"Katrina is about the sudden and complete loss of all that home means—safety, respite, privacy, comfort and security.”

Watch Tracy Washington of the NAACP Gulf Coast Advocacy Center talk about race and rebuilding in New Orleans.

On a chilly autumn night, Jocquelyn Marshall opened the door to her new home, an apartment tucked in a maze of quiet streets lined with townhouses south of downtown New Orleans. She’d been here only two weeks since making it back from Houston, and the newly-built, two-bedroom apartment was sparkling but almost completely bare. She sat on a milk crate in the middle of the hardwood living room floor, while her 12-year-old son, Justin, watched television on the white carpet in his bedroom.

This was their third residence in an odyssey that began when the floodwaters washed over New Orleans. It took them from their home of more than 10 years—a public housing unit inherited from Jocquelyn’s mother—to an overcrowded shelter in Mississippi, then an apartment shared with 14 other people in Houston, and finally to this eerily empty new place in their beloved city. 

A round-faced, dark brown woman with her hair tucked into a soft black cap, Jocquelyn was about to turn 37 but looked much younger. She spoke in the unhurried, distinctive cadence of Black New Orleanians. She cried just once during our conversation, describing the hardships of a neighbor whose family had been stranded on a bridge after the hurricane, with only a box of crackers and a few bottles of water that the mother rationed in pieces and sips to her children.

“I know we’re living in difficult times. People who don’t understand that, they’re not gonna survive,” Jocquelyn said calmly. “You have to have faith, and that’s basically what I’m living on day by day, faith. Me and my child, that’s it.”

She was among the few public housing residents who counted themselves lucky enough to make it back to New Orleans. Most of her friends and neighbors remained scattered in Houston, Atlanta, and other cities, living on FEMA assistance with families often doubled or tripled up in apartments.

This battle epitomizes a renewed struggle—one with national reverberations—over the future of public resources for the poor.

Jocquelyn grew up in the C.J. Peete projects, one of the “Big Four” that are at the center of a grassroots and policy battle over public housing and rebuilding in New Orleans. After thousands of public housing residents evacuated, housing authorities boarded up their apartments and announced plans to demolish 5,000 units in some of the largest developments—C.J. Peete, Lafitte, B.W. Cooper and St. Bernard.

About 4,000 of the 5,146 families who lived in New Orleans public housing remain displaced. As bureaucrats, politicians, developers and lawyers fight over the city’s redevelopment plans for low-income housing, these buildings remain closed, and residents have been told they’d have to wait for another three or five more years to return home. In all likelihood, without a drastic change of power and planning, many will never be able to come back and live in their city.

Their battle to return has encompassed months of back-and-forth with recalcitrant, heavy-handed local and federal housing authorities, a stalled lawsuit, several takeovers of a few units in St. Bernard and C.J. Peete, plenty of marches and rallies, and finally, this February, legislative hearings held both in D.C. and locally by congressional leaders who promised to figure something out.

“Katrina is about wrenching hundreds of thousands of people from homes to which most will never return. Katrina is about the sudden and complete loss of all that home means—safety, respite, privacy, comfort and security,” said Sheila Crowley, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, at the D.C. hearing.

She added, “Unless policy and practice take a different turn from where they appear to be heading, Katrina will be remembered as a massive public failure.”

But beyond the future of working-class Black communities in New Orleans, this battle also epitomizes a renewed struggle—one with national reverberations—over the future of public resources for the poor.

Six weeks after the storm, the mandatory evacuation order was lifted and people who could began making their way back as New Orleans began its slow recovery from the devastation. The flooding destroyed 142,000 apartments throughout the city, which had constituted the bulk of housing for working-class families. In a city with stark divides of wealth, the existing public housing stock before Katrina (7,100 units) also served a key role in providing affordable housing for many low-wage workers. Residents included workers in the hotel and restaurant industries, street musicians, the elderly, and mothers and children on welfare.

Public housing everywhere in the country is owned and managed by local housing authorities. In this case, it’s the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO), which for the past few decades, has been known for corruption and mismanagement. In 2002, the agency finally went into federal receivership. In New Orleans, then, the housing crisis directly implicates the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and a resolution has to be fought through the Bush administration’s appointees in that agency. For residents and their advocates, it has made their activism national in scope by necessity.

In June 2006, after HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson announced that the “Big Four” developments would be razed, residents and their advocates began organizing to stop the demolitions and return to their homes. They filed a class-action lawsuit against HUD, Anderson v. Jackson, charging the agency with racial discrimination and demanding that it re-open their units. The lawsuit is expected to go to trial later this summer.