seems strange to argue against the removal of their power, unless activists are choosing the lesser of two evils, which is—get this—also selling out. Many times, Arena idealizes and overestimates the disruptive power of residents, and shames “former radical activists [who] had become realists and accepted the austerity and privatization agenda.” My second question: if they hadn’t, wouldn’t all of the residents just been displaced anyway, without any accommodations? Finally, I couldn’t tell if his oppositions to mixed-income development, would remain if it was carried out more equitably. Does he think something else should be the new strategy for 21st-century public housing? Arena’s anti-realist logic was hard for me to follow, so I’m hoping that Thursday’s discussion will help.