By Stephanie Grabbe
The University’s Progressive Student Union (PSU) co-hosted an event with the University’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) called “Housing and Human Rights in New Orleans and New York” on Tuesday night.
The event offered several views on the displacement of low-income American citizens in both the Gulf Coast area-mainly due to Hurricane Katrina-and the New York City metropolitan area, specifically downtown Brooklyn due to expensive construction projects. The panel was composed of Jo Etta Rogers, a Katrina survivor from Mobile, Alabama, and Harold Sussant of the New York Solidarity Coalition, an organization that unites Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita survivors to fight for basic for every U.S. citizen like healthcare and adequate housing.
Rogers and Sussant explained that currently more than 4,500 housing units in New Orleans alone are being demolished, leaving several thousand residents homeless, even as the anniversary of the storm nears three years this August.
They pointed out the inequality and misrepresentation that went far beyond the unfair housing in the aftermath of Katrina. Recognizing that the situation in New Orleans was widely ignored because of the overwhelmingly low income level, the two speakers also touched on the larger injustices that followed Katrina and were still ignored in the news media.
The speakers presented a short video which followed post-Katrina volunteers that helped with the hurricane’s aftermath; Rogers explained that “the zeros” written on house doors with spray paint meant that Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had properly searched the household without recovering any bodies.
“People were coming back a year, year and a half later and found their loved ones’ bodies decomposed. They found skeletons,” Rogers said, referring to some of the houses with the marked doors. Sussant said that some of the bodies were found by college students who had volunteered their time to aid the clean up effort in Louisiana. “The people that were finding these bodies were students like yourselves who were traumatized by this and this was as recent as this past May.”
Before moving on to explain some of the same “affordable housing” problems that are now plaguing downtown Brooklyn, Rogers asked students to get involved with the Coalition to create legislation that would encourage manageable living options for displaced citizens along the Gulf Coast. “This is a fight that we as survivors need to take to the street,” Rogers said.
Theo Moore, lead organizer at Families United for Racial and Economical Equality (FUREE) spoke of Brooklyn resident’s similar situation to the residents affected by Hurricane Katrina, in which large numbers of low-income residents are being forced out of their homes in order to create more space for the upper class.
Moore explained that downtown Brooklyn is currently facing a large-scale renovation that is replacing businesses and households in lower- to working- income neighborhoods with luxury apartments impossible for any displaced family to afford. He said that “no hurricane was necessary to create the same dislocation of people,” and gentrification is becoming an undeniable trend in the New York City metropolitan area, almost identical to the issue destroying the lives of thousands of “internal refugees” and low income residents in the Gulf Coast area today.
“You begin to see the connection between New York and New Orleans very clearly,” Moore said.
Affordable housing in both New Orleans and New York City is being displaced by luxury condominiums, or by nothing at all, according to speakers at a program hosted by the Progessive Students Union and the University’s chapter of the NAACP. (Stephanie Grabbe)