November 22, 2005
Storm Forces a Hard Look at Troubled Public Housing
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY

NEW ORLEANS - For years, cities across the nation have been declaring old-style public housing complexes a social experiment gone awry, emptying the buildings and, with a good-riddance press of the plunger, blowing them up.

In New Orleans, for better or worse, nature seems to have done some of the job.

As with so much else here, Hurricane Katrina seriously damaged many of the buildings run by the local housing authority, tearing off roofs and flooding lower floors. Officials are vowing to use this crisis to step up their efforts to remake the long-troubled system, which had housed about 20,000 people, nearly 5 percent of the city's population.

In the future, local and federal housing officials say, the poor will no longer be clustered in isolated, low-rise housing developments that had the disheartening feel of barracks and often became magnets for social ills. Some of the existing projects will be torn down, and smaller structures, like townhouses, will be erected in their place, with middle-class residents living among less prosperous ones.

"We are not going to build traditional public housing anymore," the federal housing secretary, Alphonso Jackson, said on a visit to New Orleans this month. Mr. Jackson's agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, is pledging to spend more than $1.8 billion to rebuild government and private housing in the Gulf region ravaged by the hurricane.

The future of the housing authority is a crucial issue for this city, which is already facing a housing shortage that is having a ripple effect on the hobbled local economy. Businesses cannot reopen because they cannot find workers, and workers are not returning to the city in large part because they cannot find places to live.

The authority said half of its 10 largest developments suffered serious damage in the hurricane, including at least two that were considered decrepit and needed to be replaced. The authority had 7,500 units, 5,300 of which were occupied when the hurricane struck; few residents have been allowed to return to their apartments. And with the public housing system largely emptied of people, the authority said it had an opportunity to consider ambitious plans.

Given the system's track record, the need for a major redevelopment is evident. Public housing was for decades a part of New Orleans that most visitors never saw: tumbledown groups of buildings overseen by a poorly managed, patronage-ridden local authority.

In the mid-1990's, federal inspectors found that of a selection of 75 apartments that they examined, 70 failed quality standards, describing the conditions as "deplorable, unsafe and in many instances unfit for human habitation."

In another typical finding, inspectors discovered that 21 handymen at one project claimed a total of 1,019 hours of overtime in just two weeks, an average of 49 hours per person. In reality, they were doing little work, and areas of the project were flooded with sewage from broken pipes.

In 2001, an official in the HUD inspector general's office, D. Michael Beard, offered a Congressional committee a series of photographs showing poor conditions in the housing developments, culminating with one that showed a large hole in a bathroom that had gone unmended for three years. "The smell drove the auditors out of the bathroom," Mr. Beard testified.

The next year, the federal government seized control of the authority. Lori Moon, one of the private consultants who took over, said turning it around was a "monumental task."

A look at the C. J. Peete housing project before the storm illustrates her point. The project, which will be one of the first to be redesigned, was in many ways an embodiment of all that went wrong here as the city sought a way to house its poor.

It was easy to get lost in the project amid rows of brick buildings on trash-strewn grounds set off from the rest of the Central City neighborhood. Crime was common - "all the drugs, all the guns, all the fighting," was how one resident, Rosemary Johnson, described it recently.

The project was once home to about 5,000 people, though in recent years, the authority had begun to shut down buildings. Some were demolished. The rest sat unused, with broken windows, pockmarked walls and barbed wire fences giving them a sinister look.

While C. J. Peete suffered moderate wind damage, not flooding, in the hurricane, officials said it was still a prime candidate to be refurbished because it was already in bad shape.

A few residents, including Ms. Johnson, returned recently to see what could be salvaged from their apartments.

"We don't know what the future holds," said Ms. Johnson, a hotel housekeeper who had lived in the housing project all her life - she had been paying $299 a month in rent - and was evacuated to El Paso. "They need to rethink things through before they tear this down. Why tear it down now if it's still livable? People need housing now."

This view is not unusual among public housing residents. People who once lived at B. W. Cooper, a project that was bleakly similar in scope to C. J. Peete but suffered far more damage, including several feet of flooding, said they wondered whether it could be salvaged.

Before Hurricane Katrina, the private consultants running the authority had been trying to revamp the system by pressing long-delayed plans to put up new buildings.

A signature project, built in the last few years on the site of the old Desire development, was called Abundance Square, with buildings more akin to suburban-style townhouses. Many more were planned, but the project was in the Ninth Ward, badly hit by the hurricane, and it was wrecked.

"We were taking it community by community before Katrina," said Ms. Moon, the consultant. "Now we are going to be looking at it from a far more holistic approach."

Whatever the authority's problems, some residents said they were eager to restart their lives. Elmonzia Glapion stayed at the Iberville project for seven days after the flood, even with several inches of water in her living room. She did not want to leave without her dog.

Finally, Ms. Glapion was evacuated to North Carolina, but then she returned and began living as a squatter in her own apartment, without utilities, spending her days trying to dry out the furniture and scrubbing the scum from the floors and walls.

"I was born in New Orleans, and it's not so easy to leave," Ms. Glapion said. "There's nothing like your own home."