From an article on Akiit.com, also posted on New Orleans Ladder:

“Tucked away on the White House Web site under a tab labeled “Additional Issues,”you can read the renewed presidential commitment: “President Obama will keep the broken promises to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. He and Vice President Biden will take steps to ensure that the federal government will never again allow such catastrophic failures in emergency planning and response to occur.”

If Obama is honoring his promise, he is also missing his target. The biggest unmet recovery issue is housing, particularly for low-income residents. It is the most glaring omission in the renewal of New Orleans city life. You can drive by blocks of blight that are either the consequence of the floods — or were like that before the storm. In the areas where the city’s “Big Four” housing projects once stood, you find, at best, partially completed (though posh) mixed-income housing developments or, at worst, gated fields of weeds.

Only 78 percent of the city’s pre-Katrina population has returned. The percentage of African Americans has dropped from 66.7 percent to 60 percent. New Orleans can now say it is less poor, but that’s because tens of thousands of low-income residents haven’t made it back to the city, and may never return. According to a report by the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center and the Brookings Institution, the number of people living below the poverty line in Orleans Parish (which encompasses the city of New Orleans) has dropped by 68,000 people.

More than $40 billion in federal disaster funding has been spent in Louisiana in the last five years. But a lot of that money has not reached residents, families and workers who have the fewest means to recover. Close to 200,000 housing units were destroyed in Louisiana by the 2005 floods, including 80,000 rental units — many subsidized for low-income workers. In New Orleans, 20 percent of damaged rental units sheltered extremely poor households. “There are many areas of unfinished business, such as meeting the demands for affordable rental housing,” the Data Center report says.”

Read the article, it’s important.

Has Obama Kept His Promise to New Orleans?

Have a nice day…

in your house, apartment, condo…