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10-15-2007, 02:49 PM
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Machiavelli Incarnate
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Join Date: Jul 2006
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Quote:
Originally Posted by noneof yourbusiness
None of your greedy bastards get a dime by screwing over a entire city.
Its in investment in the nation. The complete lack of concern for your own citzenry is mindboggling.
Tel you what evucarte everybody from any potential hotspot. Tornado alley, New MAdrid Fault, San Andreas Fault, the Eastern Seaboard gulf of mexico and the entire motherfucking state of Floarida. Cause those poeple are all stupid right.
Now give up all contorl to the Coprations that can make a buck this dicplacment. Throw every other motherfucker that doesnt look like you out of this nation.
Great. Fuck every poor person too. Let em die or throw them out too.
Okay now the last 100,000 some of your left. Now with you bastards nothing but a zit on the ass of the world. Nobody need be botherd by you again.
how about that?
Or invest in your future and raise a hadn and help your neighbor to make the nation better.
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Do you make sense when you're sober? |
10-15-2007, 05:30 PM
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Political Mastermind
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Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 2,483
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Dom1
Who has abandoned it?
If you were the owner of an apartment building or houses which you rented out would you rebuild them only to be torn up by the people leasing? I have a sneaking suspicion you have never visited the ninth ward. Go visit . . . preferably at night, and get some perspective. New Orleans has to do some changng to attract many of their businesses and citizens back. It is not a place many people would want to move to . . . just look at the crime rate.
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Okay, Dom1, thanks for your patience....
Your thoughts dwell on here that why would people rebuild to a slum area where people are low rent, low class and there's a high crime rate...
Lower 9th Ward, New Orleans - 2007 on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
aerial view of 9th ward...part of it...
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Empty during the day and dark at night, this area is a long way from being a neighborhood again, even though it has been the focus of intensive volunteer efforts and organizing since the storm. The destruction of the Lower Ninth Ward, which was working-class and black before the hurricane, and its subsequent failure to begin recovering, have become symbols for what some see as inequities in this city’s halting revival.
That symbolism was much in evidence at the ceremony, a gathering of the homeowners and the varied volunteer forces that built the $125,000 solid pine houses, which officials said are elevated five feet and designed to resist hurricane-force winds. It was an occasion to look past the catastrophe that sent a wall of water rushing into the Lower Ninth Ward 18 months ago, at least for the moment. If the levees fail again and a similar volume of water comes through, the new houses will take only two feet of water, the contractor said.
There were promises on Thursday to bring the neighborhood back, particularly from Acorn, the nonprofit neighborhood group that organized the construction and helped finance the two houses. There was cheering, there were plaques for the volunteers, and there were speeches by politicians and preachers.
And there were the two sturdy women who had been next-door neighbors for 25 years until Hurricane Katrina blew their houses away, the owners Gwendolyn Guice and Josephine Butler, who received the keys to the new houses on Thursday.
Acorn and the volunteers built the houses on the same spot as the women’s original ones, and both women seemed overcome at being back.
“I’m all over hoops,” Ms. Guice said, switching between tears and smiles as she happily showed off her trim little green house, a subtle modification of the classic New Orleans front-to-back-hall style.
Looking out the back at a nearby school building with a collapsed roof and a muddy vacant lot where there was once a house, Ms. Guice was adamant that Thursday represented a hopeful beginning on a street that once sheltered many solid homeowners.
“A lot of people are just sitting back, waiting and seeing,” Ms. Guice said.
Her re-installment and Ms. Butler’s, she insisted, would help draw people back. And given the privations of her long exile, much of it spent in Houston, she would not be fazed by living in the ward’s darkness and isolation, she suggested.
She showed no regrets about the fate of her old house.
“I never did find the den,” Ms. Guice said. “It just shoved straight off. It might be floating in the gulf.”
Still, the complications of the demonstration project on Delery Street raise questions about its usefulness as a prototype. The two houses were financed by Acorn and a California bank, and the two women are planning to repay their loans using their insurance proceeds and money they hope will be forthcoming from Louisiana’s Road Home housing aid program. Louisiana State University’s School of Architecture helped design the houses, students from the school helped build them, young people from Covenant House did odd jobs, a church provided landscaping, and even the novelist Richard Ford, who recently moved back to the city, pitched in.
How often this process could be replicated is unclear, though Acorn has money for more loans. Some believe that a neighborhood as destitute as this one cannot come back without large-scale intervention.
“I think we have a problem of quantity, and anything that can’t be delivered in quantity is not a suitable prototype, regardless of the fantastic intentions,” said Andrés Duany, the Miami architect and planner who has played a leading role in this city’s efforts at rebuilding. “The verification is not aesthetics, not the degree of good will; it’s quantity.”
But under Thursday’s bright sun, the focus was not on the hurdles.
“If you try not to focus on how bad everything is, you can focus on what is good,” Allan Jones, an electrician who worked on the two houses, said as he surveyed the bleak landscape. “There is potential.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/23/us/23ninth.html
Lower ninth ward was working class families....wonder what the economy was like? Well, let's look at some poverty stats...and wonder why business never picked up on here...
New Orleans by the Numbers | Dollars & Sense
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Home ownership
Black people are less likely than the general population to own their own homes, but home ownership in the Lower Ninth Ward was more prevalent than in either New Orleans as a whole or among Blacks generally. If the government refuses to help the uninsured residents of the Lower Ninth Ward rebuild, it will have destroyed what was actually a shining example of Bush's often touted "ownership society."
Birthplace & Place of residence five years ago
The United States is generally a mobile society; people move quite frequently. Louisiana, New Orleans and the Lower Ninth Ward are exceptions to that rule. Despite all the social ills in Louisiana and New Orleans, residents had deep roots and were invested in their communities.
Residents of New Orleans and of Louisiana are more likely to lack a high school education than residents of the United States as a whole. But New Orleans residents are more likely to have a college education than residents of either the state of Louisiana or the entire country.
However, New Orleans did not invest in all its communities equally. Forty percent of the adult residents of the Lower Ninth Ward lack a high school diploma or GED.
The people of New Orleans are poor, and in the Lower Ninth Ward even more so. Poverty is a confusing concept that requires some ex-planation. The federal government sets one national poverty line that is supposed to indicate, for families of various sizes and for individuals living alone, whether they are making enough money to meet basic needs. Based on a 1960s model in which food represented 1/3 of a family's budget, the poverty line was calculated as three times the cost of meeting minimum nutritional needs. People with incomes below that line are determined to be in poverty.
The poverty line is adjusted annually based on inflation, but the model itself has never been revised. The calculation does not take into account regional differences in the cost of living, the additional expenses that families now face (such as child care), or disproportionate cost increases for essentials like housing, heating, and transportation. (See "Ask Dr. Dollar", Dollars & Sense, January/February 2006).
Because the poverty line is set so low, those living at less than 50% of poverty are in extreme, perhaps life threatening, poverty. Even people earning twice the poverty line may barely be getting by. For that reason, many federal and state programs use a multiple of the poverty line (often 125%, 150%, or 185%) to determine eligibility for assistance, and at least one-Massachusetts' Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program-uses 200% of poverty for eligibility. Unfortunately, the Census Bureau does not provide data for poverty ratios above 200%, which would be gin to give us a more useful measure of affluence and discretionary income.
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10-15-2007, 05:49 PM
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Political Mastermind
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Join Date: Aug 2006
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So, we can say from your assumption that there was a large working class Black family living in the 9th Ward. Your allegations that the crime is high should be looked into next, IMHO, as you really feel that that is the reason no one should rebuild in the Ninth Ward.
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Before Katrina, the newspaper reports, the ward had 5,601 homes. Now, "demolition permits have been obtained on about a quarter of them, the highest percentage citywide."
"But demolition permits do not always signal an intention to rebuild," it adds. Only 3% of the ward's homeowners have applied for electrical permits -- "enough to power only 152 houses."
There are small clusters of FEMA trailers and returning residents in the ward, according to the Times-Picayune, "but unruly weeds are all that have sprung up on lots where demolition first offered the false promise of rapid recovery."
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In New Orleans, 9th Ward still 'all but vacant' - On Deadline - USATODAY.com
Seems to me this is the LAST area to rebuild because it was the hardest hit and the Mayor is working on getting bigger parts of the city going first.
Crime statistics in New Orleans compared with the rest of the US
New Orleans Crime Statistics (LA) - CityRating.com
But is New Orleans different from other cities?
Violent Crime on the Rise in U.S. Cities - Newsweek National News - MSNBC.com
Looks as though all cities crimes of a violent nature are on the rise...
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After 15 years of declines in murders, robberies, rapes, arsons and assaults in cities large and small across the country, the number of violent crimes is now rising. FBI statistics released this summer show a 1.3 percent rise in 2006; that follows a 2.3 percent jump the year before. It’s the first back-to-back increases in the national violent-crime numbers since the early 1990s. The recent surge has cops around the country concerned that if nothing is done quickly, the bad old days of high crime and widespread fear might return. “It’s like a cancer patient,” says Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Bratton. “You think you are clear, and then [the tumor] comes back again.”
The bad news was uneven. Murders overall rose 0.3 percent last year (after a 3.4 percent hike the previous year)—but they spiked 6.7 percent in the biggest cities. New York homicides jumped from 539 to 596, a 10.5 percent hike; murders in Philadelphia and San Antonio also rose about 10 percent. Chicago and Houston saw smaller increases. But murder dropped slightly in Los Angeles and Dallas. Nationally, robberies rose 6 percent in 2006 after a 3.9 percent jump the year before, the largest spike among the crime categories.
Related Content
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So, is it fair to make a general large comment about how no one will give the insurance money to people because this is a high crime area? Or could that be something you misunderstood? |
10-15-2007, 05:51 PM
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Machiavelli Incarnate
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Join Date: Jul 2006
Posts: 13,012
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Cookie Parker
I deserved that chastisement, Dom1..and will gladly accept it. And you are right from the articles...it is crime infested.
I will be back later tonite..but wanted to put this here before I forget...
Wake up Black America: New Orleans:An example of how the illegal friendly bill will adversely impact blacks
when Bush brought up that 1931 (?) law and allowed Halliburton to bring in illegals and to hire for below fair market values the construction jobs, it depressed the job markets in New Orleans, much as it has nationwide. that's all I wanted to start here and I hate to do this, but time will not allow now.
I'll be back..and again, I apologize...I deserved your chatisement for not reading your material and bulldogging my way into the conversation...thanks... |
I want to end all illegal immigration, but it is not a conservative/liberal issue. In fact, it was conservatives who were instrumental in defeating the latest immigration bill, and the base of the party went against Bush and many of the Democrats on this.
I believe it was 3/4 of the Republican voters and over half of the Democratic voters wanted this bill quashed - but the politicians on both sides wanted the hispanic vote. If you check the voting records though, more conservatives came out against the immigration bill than liberals did.
If we want to stop illegals from getting jobs we have to be tougher on not allowing them to enter in the first place. Not too many candidates running (at least viable ones) are willing to do that. Tom Tancredo comes to mind, but although he is a Republican I don't even like him and it seems that he doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell. There may be others, but not too many.
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10-15-2007, 05:53 PM
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Political Mastermind
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Join Date: Aug 2006
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Now, Halliburton and KBR its subsidiary...
The Raw Story | Halliburton awarded another $33 million contract for Katrina work
Huge chunks of money to repair this disaster...
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President Bush's former FEMA director Joe Allbaugh, who ran the agency from 2001-2003, is now lobbying for Halliburton in Washington.
In a news article Sept. 12, the Wall Street Journal asserted: "The Bush administration is importing many of the contracting practices blamed for spending abuses in Iraq as it begins the largest and costliest rebuilding effort in U.S. history."
After several such stories, Bush announced that contracts would be reopened to competitive bidding.
Vice President Dick Cheney was Halliburton's chief executive for five years before quitting to join Bush's ticket in 2000. Cheney continues to hold Halliburton stock options and receives about $200,000 a year in deferred compensation from the company.
Supporters note that because of its size and reach, Halliburton is one of few companies qualified for the reconstruction work. They add that Cheney's current Halliburton income flows from from retirement accounts he has either already paid into or from deferred compensation that he is entitled to receive as a former employee.
The contract follows.
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Kellogg Brown & Root Services, Arlington, Va., was awarded on Sept. 30, 2005, $33,565,296 for modification P0009 to Task Order 0017 under a cost reimbursement, indefinite- delivery/indefinite-quantity emergency construction capabilities contract for Hurricane Katrina stabilization and recovery at Naval Air Station (NAS) Pascagoula, NAS Gulfport, Stennis Space Center and other Navy installations in the Southeast Region. The work to be performed provides for re-construction, re-roofing of most buildings, barracks, debris removal from the entire base, water mitigation, mold mitigation, interior and exterior repairs to most buildings, waste treatment plants, and all incidental related work. Award of this modification brings the total task order amount to $61,340,466. Work will be performed in the areas noted above, and is expected to be completed by September 2007. Contract funds will expire at the end of the current fiscal year. The basic contract was competitively negotiated with 59 offers solicited, three proposals received and award made on July 26, 2004. The total contract amount is not to exceed $500,000,000, which includes the base period and four option years. The Naval Facilities Engineering Command, Southern Division, North Charleston, S.C., is the contracting activity (N62470-04-D-4017).
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I do indeed stand corrected....Halliburton was to repair the Naval facilities in New Orleans... |
10-15-2007, 05:58 PM
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Political Mastermind
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Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 2,483
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But does that leave the Government and Halliburton blameless?
Let's see....
Where Did the Katrina Money Go?Two years after the storms, most hurricane rebuilding funds have yet to be spent-much less reached those in need. - CommonDreams.org
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When pressed on the slow pace of recovery in the Gulf Coast, President Bush insists the federal government has fulfilled its promise to rebuild the region. The proof, he says, is in the big check the federal government signed to underwrite the recovery — allegedly more than $116 billion. But residents of the still-devastated Gulf Coast are left wondering whether the check bounced.
“$116 billion is not a useful number,” says Stanley Czerwinski of the Government Accountability Office, Congress’ investigative arm.
For starters, most federal money — about two-thirds — was quickly spent for short-term needs like debris removal and Coast Guard rescue. As Czerwinski explains, “There is a significant difference between responding to an emergency and rebuilding post-disaster.”
That has left little money for long-term Gulf Coast recovery projects. Although it’s tricky to unravel the maze of federal reports, our best estimate of agency data is that only $35 billion has been appropriated for long-term rebuilding.
Even worse, less than 42 percent of the money set aside has even been spent, much less gotten to those most in need. For example:
* Washington set aside $16.7 billion for Community Development Block Grants, one of the two biggest sources of rebuilding funds, especially for housing. But as of March 2007, only $1 billion — just 6 percent — had been spent, almost all of it in Mississippi. Following bad publicity, HUD spent another $3.8 billion on the program between March and July, leaving 70 percent of the funds still unused.
* The other major source of rebuilding help was supposed to be FEMA’s Public Assistance Program. But of the $8.2 billion earmarked, only $3.4 billion was meant for nonemergency projects like fixing up schools and hospitals.
* Louisiana officials recently testified that FEMA has also “low-balled” project costs, underestimating the true expenses by a factor of four or five. For example, for 11 Louisiana rebuilding projects, the lowest bids came to $5.5 million — but FEMA approved only $1.9 million.
* After the failure of federal levees flooded 80 percent of New Orleans, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers received $8.4 billion to restore storm defenses. But as of July 2007, less than 20 percent of the funds have been spent, even as the Corps admits that levee repair won’t be completed until as late as 2011.
The fact that, two years later, most federal Katrina funds remain bottled up in bureaucracy is especially shocking considering that the amounts Washington allocated come nowhere near the anticipated costs of Gulf rebuilding.
For example, the $3.4 billion FEMA has available to recover local public infrastructure would only cover about one-eighth of the damage suffered in Louisiana alone. But this money is spread across five states — Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas — and covers damage from three 2005 hurricanes, Katrina, Rita and Wilma.
Congress has acted on some of the money holdups, like changing a requirement in the Stafford Act that mandates local governments pay 10 percent of rebuilding projects up front before receiving federal aid. The Bush administration had refused to waive the rule — like it did for New York after 9/11 — grounding countless projects. The effect of the rule was particularly devastating in the hardest-hit places like Mississippi’s Hancock County, where communities lost most of their tax base after the storms.
Many in Washington claim that state and local governments are to blame: The money’s there, they say, but the locals just aren’t using it. And it’s true that there have been problems below the federal level. For example, Louisiana’s “Road Home” program — created by Congress but run by the state — has been so poorly managed that 18 months after the storms only 630 homeowners had received checks. Closings have sped up since then, but administrators admit many won’t see money until 2008, if at all — the program is facing a projected $3 billion shortfall.
But the White House and Congress have done little to exercise oversight of these federally backed programs, much less step in to remove red tape and make sure taxpayer money gets to its intended destination.
This is especially true when it comes to tax breaks and rebuilding contracts. Included in the $116 billion figure is $3.5 billion in tax breaks to jump-start business in Gulf Opportunity Zones — “GO Zones” — across 91 parishes and counties in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. But many of the breaks have been of questionable benefit to Katrina survivors, like a $1 million deal to build 10 luxury condos next to the University of Alabama football stadium — four hours from the Gulf Coast.
Federal contracts for rebuilding and recovery have also been marked by scandal, fraud and abuse. An August 2006 study by the office of Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., identified 19 contracts worth $8.75 billion that experienced “significant overcharges, wasteful spending or mismanagement.”
For thousands of Gulf residents, the end result is that federal support for recovery after Katrina’s devastation has been insufficient, too slow and hasn’t gotten to those most in need.
“Where did it go?” says Tanya Harris of ACORN in New Orleans when asked about the $116 billion. “Tell me. Where did it go?”
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I think it's a fair question. Seems maybe the reason the rebuilding is taking so long is that this is a black area, with a democrat incharge and unlike New York, the money allocated was way below cost and most of it hasn't been released by the government....
So, is crime the reason here? Or government prejudice? |
10-15-2007, 05:58 PM
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Machiavelli Incarnate
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Join Date: Jul 2006
Posts: 13,012
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Cookie Parker
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I don't think the Road Home program required people to have home insurance. The money is there but not being distributed in a timely manner . . . and the state of Louisiana (who had a surplus I believe) is in charge of the distribution of funds to the best of my knowledge.
As far as attracting businesses . . . well, the crime rate is a BIG part of it. I am sure it costs a bunch to insure your business as well as all the other costs of doing business in a place where crime runs rampant.
About a month ago four men walked into a contractor's trailer and tried to rob them with them in it. In all, I think three contractor's were shot and three thugs were shot. I wouldn't work there, and I don't think too many would unless they absolutely had to.
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10-15-2007, 06:03 PM
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Political Mastermind
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Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 2,483
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How's Halliburton making out two years after the fact?
The “Katrina gold rush:” Profiteering and the Gulf Opportunity Zone : NOLA Indymedia
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The atmosphere of a Wild West profiteer’s paradise in the disaster area was facilitated and encouraged at every step by the actions of the federal and state agencies responsible for the reconstruction efforts.
To begin with, nearly every one of the first wave of post-hurricane reconstruction contracts was awarded purely on the basis of political connections, without even a public review of bids and proposals. Federal audits in 2006 found that as many as three-fourths of all Katrina-related contracts were awarded on a no-bid or limited competition basis.
These contracts were often fitted with what are known as “cost-plus” provisions, which ensure that the contractor will turn a profit regardless of the eventual cost of the project; the cost of the project plus a predetermined profit are automatically passed on to the government.
According to a report last year by Corpwatch, a corporate watchdog group, of the first series of post-Katrina reconstruction contracts, 90 percent were awarded to firms outside Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Local and less well-connected firms were simply “frozen out” of the process.
In one such incident, Circle B Enterprises received a $287 million FEMA contract for manufactured housing, despite having filed for bankruptcy in 2003. The company was not licensed to construct homes in Georgia, where it is listed, and does not currently even have a web site.
Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR), part of the Halliburton empire formerly controlled by Vice President Dick Cheney, was awarded a number of contracts totaling $40 million for repair work at US Navy facilities.
According to Taxpayers for Common Sense, a government watchdog group, FEMA also awarded limited competition, cost-plus contracts for the construction of temporary housing for Katrina victims to Fluor Corporation ($221 million) and Bechtel National, part of Bechtel Group ($257 million).
It is worth remembering that both Fluor and Bechtel Group, as well as KBR, had previously been awarded highly lucrative contracts for reconstruction projects in Iraq, for which charges of nepotism, fraud, and waste had already been leveled.
After Katrina victims who moved into the trailers provided by Fluor complained of frequent nosebleeds, headaches, and trouble breathing, the trailers were discovered to be constructed of substandard materials and to contain extremely toxic levels of formaldehyde, an agent linked to cancer and respiratory illness.
Despite the hundreds of millions FEMA spent for housing relief, temporary trailers failed to reach New Orleans’ Ninth Ward until June 2006.
Many of the huge Katrina fortunes associated with the “gold rush” were made through a process called “skimming,” by which a contractor awarded with a certain sum to perform some task by the government then hires a second contractor to perform the task for less than the sum awarded by the government—keeping the difference as pure profit. The second contractor might then hire a third, and so on. The government body responsible for overseeing the contract can be unaware that a second contractor has been hired, or can be a conspirator in this scheme.
A 2006 Corpwatch report cited as an example of “skimming” one $500 million contract awarded to the Ashbritt corporation for the removal of debris—a sum that amounted to $23 per cubic meter of debris. Ashbritt then contracted C&B Enterprises to do the same work for $9 per cubic meter. C&B Enterprises in turn hired Amlee Transportation to do the job for $8 per cubic meter, which then hired another company. Ultimately, a haulage contractor from New Jersey completed the project for $3 per cubic meter.
These numbers suggest that in the case of this particular disaster removal project, for every dollar spent by the government, 13 cents went towards the task itself, while 87 cents was skimmed off as profit by corporations and private individuals who did nothing to aid the victims of the hurricane. To put that another way, of the initial $500 million allocated to the project, $85 million went to debris removal, and $415 million was pure “disaster profit.”
Takings like these drew a virtual stampede of corporations to the Gulf Coast, each eager to rake in windfall profits on this scale.
Other Katrina fortunes were acquired by less subtle means. For example, a number of officials tasked with organizing reconstruction efforts were outfitted with government credit cards with a limit of $250,000 per transaction. The General Accounting Office, later renamed the Government Accountability Office, reported that an initial probe into the use of these cards had found that “government credit cards in two California Navy units had been used for more than $660,000 in fraudulent or questionable purchases of personal goods ranging from jewelry to pizza,” according to a September 2005 article in the Wall Street Journal.
The “Gulf Opportunity Zone”
The infamous phrase “Gulf Opportunity Zone” has become synonymous with the rampant profiteering and exploitation that took place in the hurricane-stricken Gulf Coast in the period following the disaster.
The Gulf Opportunity Zone itself was created by HR 4440, the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act, proposed in September 2005 and signed in December of that year by President Bush. Upon signing the bill, Bush remarked, “This important bill will help the citizens of the Gulf Coast continue to put their lives back together and rebuild their communities in the wake of the devastating hurricanes that hit the region earlier this year.”
While the bill, often referred to in business circles as the “Go Zone Act,” accomplished none of these things, it did have two notable features.
First, the estimated program cost as of the day Bush signed it was $8.6 billion between 2006 and 2015—a tiny sum compared with the monumental destruction inflicted by the hurricane, which resulted in an estimated $200 billion in damages. By way of comparison, one recent Columbia University study estimated that the total cost of the war in Iraq could exceed $2 trillion.
The second notable feature of HR 4440 was that it essentially consisted of tax credits and other incentives to private individuals and businesses that established residences and operations inside the disaster area. The Gulf Opportunity Zone was not a program of public works, but of benefits to employers who hired inside the disaster area, reimbursements to businesses that had clean-up costs, tax-exempt bonds to finance private construction efforts, and so on.
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If you can read this and still find fault with the working class black families in the ninth ward, then you, my friend Dom 1 are not paying attention at all to the money corporations have made off war and disasters in this nation...with nothing to show in return. |
10-15-2007, 06:10 PM
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Machiavelli Incarnate
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Join Date: Jul 2006
Posts: 13,012
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Cookie Parker
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I didn't say nobody should rebuild there, I just said that if I were a landlord I wouldn't rebuild there to have my investment torn up. Why would anyone? Why would anyone rebuild (and I believe 45% of the residences were leased) if they are not going to get a return on their investment?
A lot of the families that lived in the ninth ward as well as other parts of New Orleans have moved away and have no intention of coming back. Many have moved to Houston and the Mississippi Gulf Coast because of the violence in New Orleans.
Also, it isn't that the insurance money isn't given to the people, it is that even if insurance money is given why should they rebuild in New Orleans rather than someplace safer and cheaper to live? It takes less than 45 minutes to get accross the Twin Spans into New Orleans from the Gulf Coast and a lot of people are just commuting . . . the amount is a lot more than people realize.
Another anecdote, I think it was a Korean man, but not sure. Anyway, he rebuilt his million dollar home because he wanted to stay in the city he loved. Because of Katrina, he couldn't get full coverage on his house and some thugs ended up buring it down . . . for no other reason than it was there. It may not make the national news, but you can bet that most people in New Orleans know that story. Thus, the apprehension for moving back. The people who stay really love the city a great deal, they would have to in order to stay there.
About the crime, last month a black kid was shot in the morning. Later that day his brother was shot and killed. They had been suspected of being involved in 14 murders but witnesses kept backing out. Nagin came on and basically said that it was vigilante justice and he didn't seem too concerned. The NOPD is overworked and underpaid and get very little community help. It is an extremely dangerous city.
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10-15-2007, 06:15 PM
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Machiavelli Incarnate
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Join Date: Jul 2006
Posts: 13,012
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Cookie Parker
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I'm not blaming working class black families, they should be able to get funds from teh Road Home program, but it is slow being released - that is the state dealing with the residential areas.
What I am saying is that nobody has come up with a good reason or really any reason why owners of properties in the ninth ward who were leasing places (and there were a lot) should rebuild there. If you had rentals or businesses there places would you rebuild in the ninth ward? |
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