Gulf Coast Recovery News
"The loss would be especially devastating for New Orleans, which is desperately short of housing for the low-income workers who are essential to the city's service economy. "
"After Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans in 2005, obliterating every home in the mostly black, impoverished Lower Ninth Ward, Washington was forced to go to the Superdome. The dome served as a refuge for the city's poor after the levees failed."
"New Orleans is riddled with problems such as poor leadership, crime, poor education, poverty and homelessness. There are New Orleanians that relocated to other parts of the country from the effects of Katrina, and want to return, but still have not been able to..."
"After Katrina, the poor homeless of New Orleans were airlifted throughout the United States to begin new lives. Many Haitians had tried to make new lives in the United States and until the other day were deported back to poverty and hopelessness."
'''Hurricane Katrina destroyed the lower Ninth Ward, but that community had been ravaged by poverty, without attention,' she said. 'The levees may have failed that week, but the government had failed for years.'''
"On Thursday night, two teams from UNITY's continuum and another from the New Orleans Police Department's homeless-outreach arm searched dozens of transient hot spots and ferried about 50 people to the city's handful of shelters, which were crammed..."
"That would spell disaster for the tens of thousands of low-wage workers -- full-time restaurant workers, home health care aides and maintenance workers -- and the New Orleans economy that depends on them."
"Low- and moderate-income families must spend most of their income, unlike wealthier families who can save and invest. So taxes on purchases fall heaviest the lower you are on the income ladder."
Her displacement, followed by her struggle to get back on her feet in the four years since, has given her a unique perspective on poverty in America.
"'I visit a lot of schools where 95 percent of the kids are on reduced or free lunch,' he says. 'Those schools are full of good kids. We just need to give them a chance to get out of abject poverty.'"
"The organizations have teamed up in Lafayette, La., the past two years for Blitz Build, during which thousands of work hours culminated in 19 houses being built for families left homeless after Hurricane Katrina's destruction."
"...[R]enters in the city's largely low-wage, tourism-industry work force aren't likely to make enough money to afford current market-rate rents in New Orleans, which rose 44 percent between 2004 and 2007, according to the Data Center."
"The BDF's junior program originally targeted youths in the 7th Ward, but it has drawn players from across the city. The program's specific purpose is 'reaching low-income children who lack easy access to the game of golf.'"
"Another factor that could show up when the scholarship students in private schools are tested is whether being in a class with children of higher economic status would affect their scores. Most of the vouchers went to children of low-income students."
"...[I]n 2006, when the state's Road Home program promised him and his wife [of modest means]... a way to fill the gap between the low pre-Katrina value of their home and the higher cost of rebuilding it after the storm, Dunkley... expected the government to deliver."
"William Harris, a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will focus his presentation on the plight of low-income, black residents. 'My concern is how do we bring social justice through planning and urban design,' Harris said."
"The state ethics board is considering charges against the former director of the New Orleans Affordable Homeownership Corp. and a pair of contractors hired by the city agency after Hurricane Katrina to gut homes and clear overgrown lawns for low-income and elderly property owners."
"Public housing is an area for hope. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan broke ground... on the redevelopment of the last of the four big housing projects. The warehouses of poverty and dysfunction will be replaced by mixed-income townhouses..."
"'The people that I talk to are frustrated with the setbacks that they have had to endure, are frustrated with the nature of the bureaucracy that allows decisions to be unmade for long periods of time,' said Sheila Crowley, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition."
"But some low-income families are obviously far more motivated and concerned about education than others, and so far no one has done a nuanced study of whether the pool of parents choosing charter schools varies from those who choose non-charter schools"
"Among lower-income residents in Orleans, 36 percent of homeowners spent more than one-third of their income on housing. That 'merits concern,' said Data Center researchers, warning that foreclosures are likely when financial burdens rise"
"I'm a homeless outreach worker. For every triumphant story of recovery, I hear dozens of stories of continued struggle, pain and despair, while thousands of people remain exiled in the greatest diaspora of Americans in modern times, without homes to return to."
"Miriam Russell of the Louisiana Economic Development Department said Monday's meeting was about fitting together the pieces of the puzzle to help those in the poverty stricken areas of the state."
"The battle over low-income housing has been one of the most bitter that anyone in the middle-class, mostly white parish can remember, one that has stoked issues the region has been grappling with since Hurricane Katrina..."
"'Nothing else will be going forward,' Tucker said, until the market analysis is done, a process that could take about three months. He said the idea is to 'slow down high-density, low-income projects' until the commission gets a better handle on housing availability and what is needed."
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