John Arena
In the early 1980s the tenant leaders of the New Orleans St. Thomas public housing development and their activist allies were militant, uncompromising defenders of the cityâ€™s public housing communities. Yet ten years later these same leaders became actively involved in a planning effort to privatize and downsize their communityâ€”an effort that would drastically reduce the number of affordable apartments. What happened? John Arenaâ€”a longtime community and labor activist in New Orleansâ€”explores this drastic change in ,Driven from New Orleans,, exposing the social disaster visited on the cityâ€™s black urban poor long before the natural disaster of Katrina magnified their plight.,Arena argues that the key to understanding New Orleansâ€™s public housing transformation from public to private is the co-optation of grassroots activists into a government and foundation-funded nonprofit complex. He shows how the nonprofit model created new political allegiances and financial benefits for activists, moving them into a strategy of insider negotiations that put the profit-making agenda of real estate interests above the material needs of black public housing residents. In their turn, white developers and the cityâ€™s black political elite embraced this newfound political â€œrealismâ€ because it legitimized the regressive policies of removing poor people and massively downsizing public housing, all in the guise of creating a new racially integrated, â€œmixed-incomeâ€ community.,In tracing how this shift occurred, ,Driven from New Orleans, reveals the true nature, and the true cost, of reforms promoted by an alliance of a neoliberal government, nonprofits, community activists, and powerful real estate interests.
Cities,Urban Studies
Driven from New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization