HUD HANO Goat Rodeo (Cont)
By Professor William P. Quigley
Just when it seemed like HUD and HANO, who tore down thousands of fixable low cost apartments with a plan to only to replace them with only hundreds, could not give New Orleans any worse news, the Times-Picayune reports a multi-million dollar squabble over payment for the demolition of the CJ Peete housing development.
Sam Bailey, a former public housing resident himself, started a demolition company and got the over $1 million contract to tear down the CJ Peete housing development. But the Atlanta company who hired him still owes him $700,000. The Atlanta company, Dalyrymple Corp., says they are still owed money from HANO and the major contractor McCormack Baron out of St. Louis. Three other subcontractors claim they are owed another $400,000 and change too. Everyone is going to court and filing liens and pointing their fingers at everyone else.
If HUD and HANO cannot figure out how to pay to tear the thing down, under what circumstances would we believe they can figure out how to put it up correctly?
HUD and HANO have already decided that New Orleans will get, at a maximum under all plans, two-thirds less affordable housing than we had before Katrina. And that assumes that CJ Peete will be rebuilt and a hundred or so public housing families will get to return to the site where nearly a thousand lived at one time.
While tens of thousands remain displaced from New Orleans and the Disaster Housing Program is set to terminate, HUD and HANO continue their stumbling ways.
There is a term in the country when things are messed up beyond belief, they term it a goat rodeo. The Army calls it FUBAR, or " ___ ed up beyond all repair." Goat rodeo or FUBAR, HUD and HANO are at it again while thousands remain in need of affordable housing. Pull up a chair, it looks like it is going to be a long wait.
Professor William P. Quigley is Director of the Loyola Law Clinic & the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center at Loyola University in New Orleans.
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1 comment:
Indeed, professor. . .
Some of always had doubts about the feasiblity and sanity of the Bush administration's plan to demolish more than 4000 homes while New Orleans was in the middle of the worst housing shortage any American city had faced in a century.
Now that it turns out that they don't even have the money to pay the companies that demolished these homes, they certainly won't be able to come up with the money to build anything to replace this housing. . . certainly not now that the U.S. economy is headed for a depression because of Bush's economic policies.
Who were the local people that supported this cynical plan to drive out the working poor? It's time to call them to account.
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