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Driven From New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization (2012) by John Arena, College of Staten Island (CUNY)

14 Tue Apr 2015

Posted by in Free Speech, Globalisation, Microeconomic Analysis, Political Economy, Racism (phenotype), Social Theory, Sociology, urban economics

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LUMPENPROLETARIAT—John (Jay) Arena, assistant professor of sociology at the City University of New York’s College of Staten Island, lived and worked in New Orleans for over twenty years and was involved in various community and labor organizing initiatives in the city.  This afternoon, John Arena, shared some of his experiences in New Orleans with free speech radio’s Against the Grain (94.1 FM, KPFA/Pacifica, Berkeley, CA).  (Listen and/or download here or here.)

John Arena also discussed his book, Driven From New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization (2012:  University of Minnesota Press).  The findings John Arena presents, of the callous way city leaders displaced blacks and poor residents from public housing in New Orleans, particularly the Florida projects and the Desire projects, echoes the findings documented in Kevin Fox Gotham’s Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development: The Kansas City Experience, 1900-2000.  Like Gotham, Arena describes how these projects were deliberately segregated.  Arena confirms Gotham’s argument that segregation was key in capitalist elites’ creation of ghettos.  Despite the challenges faced by public housing developments, by projects, rather than providing resources to improve housing or social services, the profit motive of developers has lain waste to black communities through the betrayal of non-profit organisations.  Arena described how the New Orleans Black Panthers, for example, had faced repression from militarised police, which even included the use of a tank.  With the more vocal of social justice groups having faced state repression, community leaders in the 1990s began acquiescing, selling out, to capitalist elites bent on profiting at the expense of human lives.  Arena explained how non-profits gradually abandoned their deeper principles of social justice, in favor of narrower identity politics devoid of class consciousness:

“At one level, they’ve expanded because they’ve, simply, stood in for where the state had been.  Right?  So, the state is not delivering public housing or some other service; and these non-profits have emerged to deliver that.  And we see that, particularly, in post-Katrina New Orleans.  And the rights of the workers are much less, a whole host of other problems.  But [non-profits] have grown in that way.  But the other way, which maybe is even more pernicious, and it’s partly, I would argue, they’re linked to a kind of identity politics organising.  It is that they channel struggles, resistance, into narrow forms of challenges to the neoliberal agenda.  And, so, they undermined building, kind of, a broad front, a broad class challenge to the neoliberal agenda.  And, so, they tend to cultivate this tendency toward realism, that we can’t take on this—we can’t mount a major challenge.  We have to, kind of, work out a reasonable agenda within the neoliberal project.  […]  But I would argue they’ve undermined building, kind of, a broad class front to challenge the neoliberal agenda and its deeply racist edge.”

Communities were promised urban renewal, but what that meant was bulldozing of buildings, displaced communities, and exacerbated poverty.  Urban renewal has been a favored method for elites to privatise public housing since the post-WWII period when the federal government provided money to localities to acquire slums, which would then be bulldozed, so they could be turned into upper income homes.  This was a form of gentrification, as it involved the displacement of existing communities.

Like Gotham, Arena confirms the way blacks were ghettoised through their exclusion from FHA loan subsidies, preventing most from owning homes.  Unlike blacks, whites were given FHA subsidies, so they could buy houses.  Prior to the FHA loans, home mortgages were usually 10-year mortgages, which required about 50% down payment.  Notably, Arena points out how the Democrat Party has been just as complicit as the Republican Party in hurting working people.  Arena points out how the attack on HUD and public housing began under a Democrat administration, which Ronald Reagan then continued.

Also, under Bush I, the National Commission on Severely Distressed Housing, ostensibly for helping families living in blighted communities, opened the door for privatisation of public housing.  Then, the Hope VI plan developed by HUD, and which emerged under Bush I, “is pushed much farther by the Clinton administration”.  This law, said Arena, required “downsizing” of housing buildings as well as requiring “refurbishing” upgrades, which ensured displacement of most existing residents.  From Bush II on down to the Obama administration, Democrats and Republicans have continued the anti-working class policies.  Arena explained:

“For the majority of Katrina survivors, Katrina was a disaster.  But for the wealthy, people like Joe Canizaro, and the developers and the neoliberal public officials, they were ecstatic.  Right?  This was an opportunity, with the evacuation of the city, to finish off public housing.  The destruction of St. Thomas, before Katrina, was part of a 50% downsizing of public housing.  It went from 14,000 to approximately 7,000 units.  After Katrina, even though the public housing developments came through the storm in relatively good shape, the authorities—it was, actually, controlled by HUD at that time—they swooped in, closed down the developments, and locked people out.

“The one development they couldn’t get their hands on was the Iberville, just outside the French Quarter, which had been the focus of an organising campaign before Katrina, C3/Hands Off Iberville.  So, it was forced to be open.  The other four were demolished after a long bitter struggle that gained national attention.  But, now, the Obama administration has, kind of, picked up where the Bush administration left off, and now is in the midst of demolishing the Iberville development, even though we have a horrible homelessness crisis in the city.”

It’s notable to see, historically, how the worst abuses of the capitalist mode of production against the working classes have consistently worsened, whether Democrats or Republicans have been in power.  This speaks to the problems with having a two-party cartel control our political process through the exclusion of alternative political parties.

-Messina

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AGAINST THE GRAIN—(94.1 FM, KPFA/Pacifica) “From the studios of KPFA in Berkeley, CA, this is Against the Grain on Pacifica Radio.  I’m Sasha Lilley.”

SASHA LILLEY:  “It’s no secret that Hurricane Katrina devastated the poor of the Gulf Coast region in many ways.  One of those was the decimation of public housing in New Orleans, a story that gained national attention.  But the attacks on public housing in New Orleans started decades earlier and was initially met by remarkable resistance.  Yet, according to sociologist John Arena, a participant in housing and labour struggles in New Orleans, something changed. The combative community tenant leaders of the 1980s became, in the 1990s, the shepherds getting poor people to accept the downsizing and, then, demolition of their publicly-owned dwellings.  How and why that happened is the heart of John Arena’s book, Driven From New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization.  John teaches at CUNY’s College of Staten Island.  When I spoke with him I asked him to begin by telling us about his own involvement in social justice organising.”

JOHN ARENA:  “Yeah, Sasha.  I moved to New Orleans in the mid-1980s.  I’m originally from upstate New York.  And I had gone there with the idea of labour organising, community organising.  My first job was working in the Upper Ninth Ward.  And I worked at a social service center, a food bank, that served the Florida Housing Development and the Desire Public Housing Development.  And, so, I was involved with social service.  But I was involved in a number of social struggles around cuts in, at that time, in the mid-80s, welfare.  And there were a lot of anti-police brutality struggles as well going on.  And, so, I learned about the struggles that were going on and about public housing, in particular.”

[full transcript pending]

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AGAINST THE GRAIN (.org)—Nonprofit organizations make up much of what we often think of as the left in this country — focusing on housing rights, the environment, and many other deserving issues. But is their influence benign? Could there be a connection between nonprofits and the neoliberal project of privatization and cutting back public services? Activist and sociologist John Arena contends that nonprofits were key in getting poor people to go along with public housing privatization in New Orleans, with terrible consequences.

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UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS—How public housing advocates in New Orleans became active supporters of privatization

Driven from New Orleans explores the drastic transformation of New Orleans’s public housing from public to private in the early 1980s, exposing the social disaster visited on the city’s black urban poor long before Katrina. John Arena reveals the true nature—and cost—of reforms promoted by an alliance of a neoliberal government, nonprofits, community activists, and powerful real estate interests.

“John Arena has written an important book on an important topic. New Orleans stands out because of the travesty associated with Hurricane Katrina; however, Driven from New Orleans tells a much deeper and broader story that could be replicated in many cities. Arena provides a sorely needed account of neoliberal reorganization of American cities with the active support of nominal advocates and representatives of the impoverished populations who are displaced as part of that reorganization. It is a signal contribution to the study of black urban politics, the political economy of urban redevelopment, and the concrete dynamics of urban neoliberalism.” —Adolph Reed, Jr., University of Pennsylvania

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[last updated 17:30 CDT 14 APR 2015]

[transcription work by Messina]

Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development (2002) by Kevin Fox Gotham, Ph.D., University of Kansas

12 Sun Apr 2015

Posted by in Free Speech, Microeconomic Analysis, Philosophy, Political Economy, Racism (phenotype), Social Theory, Sociology, urban economics

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LUMPENPROLETARIAT—Dr. Kevin Fox Gotham (Tulane University, School of Liberal Arts, Dept. of Sociology) has written a must-read book for all Americans, Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development:  The Kansas City Experience, 1900-2000 (2002: State University of New York Press).  Many people often think of neighborhoods, which are populated mainly by a certain ethnicity (or ‘race‘), as being the result of personal choice or preference.  Historically, ethnic residential enclaves have been transitional, as various ethnicities have been absorbed into the larger population over time.  We can talk about places like your nearest Chinatown.  But such neighborhoods are mainly business districts, not residential districts.  Here, we’re talking about ghettos, residential districts.  The only ethnicity (beyond indigenous Native Americans), which has been systematically segregated and prevented from integrating into the USA’s post-WWII suburbanisation, are blacks, Americans of African descent.

Before the 1940s, industrial cities in the USA had dominant industries centrally located with the working classes clustered in the urban core, near their places of work, largely due to the limitations of transportation.  After the 1940s, we see a historical trend of industrial dispersal of industries out of central cities.  Firms and corporations, mired in class conflict[1] and bent on union avoidance, began to forgo the benefits of economies of agglomeration and began fleeing to rural areas in search of cheaper and non-organised wage labour to exploit.  As this occurred, many blacks who had been gaining employment in the peripheral industries of the urban core, servicing the primary industries, were left behind trapped by the structural unemployment of the deindustrialisation of the urban core.  Racial/racist residential restrictive covenants and Jim Crow segregation laws had laid the institutional framework for society’s racist violations of the human rights of blacks.  When the state had to admit the unconstitutionality of government segregation laws and racially restrictive covenants, the private sector took the reins.  Redlining and the denial to blacks of credit and banking services helped operationalise twentieth century segregation, helping create USA’s ghettos.  Blacks were, basically, denied loans and services their white counterparts depended upon.[2]

As working class whites moved on out to the suburbs, as the urban core was abandoned by firms and corporations, working class blacks were institutionally and legally segregated and prevented from moving into the suburbs, which the real estate industry was propagandising as white neighborhoods for profit.  This white flight and manipulation of housing markets trapped most blacks without adequate jobs in concentrated pockets of poverty.  For the first time in U.S. history, we saw geographic concentration of poverty, as a result of institutionalised racial/racist segregation.  Before then, poverty had been quite evenly dispersed.  So, USA’s ghettos are a twentieth century phenomena created by our business and government elites, who decided to confine black people to poverty for profit.

Gotham’s book, Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development:  The Kansas City Experience, 1900-2000, is based on the work of Massey and Denton (1993) [3], who drew attention to the “missing link” to explaining persistent, multi-generational poverty—segregation.  This is important history, which needs to be taught in schools, community colleges, and universities.  Most of us have tragically misunderstood the true nature of capitalist elites’ role in the creation of the USA’s ghettos.  This history must be discussed in popular discourse in our nation, if we are to have a clear understanding of the nature and origin of urban poverty, so as to inform effective decision-making with regard to our social responses to urban poverty.

Gotham’s book proves what many of us have long suspected about ghettos.  They have been institutionally created, and not only through the violence of segregation laws, Jim Crow laws, and the lynchings of the 1910s and 1920s.  Segregation laws were ruled unconstitutional by 1916.  Racially restrictive covenants were also ruled unconstitutional by 1947.  Yet, most of the Great Migration of blacks from the south to the north, occurred during the second wave, known as the Second Great Migration, when the industrial city started to become the corporate city after the 1940s.  When the state was unable to keep all of its racist laws on the books, as blacks migrated north, the private sector, led by the real estate industry, was able to continue the project of segregating U.S. cities for profit.

Gotham lays out, with rigorous evidence, how ghettos were created through the profit motive of the real estate industry, which exploited and exacerbated existing racism and prejudices among whites to use blockbusting, and the use of agent provacateurs to induce panic sales of properties, and other unscrupulous means to destabilise housing markets.  The more people buy and sell houses, the more money, the real estate industry makes.  So, the real estate industry actually fomented fear of blacks moving into, or near, white neighborhoods to induce white flight, so as to increase their own profits.

“Non-white people were hired to deceive the white residents of a neighborhood into believing that black people were moving into the neighborhood, thereby encouraging them to quickly sell (at a loss) and emigrate to generally more racially homogeneous suburbs. Blockbusting was most prevalent on the West Side and South Side of Chicago.”

However, one such captain of industry was J.C. Nichols, which Gotham features in his case study of Kansas City, Missouri.  It turns out, J.C. Nichols’ destabilisation of the Kansas City housing market became the model, by which other cities across the nation also began segregating blacks from whites to unprecedented degrees.  Kansas City, Missouri remains to this day deeply divided along the north-south divide of Troost Avenue, which Nichols exploited alongside school segregation laws of the separate but equal doctrine. [4]

-Messina

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SUNY PRESS—Gotham, Kevin Fox. 2002. Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development:  The Kansas City Experience, 1900-2000. Albany: The State University of New York Press.  216 pages.  (Also, see second edition[*], released in February 2014.)

Summary

Examines how the real estate industry and federal housing policy facilitate the development of racial residential segregation.  [The following is also featured on the book’s back cover.]

Traditional explanations of metropolitan development and urban racial segregation have emphasized the role of consumer demand and market dynamics. In Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development: The Kansas City Experience, 1900-2000, Kevin Fox Gotham reexamines the assumptions behind these explanations and offers a provocative new thesis. Using the Kansas City metropolitan area as a case study, Gotham provides both quantitative and qualitative documentation of the role of the real estate industry and the Federal Housing Administration, demonstrating how these institutions have promulgated racial residential segregation and uneven development. Gotham challenges contemporary explanations while providing fresh insights into the racialization of metropolitan space, the interlocking dimensions of class and race in metropolitan development, and the importance of analyzing housing as a system of social stratification.

“This work challenges the notion that demographic change and residential patterns are ‘natural’ or products of free market choices … [it] contributes greatly to our understanding of how real estate interests shaped the hyper-segregation of American cities, and how government agencies[,] including school districts, worked in tandem to further demark the separate and unequal worlds in metropolitan life.” —H-Net Reviews (H-Education)

“A hallmark of this book is its fine-grained analysis of just how specific activities of realtors, the FHA program, and members of the local school board contributed to the residential segregation of blacks in twentieth century urban America. A process Gotham labels the ‘racialization of urban space’–the social construction of urban neighborhoods that links race, place, behavior, culture, and economic factors–has led white residents, realtors, businessmen, bankers, land developers, and school board members to act in ways that restricted housing for blacks to specific neighborhoods in Kansas City, as well as in other cities.” —Philip Olson, University of Missouri–Kansas City

“This is a book which is greatly needed in the field. Gotham integrates, using historical data, the involvement of the real estate industry and the collusion of the federal government in the manufacturing of racially biased housing practices. His work advances the struggle for civil rights by showing that solving the problem of racism is not as simple as banning legal discrimination, but rather needs to address the institutional practices at all levels of the real estate industry.” —Talmadge Wright, author of Out of Place: Homeless Mobilizations, Subcities, and Contested Landscapes

Kevin Fox Gotham is Professor of Sociology at Tulane University.”

[*] Summary, Second Edition (February 2014)

Updated second edition examining how the real estate industry and federal housing policy have facilitated the development of racial residential segregation.

Traditional explanations of metropolitan development and urban racial segregation have emphasized the role of consumer demand and market dynamics. In the first edition of Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development Kevin Fox Gotham reexamined the assumptions behind these explanations and offered a provocative new thesis. Using the Kansas City metropolitan area as a case study, Gotham provided both quantitative and qualitative documentation of the role of the real estate industry and the Federal Housing Administration, demonstrating how these institutions have promulgated racial residential segregation and uneven development. Gotham challenged contemporary explanations while providing fresh insights into the racialization of metropolitan space, the interlocking dimensions of class and race in metropolitan development, and the importance of analyzing housing as a system of social stratification. In this second edition, he includes new material that explains the racially unequal impact of the subprime real estate crisis that began in late 2007, and explains why racial disparities in housing and lending remain despite the passage of fair housing laws and antidiscrimination statutes.“

Read more at SUNY Press, including table of contents for Race, Real Estate and Uneven Development.

***

[1]  See Olsen, Erik K. 2010. “Class Conflict and Industrial Location”, Review of Radical Political Economics 42(3) 344-352

[2]  We should note, however, that it was not only blacks who suffered under racially restrictive covenants, racial residential segregation, redlining, and so forth.  Mexicans, Hispanics, Jews, and other groups, along a hierarchical ethnic pecking order were also discriminated against and faced barriers to integrating into the broader society.  Your author’s Hispanic political science professor, years ago, at San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton, California described how he and his spouse were denied the option freely given to whites to buy a house west of Interstate 5, which divided Stockton up until the 1970s.  Blacks were not allowed west of Interstate 5, unless it was to perform domestic work.  Not only blacks, but other non-whites faced racial residential segregation.

[3]  Massey, Douglas S. and Nancy A. Denton. 1993. American Apartheid. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.

Also, see:

  • Davis, Otto A. and Andrew B. Whinston. 1961. “The Economics of Urban Renewal” Law and Contemporary Problems, 26 (1) 105-117.
  • Sugrue, Thomas J. 1993. “The Structures of Urban Poverty: The Reorganization of Space and Work in the Three Periods of American History”.  (This is chapter 3 of The Underclass Debate by Michael B. Katz, ed. Princeton, N.J.  Princeton University Press, 1993.)
  • Wilson, William J. 1997. When Work Disappears. New York: Random House.  (Especially, chapter 1, “From Insitutional to Jobless Ghettos” and chapter 2, “Societal Changes and Vulnerable Neighborhoods”.)

[4]  Blacks are largely held at bay to the east of Troost Avenue, with a band of predominantly white neighborhoods living adjacent to Troost, west of the parallel north-south Holmes Road and Rockhill Road.  Just a mile or two further west is the Kansas state line, which really gets white and wealthy.

As your author writes this, with rear balcony facing Troost Avenue, a helicopter, or as Ice Cube calls it, ghetto bird, approaches and begins to hover around.  The helicopter appeared shortly after gunshots were fired.  Your author still hasn’t quite acclimated to the sound of gunshots.  The first shot sounded pretty close, and it startled your author.  We return to our in-breath and out-breath, calm ourselves, and take the first steps to continue living.  But life along, and east of, Troost Avenue in Kansas City is harsh and, often, tragic.  Urban blight, dilapidated housing, and abandoned properties dominate the landscape.  Amazingly, if you just walk a block or two to the west of Troost, it’s like a different world entirely.  The legacy of segregation continues.  It seems interesting, considering Kansas City, Missouri is home to the historic neighborhood of Westport, famed for its historic Battle of Westport.  The Civil War and the Battle of Westport were watershed episodes of history, leaving clear lines of demarcation where opposing forces met.  It seems a sort of stand-off continues in Kansas City, as expressed by the fierce segregation represented to this day by the Troost Wall.

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[last updated 4 MAY 2015 01:43 CDT]