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Residents have nowhere to come back to if not their old homes, now sitting empty in a city still dotted with gutted houses, FEMA trailers and a rental market inflated by up to 70 percent. The “bricks,” as the projects are called, are architecturally sound, everyone seems to agree, and even HUD’s studies show that it would cost less to clean up and fix than to demolish and re-develop the buildings.

Clearly, the drive toward demolition is about more than cost analysis. Before Katrina, New Orleans ranked second in the nation for high concentrated poverty (behind Fresno). Concentrated poverty is measured by the percentage of an area’s poor population living in neighborhoods with a 40 percent or higher poverty rate. Of New Orleans’ Black residents, 43 percent lived in neighborhoods with extreme poverty. After the disaster, public officials famously made race-tinged comments about the flood as an act of God cleaning up New Orleans public housing, and the city being better off without welfare queens, pimps and  “soap opera watchers.” HUD’s Jackson signaled his own low opinion of public housing when he told the press that “only the best residents should return. Those who paid rent on time, those who held a job and those who worked.”

In the prevailing national thought about poverty, public housing is a failed social policy much like welfare. Between the image of the old projects as dead-ends of ghetto poverty, and the new, developer-fueled vision of “New Urbanism” mixed-income neighborhoods, there is little room for poor people themselves to be part of the solution. Rather, as many New Orleans residents point out, the solution has been to disperse the poverty, not to end it.

“What you see in New Orleans is happening in every other community around the country. What is different about New Orleans is Katrina gave the government a chance to fast forward what other communities are going through in terms of the conversion of traditional public housing, and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of families,” said Bill Quigley, a law professor at Loyola University and one of the main advocates on the residents’ lawsuit.

A large housing complex presents a great economic opportunity for a lot of parties—for the city to create jobs and bring in more private investment, for developers to apply for millions in federal tax credits and make more money with new, upwardly mobile residents and tourists. 

In the wake of the hurricane, four large developments were suddenly up for grabs at the same time—which is, Quigley said, “a developer’s dream, and a resident’s nightmare.”

New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, in his influential article, “All Fall Down,” called the rebuilding of New Orleans “one of the most aggressive works of social engineering in America since the postwar boom of the 1950s.”

Jocquelyn Marshall moved into C.J. Peete, then known as the Magnolia, in 1973. Her then 37-year-old mother, Rosemary, had divorced her husband and couldn’t keep their home on nearby Clara Street. Along with four-year-old Jocquelyn, she took two young nieces whose mother had died and moved into a two-bedroom apartment on Willow Street.

To supplement their income, Rosemary sold “icebergs”—Kool-Aid poured over snow cones—in the neighborhood for a quarter each. “My mother was known as the iceberg lady on Willow Street,” Jocquelyn said, smiling.

Little Jocquelyn and her 8-year-old cousin slept in the same twin bed, one girl at the foot and the other at the head, while the 12-year-old cousin got her own bed in their shared room. Rosemary worked eight hours a day, sometimes six days a week as a dental assistant, so the older children babysat Jocquelyn, and neighbors were always on hand to look out for all the kids. Jocquelyn’s fondest memories from those days are of the talent shows that she and her friends staged in the courtyard. With their audience watching from porches, she sang the lead vocals in a girl-group rendition of their favorite song, “Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone.”

But her mother was strict about not letting them hang out too much. Every once in a while, there would be a shooting, but even then, Jocquelyn remembered the “old school gangsters” always made sure to warn residents to stay inside when something was about to go down.

“We all took care of one another…all that is gone,” she said.

By the time Jocquelyn was growing up in public housing in the ’70s, it had actually been in decline for years.

New Orleans public housing, like the rest of the country’s, was built in the 1930s and ’40s. Unlike northern cities with their high-rise towers, New Orleans’ soil required lower construction, and its public housing reflected a distinct architectural style much like the rest of the city’s unique character. Built of red brick, these complexes were two and three stories high with porches and wrought iron rails, set around grassy courtyards.

America’s public housing began initially under the Public Works Administration, and was formalized in the first National Housing Act of 1937, which gave federal loans to state and local authorities to build subsidized housing for millions of Americans affected by the Great Depression. Early working-class residents included both whites and Blacks.

“This contemporary notion of public housing as a place for poor Black people is an ahistorical one,” said Rhonda Williams, a professor of history at Case Western Reserve University and author of The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles Against Urban Inequality.