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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview U-0251, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
James Perry describes how his work experience and his passion for civil rights fueled his interest in housing rights for low-income people. Born to educator parents in New Orleans East, he learned to be appreciative of how the civil rights movements benefited African Americans. After receiving his bachelor's degree from the University of New Orleans in the late 1990s, Perry discovered there were few job opportunities outside of the service and tourism sectors in New Orleans. Intent on remaining in his hometown, Perry found a job working at the Preservation Resource Center, an organization responsible for renovating vacant historic houses. His early interest in civil rights and his work experience in the housing market informed his later career as the executive director of the New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, which helps provide low-cost fair housing for low-income residents and which investigates housing discrimination. Perry concludes that discrimination is often obscured through civility and courteousness. While his work focuses on legal strategies to buttress housing equity provisions, Perry acknowledges the practical difficulty of moving beyond the region's negative racial past. The trend of replacing segregated public housing with mixed-income housing was complicated by Hurricane Katrina. The storm merely illuminated a history of class and racial segregation, and federal and local government housing agencies perpetuated it by privileging middle-class interests over those of poorer residents, says Perry. He argues that low-income residents who had hoped to return to the newly constructed buildings were frequently prevented from doing so. Perry also discusses the role the media played in post-Katrina New Orleans. They projected the image of Mayor Ray Nagin as helpful to evacuees' cause as he berated FEMA for its inefficiency, he says; however, Perry argues that Nagin's rejection of additional trailers actually prevented evacuees' return to New Orleans. Perry notes that a flurry of civil rights activity swept Katrina-like through New Orleans with intense energy, but the storm's aftermath left the ground fallow, and civil rights organizers were unable to maintain activists' fervor to protest social injustices. He discusses the new jobs and industries that cropped up following the devastation inflicted by Katrina—jobs that are vital to attracting a vibrant middle class back to New Orleans. Perhaps more important to Perry is the national scrutiny that forced the nation and native Louisianans to address racial and economic disparities in New Orleans.
James Perry, executive director of the New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center in New Orleans, argues that Hurricane Katrina exacerbated and highlighted existing racial and economic tensions in that city. He discusses the fair housing efforts in the area and offers his views on civil rights activities in post-Katrina New Orleans.
[START OF DISC 1, TRACK 1]
Well, I guess we should start at the very beginning. If you would say your name for the recording, and then tell me about—I know you're from New Orleans—tell me about what neighborhood you're from?
James Perry, and New Orleans East is where I grew up. I actually wasn't born in New Orleans, I was actually born in Greensboro, North Carolina, and I moved to New Orleans at about three or four years old. And that whole time, [I] lived in New Orleans East, all the way till I was about seventeen or eighteen, when I started kind of moving into other parts of the city, but I pretty much been in the city since three or four years old.
I guess your parents got a job in New Orleans, or how did you end up here?
My mother is from New Orleans, and my father was teaching at the University of New Orleans, and they met there. He got a job outside of New Orleans, so they moved to Carolina, but then he got a job, or decided to come back to the University of New Orleans, around the time that I was three or four years old.
What did she teach, your mom?
She was a public school teacher, maybe fourth grade then, and now she's a public school librarian and my father is an English professor.
What do you remember about New Orleans East? What kind of neighborhood was it?
I was born in '75, so we're talking like
'79 to '91 or '92 that I lived in New
Orleans East, and I guess during the first part of the time when I lived
in the East it was really this upcoming area, it was really this
vibrant, middle-class area, and it did really well. I think a lot of
that was because we had the NASA Space Center in the East, where they
manufactured parts for space shuttles, and so we had a lot of people who
made a lot
Were those patterns that you were noticing then when you were in high school or is this stuff looking back that—.
No, I did notice, you know, probably not for the right reasons—it was because I couldn't buy the tennis shoes that I wanted to buy at the mall that was only a few blocks from my house. Instead I had to find a way to get all the way out to Metairie in order to buy whatever new jeans I wanted to buy. So I noticed then, yeah.
So would you say that that's the sort of thing that got you thinking about the work you do today?
You know, actually not at all. I think it's important to
point out, because with the New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, I
think people a lot of times—. Well, first of all,
it's almost a bad name, this whole term "fair
housing," because people ask me all the time, "Well,
what do you do? You know, fair housing, do you renovate houses, do you
buy/sell houses, do you teach people how to buy houses?" And
what we actually do is we
What is the story?
It's not even a story, it's just that once he played—. My grandmother required that everyone learn to play an instrument, and primarily the piano, and so he of course played piano and organ as a result, and one day King came to preach at his church, and he played for King as King preached. He grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, you know, so King wasn't far away from him.
The Civil Rights Movement means a lot of things to different people, so I'm curious, you know, just talking about the legacy of your parents, what was it about the movement that they really wanted you to know?
I don't know that it's so much about the movement,
as it is about why the movement happened. My mom told me once
about—. I remember as a kid, asking her about segregation,
and how it worked and what it was, and she said, "You know, I
really
Why were you drawn to the housing part of civil rights work?
You know, I wasn't. All through high school and through
college I was always involved in all kinds of Civil Rights related
organizations. In high school, [I was] president of the Black Student
Union and the same thing in college. In college, at the University of
New Orleans, we had a professor who wrote in to a local paper and
said—I'm not even sure why he wrote in, nowadays I
have go back and look at my paperwork—but he wrote in and
said that African-Americans were less intelligent than Caucasians
because they have smaller heads and therefore smaller brains. And so,
Right. You wanted to stay in New Orleans.
Trying to stay in New Orleans, and it really seemed like the only way to
stay was to work in the restaurant or tourism industry. And I
wasn't interested. And I didn't want to leave. But
I got really lucky and found a job working at the Preservation Resource
Center, and they have a program called "Operation
Comeback." They help people buy and renovate vacant and
blighted historic houses. And so it was the best job experience ever. It
was incredible, and I worked for a woman named Stephanie Bruno, who
I'm still excellent friends with. She taught me an awful lot,
and she taught me and the program taught me every aspect of housing in
the city of New Orleans. And the
One of the things that really interested me about the Preservation Resource Center is that my preconceived notion about historic preservation is that it's about getting the right filigree on the buildings, or the right color, stuff like that. And the work there seemed to be very much about civil rights and economic justice. At least, that's in the mission statement.
It's interesting you say that. You know, I had a great experience working at the Preservation Resource Center, but historically, civil rights advocates and preservationists in the city of New Orleans butt heads constantly and never get along. Which makes it also much more interesting that the head of a civil rights organization gets his initial training at the Preservation Resource Center.
So I got that wrong about the Preservation Resource Center.
Well, I don't know, I think on some issues they get a bum
rap, on others they don't, you know? I would say that the
focus of the Preservation Resource Center is the built environment. And
sometimes the focus on the built environment is to the benefit of
everybody and sometimes it's not, is a good way to put it. I
would say that they're pretty consistent about focusing on
saving the built environment in the city of New Orleans.
Can you give me an example [of] one of those times they were at odds, maybe something when you felt like if you were in charge there, you would have pushed for a different position?
Let me see. Well, I don't know how specific this is, but one
big issue for reviving old historic neighborhoods that the civil rights
advocates fear is gentrification. And you hear it come up over and over
again and all the time. Just before I came to the Preservation Resource
Center, they bought and renovated eight vacant and blighted properties
in uptown New Orleans on General Taylor. It was an incredible project.
It was the first time that they really got in and got their hands dirty
and put their money where their mouth was, renovated these properties,
and they're beautiful, they're great. And it had
been at that time an African-American neighborhood. And they went out of
their way to market to African-Americans, to try to attract
African-Americans to the neighborhood, because I think that they knew
that if they sold the properties to all white folks then, frankly,
they'd get stigmatized, they'd get a bad rap. But
they marketed, and they couldn't sell them. They
couldn't sell them. And so they ended up selling them all to
first-time home buyers, all of whom were
Can I use the fax machine?
You know it's not plugged in to fax. It's only the one in that room.
I can't use that one.
What's it doing?
It's just not sending.
That's okay. So you were saying they were able to sell it to first-time home buyers but they were white.
Right. And so there was a good bit of backlash that they got because it was perceived that they were coming in and buying up the neighborhood and trying to essentially take over this African-American neighborhood. The issue, though, was I think pretty interesting. You know, I talked to folks to see why didn't African Americans want to buy? And I think that the buying trends were really just very different in the African-American culture in New Orleans at the time and in the white culture in New Orleans at that time, because it was a low-income neighborhood, and African-Americans had lived there for so long and had lived in shotguns for so long, and African-Americans would say to me, "Well, you know, what I really want now is I don't want to live in a shotgun, I want to live in a house that has a two-car garage, and has all these different amenities that you really find in the suburbs." And so it was this suburban style of buying that was deep in most of the African-Americans that I talked to at the time. So it was kind of this thing where maybe there wasn't a good communication about how great these particular properties could be to anyone, African-American or white. And I don't know that I fully blame the Preservation Resouce Center for it, but it was just an example of how people told them, "We're upset because you're taking over our neighborhood and changing our neighborhood, and you're not letting African-Americans in," and they actually went out of their way to.
You know, it's interesting [in] a case like that, when people talk about cities and people get nostalgic for the great neighborhoods, it's always Storyville, Little Italy in New York, it's some sort of ethnically homogenous neighborhood. And I wonder, since a lot of your work is about housing integration, if you think some of that nostalgia's misplaced?
I don't know if it's misplaced. Yeah, I don't think that it's misplaced.
Because I'm guessing some of those neighborhoods happened because of discrimination somewhere else, cause people were forced to live in one neighborhood.
Absolutely. I was talking to a civil rights advocate the other day, actually a few weeks ago, about some aspects of the Louisiana plan, the New Orleans plan, and one of his comments was, "Well, you know, the whole deal with integration, you always fight for it, but you know it's never really going to happen." You know, and we were talking specifically about this idea of dismantling African-American neighborhoods. Because there are loads of folks who would say, "Yeah, we want integration, but don't tear up these historic neighborhoods," and so I think it's one of those things that's just going to always be there, and I would submit that I don't know that anyone really had an honest answer to the issue yet. Working on all the rebuilding issues, the civil rights advocates who I've worked with now nationally and locally, we've kind of been bumping heads on that very issue consistently.
We had a meeting not too long ago with Secretary Jackson of HUD, and we
were trying to figure out how to approach him about what to do with
public housing. Because all the public housing in the city of New
Orleans is segregated. It's all ninety-nine percent
African-American, with the exception of one complex, which is about
ninety-five percent
Just like the Hope Six projects that I saw.
Absolutely. And that's on one side, endorsing the Hope Six
project idea, but on the other side is this issue that there are all
these folks who are calling us all the time from Houston and from
Atlanta and saying, "Look, I don't care about all
this high-falutin' market rate stuff. I need a place to live
today and I want to get back into my city. And X complex is in good
enough condition where we could move in today. And if you guys endorse
Jackson's idea, then that means that they're gonna
tear it down and take five years to build something new that I might not
even be able to get into, and it means that I probably won't
get back into the city of New Orleans." So it's this
really tough situation for us where we know if we argue for them to come
back right away, then we are arguing to keep the current segregated
system, but they get in to the city, you know? And the flip side is, we
argue to go ahead and make these Hope Six projects, then
we're arguing for them to stay out of the city. And do they
ever come back? And that's a question that we just were not
able to come to a perfect resolution about. What we did finally say is
well
Another place where it comes up is in education. In Baton Rouge, for
instance, [there's] Southern University which is in Baton
Rouge, a historically African-American University, and
there's Louisiana State University. And then here in the city
there's the University of New Orleans, and there's
Southern University in New Orleans. And the programs are completely
duplicative, well, not completely, they've made some changes
to make sure they're not completely duplicative, but pretty
duplicative. I mean, LSU has a great law school, and Southern University
in Baton Rouge has a great law school. And so, the issue is it costs
everyone so much more money and frankly, why have two separate
universities? It is segregation and it perpetuates segregation. But when
you talk to people from Southern University and particularly alumni from
the law school, they say, "Well look, this is our heritage,
every black judge in Louisiana went to Southern because that was the
only place that you could go to, and it's a sacred thing for
us. You know what happens if we say that we integrate these schools:
basically LSU gets bigger and you get rid of Southern. You lose this
piece of our heritage." And it's really tough to
convince folks that you should do anything other than let the system
exist as is. If I remember correctly, the direction that educators
thought was appropriate was to make the programs less duplicative, so
that you end up integrating, but not getting rid of either
It's complicated.
Very. Yeah.
Talking about picking the housing projects that are most destroyed and rebuilding those, do you think Katrina presents an opportunity or is it just a huge problem?
Well, I do think it presents an opportunity. But the extent to which it is [an] opportunity is really all about the effectiveness of our leadership. If the leadership is ineffective, then the opportunity is gone and it immediately is a problem and will continue to be a problem.
Leadership at what level?
Well, every level, but when it comes to public housing, I would say unfortunately it's really all about HUD, you know. The Housing Authority of New Orleans runs public housing in the city of New Orleans, and it had problems in the late 90s, big problems, so HUD took over the Housing Authority. It removed our local board of directors and put in place a HUD employee who is a single person who is the board. And so that one person makes all decisions. And so essentially the Housing Authority is HUD, right? So what happens with housing really is HUD's decision.
I think that before the storm there were about 7500 people in public
housing, there were about 15,000 units, but only about 7500 were
occupied, and now, nine months after the storm, there are about 1000
people in public housing in the city of New Orleans. Excuse me. And so I
don't know, I just think that in nine months, federal and
local
The other issue is about past Hope Six projects in New Orleans. There are
two main developments. One is the Saint Thomas development, which is now
called River Gardens, and in that Hope Six development they got the
Saint Thomas residents to sign off and agree that they would move out so
there could be this new mixed-income housing, and part of the selling
point was that about half of the residents would get to come back. About
half of the 1500 families in Saint Thomas would get to return and live
there, and so they knew that a lot of them wouldn't get to
come back, but you know, fifty-fifty chance, right? Might get to make it
back to the new development. So we're talking about 750
families would get to come back. So just before the storm, in the River
Gardens complex, we think that there were eighty, maybe seventy units or
so that were occupied by former Saint Thomas residents. So
we're talking seventy or eighty, out of 750 that were
supposed to come back. And that's a big deal. I mean, there
are a few different points of this Hope Six thing. One is to make cities
better. Two is to give these low income families a chance, a better
opportunity, a better life because they live in this mixed income
environment. And so when you leave out ninety percent of 'em,
you completely cheat them out of the opportunity, so what's
the point? The other thing is that the other folks who didn't
make it in to the new Saint Thomas, for the most part, were
And then there's a second complex, which is the Florida-Desire Hope Six development. And at that development, almost all the residents got to come back. So they didn't bring in hardly any mixed-income people. So once again you miss out on this whole mixed-income idea. So both developments, in my opinion, have failed. So that's the other issue, in terms of whether or not there's opportunity. If opportunity looks the way that Saint Thomas and Florida ended up, then there is no opportunity. It's only to the extent that the people who run those developments and run those projects do it right. If the projects are carried out properly and according the guidelines and they don't deliver, then yeah, it's just more trouble.
And that's also one of the things that we took into consideration when going to Jacksonville. Do we want to ask for more Hope Six? I mean, look what it's done so far, it hasn't helped. So the opportunity is there, it's certainly there, but whether or not we take advantage of it plays a big role, and when it comes to public housing, HUD really makes the decisions. I think nowadays we may want to consider pushing HUD to let us have our own local board back at the Housing Authority of New Orleans rather than allowing HUD to continue as the decider.
Because the local boys will make a difference.
Right. I think so. I hope so. I can't be sure, of course, you
never know. Sometimes local can be just as bad, if not worse. But right
now we don't have any action,
So can you tell me about what the work of the Fair Housing Center is, in the case of Saint Thomas? What were you doing?
Of course, we investigate housing discrimination, and Saint Thomas is one of those interesting cases I guess because—. There are two types of cases we'll take in. We'll take in cases that are direct, that have direct evidence of discrimination. So we do something called testing, and the way that testing works is, for instance, say an African-American female calls us and she suspects that someone wouldn't rent an apartment to her cause she's African-American. Then we would send two people to that same apartment on the same day within a few minutes of each other to try to rent the same apartment. One would be white, one would be black. They'd have similar income, they'd have similar credit, and in all respects required to qualify for the apartment they'd have the same qualifications. And so in theory they should be told about the same information about the apartments. But if one is told that the apartment is available at $400 a month and the other is told that it's $700 a month, then we probably have evidence of discrimination. So that's one of those really direct cases.
The more indirect cases are what we call disparate impact or disparate
effect cases. And in those, there may or may not be intent to
discriminate, but there's a negative effect on one protected
class. So a good example is if a landlord creates a rule that says,
"No more than two people per unit in an apartment
complex." Well, on its face, that policy's probably
non-discriminatory, but for families that have children, if a husband
and wife have a child, then automatically they are excluded from that
apartment complex.
That's the logic that brought us into the Saint Thomas issues. Because when there're negative decisions made about public housing, since about ninety percent of the residents are African-American, then it has a negative impact mostly on African-Americans. So when Saint Thomas, or when Hannah was negotiating or going through the process for who to bring back, and we say the numbers keep declining on how many residents they would allow to come back, residents came to us and complained and said, "The whole reason we signed off was to have this opportunity to live in mixed-income housing, and we're not getting the opportunity now because they keep lessening how many of [us] will get to come back." And so the negative effect, the lack of opportunity to live in a mixed-income environment, was harming mostly African-Americans. So we were able to get in and file a complaint on their behalf. We were able to negotiate to get more Saint Thomas residents guaranteed housing in the complex. Not as many as we would have liked, but we were able to get more.
We had a contract, we had an agreement with the Housing Authority that
they had to honor about how many folks would come back and about
reporting to us about getting folks in and so forth. So after the storm,
most of the units that had been reserved or were supposed to be reserved
for Saint Thomas residents were being occupied by their employees and by
New Orleans city officials. And while we recognize after the storm
everybody was hard up for housing, just a few months after the storm
people were ready to come back, and this really was the housing that was
set aside for these folks to come back. That's one. Two, is I
guess I would argue that because these folks were low-
Do you think it's going to happen?
Well, there's been an order that came all the way from Secretary Jackson, as I understand it, to move all the employees out of River Gardens. My general counsel has been watching the details more closely than I have, but I think that his order wasn't specific enough, and didn't say, "Here's the deadline by which you must move out." And so a memo that we've gotten from Anno [??], provides, I think, that they're going to move folks out, or they said that people have to be out by September. All their employees and so forth. Which is not nearly soon enough. And so that's the issue that we're ultimately looking at right now: we need that date moved up. We need them out now.
So the storm didn't necessarily change the bread and butter of what you do here. Is that incorrect?
No, well, it didn't change the bread and butter of what we
do. It did change the geographic area that we cover. We are the only
group like ours in the entire state of
In addition, you know one of the big cases that we took on after the
storm was this internet advertising case where a bunch of websites set
up to assist evacuees had housing advertised, and it was housing all
over the nation, but they would have discriminatory advertisements. And
it's illegal under the Fair Housing Act to discriminate in
advertising. So for instance, one of my favorite advertisements from
this case is one that said, "Housing available for
evacuees"—you know, they give all the information
about it—and then they say, "Not to be racist, but
no blacks." Right. And it's just so great:
"Not to be racist, but no blacks!" And then
there's another one that says, "We want to make
things more understandable for our younger children, so no black
children." They're seeking to share a room, let
folks live in their house. But it goes on and on, and there were about
thirty pages worth of these discriminatory advertisements. The
advertisements are for housing all over the nation, you know,
it's in Alabama, in D.C., in California, in
And it has some big implications, because there hasn't really
been an appellates case yet that's tested whether or not the
Fair Housing laws apply to internet websites. And so there's
some argument among scholars about whether or not website providers have
to abide by the Fair Housing law. So for instance, if the New York Times had allowed someone to run a classified
advertisement that said, "Not to be racist, but no
blacks," the case law very clearly provides that they would be
responsible. The person who placed the advertisement and the New York Times would be responsible. But
there's a law called the Communications Decency Act that says
that website providers are not responsible when third parties post
defamatory or obscene statements on their websites. And so what internet
providers will argue is that discriminatory statements are either or
both defamatory or obscene, and therefore since a third party posted the
advertisement, they're not liable under the Communications
Decency Act. So the issue becomes, you know, at the same time, the Fair
Housing Act says that it's illegal for anyone to publish any
statement of discrimination, period. Right? And so the two seemed in
some ways to be at odds with one another. This is also this issue of
whether or not a discriminatory statement is an obscene statement and
whether or not a discriminatory statement is a defamatory statement. So
we're going to find out. And we think we're on
good ground there, but it'll be interesting to see. And so
the hurricane gets us into having to take on an issue like that.
Switching gears a little bit, you were saying before that if people don't come back, by September, it's going to be too late.
No, I don't think it's too—.
Or, in the case of Saint Thomas, you were saying it's too long, I guess.
Yeah. I think that every day that we don't find ways to get people back in we lose another person, you know. They find some other great opportunity or some job opportunity, or they get more frustrated and they make the decision not to come back. And so it's that each day we lose, it's an attrition, we lose folks, a few more people every day, so by the time we get to September who knows how many of our clients that wanted to come back we'll still be able to find or locate.
So do you have a mental image of New Orleans five years from now?
Hmm. Well I guess I have two images. I have the image of what it'll look like if advocates like us have our way, and what it'll look like if we don't. And then I guess there are some things that I'm not necessarily aggressively advocating for, but I'm curious about how they are going to turn out, too. So, I think in the perfect world, New Orleans would have—.
I'm sorry, excuse me. He said that he would have
Sorry about that.
No problem.
I would say in New Orleans, in terms of who was here, comparable to who
was here before the storm, even in terms of the numbers of people,
it'd be about the same. The difference, hopefully, will be
that we'll have some new industry so that people can make
more money and we can grow our middle class. One of the biggest problems
facing
So that's one. I guess the other, the one part that I struggle
with in the vision is what will the parts of the city that were most
affected by the storm look like? Because even though we're at
the point now where the Bring New Orleans Back commission has released
its plan, you know, the mayor endorsed some parts, didn't
endorse other parts, but it doesn't have any force of law.
And you know the governor's plan doesn't really
deal with land use, what's going to happen in different areas
of the city. I'm curious about what the Lower Ninth Ward and
New Orleans East are going to look like in five years. You know? We have
friends and family who live in both areas, and I talked to some people
who say there's no way I'm coming back, and
someone please take this house off my hands, tear it down, do whatever,
I don't want it, and there are other people like my two aunts
and my parents—we've gone in, we've
gutted their houses, they've already been rewired, and so
they're pretty far along in the process of getting renovated.
And so I just don't know what those neighborhoods are gonna
look like. I hear stories about developers
Do you have hope about what will happen?
You know, I don't have a good prescription yet, I'm not sure what I think is the best route.
Can you tell me what factors—?
Yeah. I'm not so big on the whole idea of taking
folks' properties. I think that you get really, really messy
when you get into the whole issue of eminent domain, and expropriating
properties that people own. That's one. Two is that the city
of New Orleans has a really sophisticated process for acquiring vacant
and blighted properties through eminent domain, through expropriation
lawsuits, and the city has never really been able to deal with all the
properties that are blighted. There's never been the market
to sell those blighted properties, so the issue has never been the
acquisition—before the storm, it had never been acquisition
of the blighted properties, it was always that there weren't
enough people who wanted to buy them. And it's also that the
process is cumbersome, but they just weren't enough people
who wanted to buy the properties. And so the city wouldn't go
in and take them because they didn't want to just sit there
and be the entity that owns thirty thousand blighted units, you know. So
would a smart mayor want to go in and take all these properties that
have been or will be abandoned in New Orleans East or the Lower Nine,
you know? I don't know, I'm not sure. The
city's hurting for money, you have to actually pay the fair
market value of the properties to acquire them, and then once you get
them, what do you do with them? It's a really messy thing.
Both because of the issue of what the city does with the properties,
one, and two, taking properties from folks
Is there a disparate impact case in who got
Well, I think not. I've given that a lot of thought, and it's because of Lakeview. Because Lakeview is mostly upper-income white folk, and they got flooded, and it's just as bad. It's still more African-Americans than whites, but I think it lessens the ability to bring the case. There may be a case, I won't say that I don't think that there is.
We've been interviewing some people in the Ninth Ward. We've heard a few people say, you know, that they thought the government blew up the levees. Like they did in '27.
Yeah. As have I. And there are some lawsuits, as I understand it, that
are going forward just about that whole issue. There's also
this barge in the Lower Nine that ran into the levees, and
there's this conspiracy theory that the barge was purposely
placed
I was thinking about it more in terms of people's inherent mistrust.
Well, right. The mistrust is there. The whole time I've grown up in New Orleans I've heard—. Because you know there's the story of what happened in '27, where it's pretty definite that they were purposefully blown. But I think, is it Betsy or Camille? The levees broke in the Lower Nine then, and—this is all from newspaper stories that I've read—there hasn't been direct evidence that they were purposefully exploded, but you talk to Lower Nine residents who went through those storms, they believe it. They absolutely believe that that's what happened during those hurricanes as well. And they believe that's what happened this time. And I don't really discount it, but I also haven't looked closely enough to say that the evidence is definitely there. There may be a disparate impact argument, I think, [but] it's going be a while before we know whether or not it is. And frankly, it's going to depend on the numbers, you know.
One other issue is that the Army Corps of Engineers does the levees, and because they are a federal agency, they are exonerated from a lot of litigation. And so it's very, very difficult to go after them on this kind of case. And that's another big factor in whether or not there's a disparate impact case. We could find that there is disparate, but because it's the federal government, I think they're exonerated from the case.
You were saying before, that was your hope in five years, advocates like you—.
Right.
—would get your way. What does it look like if—?
Well, I think that if we don't get our way, there are a few things. The first is that the majority of the people in the city are not people who lived in New Orleans before the storm. And so the landscape completely changes, and it becomes a different city. And we lose a lot of the cultural heritage that makes the city who it is, or what it is, which would be really, really unfortunate. I think that New Orleans with a strong middle class would be an incredibly wonderful city to have. You could really have a great time. I mean, you're always going to have a good time in New Orleans, no matter what the economic situation is, but it would just be really great, I think, if we had this great, strong, vibrant middle class. I think that the other New Orleans ends up with a middle class too, but it's just not the same people who were here initially. All that tourists come to see and enjoy, all those things, right now and before the storm, what they were seeing for the most part is real New Orleans. When you come in for Mardi Gras, you're not coming in and seeing something that we put on, or make up, you're really coming in and seeing what the locals do, you know, you're coming in and for that day, you become a local. But we don't want it to become like Disneyworld, where it's a side that we show that isn't how the city really is, and that's the potential if we don't do a good job at making sure that our own citizens are able to return. So I think that's probably my primary fear or concern.
Now, it's still one of those things that's kind of
balanced a bit with this issue of if you lived in the city and you were
low income, you had a job, you worked at a hotel or something, but
didn't make enough money to afford decent housing and were
living in public housing as a result, you get evacuated, and you get to
Atlanta or somewhere, and
Are you here to stay?
I'm here to stay, yeah. Done deal. You know, one of the funny things after the storm was friends from all over the country called me and offered me loads of jobs, jobs that paid better than I get paid here, and without even thinking it through, in every instance I said no. I'm not going anywhere, I gotta be here. And it's interesting that our general counsel, Lucia Blacksher said the same thing. And I think they were good intentions. The idea was, your city is gone, you probably don't even have a job anymore, come up here and let us help you out. And so both of us really felt this urge. And after the storm, we were the only two employees left, and we both felt this urge that we had to get back to the city, and we had to be involved in the rebuilding process. So I'm here, not going anywhere.
That's about the list of questions that I have, but are there any other things that—. I guess when people are looking back and listening to this interview, they're gonna be in part looking for the levers that made the change. Are there things we haven't talked about that you'd want to point out and say if you could really have your hand in another pot, or if there's one particular housing thing that's not being addressed—?
Yeah, you know, when you look at the governor's plan, the governor has put forth a plan to deal with housing issues, and the Congress has already appropriated several billions of dollars and is looking to appropriate another set of money to the state. So the governor has this plan for how to spend it. And it focuses almost exclusively on homeownership, and on what's going to happen with homeowners. But the issue is that about fifty-five percent of New Orleanians before the storm were renters. And I think one of the keys to a strong economy and to a strong city is to have a higher rate of home ownership. So we have to get there, but I think the focus on home ownership is going to leave out all those renters, all those people who rented property in the city of New Orleans. That's gonna be a tough issue, in terms of getting folks back. When they come back initially, we have to have enough rental housing for them. So that's one thing.
The other issue there is the rental money that is
available—there's more money that's
available for big multi-family housing, which is good, for instance, for
the areas of the state that Rita hit, that Hurricane Rita hit. They have
more multi-family housing, and the reason is that they have big swaths
of land where you can build a 400-unit apartment complex, but you know,
New Orleans is an urban area where most of the land is already taken.
There aren't big swaths of land where you can go and just
build a huge complex, except for New Orleans East. Which of course was
under water, you know. But particularly in the parts of New Orleans that
are still here, you know, we just don't have —
Our rental housing is mostly what I call mom-and-pop rental housing,
because it's people who buy a double shotgun and they live in
one side and rent the other side out. Or
Left out of the plan, or they just won't be able to access—.
They won't be able to access the homeowner money. The home ownership money.
Okay. Right.
And then at the same time, there's not a lot of rental money
available to the small folks. So that's tough.
That's one thing. The other thing that's
interesting is supply and demand and its effect on the rental market.
You know, before the storm, if you paid $750 in rent, you
could live in a really nice apartment in the city of New Orleans. And if
you were willing to pay $1000, or $1200, you could
get into the Garden District or maybe even the French Quarter. But now,
$1000 a month, since the storm, gets you into a rinky-dink
apartment that still needs a lot of work, without central air
conditioning, with leaky faucets and all kinds of problems. And so the
other issue that's out there is just that the cost of rental
housing is so so so so high right now. For middle income people, who
want to come back, who rented before the storm, and need to rent after
the storm, or who own their own home, but can't move into the
home because it's flooded, they can't afford to
rent the properties that are available. You know, the law of supply and
demand says when you have a larger demand, you can sell your supply for
more. And that's what landlords have done. In five years
I'd be curious to see how that whole process panned out.
Because so far, the State Legislature has turned the door every time a
bill came up that would try
There are so many things that have the potential to be the deterrent that keeps people from returning. I think largely the debate in the media has been about public housing, but it's regular market-rate housing that's also a big issue that really hasn't had that much attention paid to it. But folks all the time say, "Where am I gonna live? I can't rent anything." So it's going to be interesting to see that.
Historically, for this area, New Orleans has been the driver, you know, it's the center of the economy, and so the suburbs, Metairie, and St. Tammany Parish, and Jefferson Parish, all these other areas really kind of work off of New Orleans, just like it happens in most other areas. But so there's the potential here for one of those other areas to become the center of the metro area, the core economic driver for the metro area, because so many New Orleanians can't get back into New Orleans and so they're settling into these areas around us. And also so many folks, so many businesses ended up relocating, and either can't or have decided not to reopen in the city. So it's gonna be [interesting to] see if Metairie becomes the core in five years, or if New Orleans is able to revive itself.
If New Orlean's history is so rich but the legacies are so strong, it might be easier to break some of the patterns of discrimination in a new place.
Ehhhh.
Or are those patterns just as strong?
You know I'm a little pessimistic. Yes and no, is I guess the best way I'll put it. One of the great things about the storm, and it's sort of forcing us to jump into looking into these other areas of the state, is that when you have a census tract, for instance, that's ninety or ninety-five percent white in Lafayette, Louisiana, and you have landlords who—it wasn't even an issue—they never really had to even consider renting to someone of another race, or another ethnicity. So the good news is now they have to consider it, and there are a lot of good folks who are going to say, "Oh! No problem," and rent to folks, and then meet them and get to know them and have a new cultural experience and in the process, really further race relations in their area. The other good news is that, when that doesn't happen, because New Orleanians who are there know us, they'll call us and we'll investigate and if that person's heart doesn't change, then we'll use the law to make their actions change at least. So it will further a lot of civil rights, at least in housing, I think, because we'll look at them much more closely than we would have looked at them before, and even if we're not looking, there are interactions that are happening that weren't happening before.
So on that front, yeah, I think that there are some good things happening. That said, my overall pessimism is just that people are inherently distrustful of things, of people who are different from them. And it takes interactions with those different people before they get it: "Oh, you're not that different!" And so I gotta see how many people get to interact, you know. So it could be for the better, and I hope it is.
Do you think that people—not you, but let's say the clients that you tend to work with—do you think that they're becoming more politically aware about these issues and politically involved, or is it still: it hits home when it's about your home?
Both. Before the storm we did an investigation of Bourbon Street nightclubs. There was a guy who was on Bourbon Street, and there was a big melee and this whole issue of him being able to get into a night club. [He was] African-American, and he couldn't get in; they said he didn't meet the dress code, but he had on dress clothes, he had on slacks and shoes. He looks behind him—he's African-American—he sees loads of white guys in the club wearing t-shirts and tennis shoes. And so it becomes this big argument, they get into a fight with the doormen, and the doormen subdue him and his friend. The whole time, they sit on his back. The doorman is 300 some-odd pounds, and they suffocate him, and he dies, right there in front of the nightclub on the street, right? So the Mayor calls for us, the Mayor calls and says, "Well, we should have this investigation to see whether or not nightclubs are discriminating."
So we sent testers out. We sent a black guy and a white guy to the
nightclubs to see whether or not there is discrimination happening. And
so what happened over and over again was that once our guys got into the
club, our [black] guy would order like a gin and tonic, and
they'd order it, and it might be eight or nine dollars, and
our [white] guy would order the same drink from the same bartender and
it'd be three or four dollars. Right? Over and over and over
again. So fifty-seven percent of the time our black testers were
discriminated against. And the reason I bring it up is the loads of
times African-Americans came up to me after—it was really
well publicized, lot of news headlines—and black folks would
come up to me and say, "You know, I had no idea that I could be
paying more for a drink than other folks. I had never even considered
it. Never a possibility. Thought hadn't even crossed my
mind." But afterwards, I would get all these jokes about folks
saying, "Well, now I only go to Bourbon Street bars with my
white
I don't know. I think that's the case. One more
story is I started a fair-housing center in Mississippi a few years
back, and the first investigation we did, it was just to see whether or
not discrimination was happening. There wasn't a complaint or
anything. So we sent a white guy and a black guy to an apartment complex
and the black guy is told that the unit is $700 a month, and
the white guy is told that it's $400 a month,
right? So we don't tell the testers what the result of their
case was, we just record the information and we release this report. And
so the black tester comes to me a few weeks later and he says, you know,
"Now that the report is done, I want to know if I can go back
and rent that apartment, because it was so nice, the lady was so
helpful, and I can afford it. I really liked it, and I need an
apartment." And so I had to break the rules and tell him,
"They told you 700, but they told the other guy 400
bucks." Or whatever the amount was. "They told the
other tester a different amount, and we're pretty sure that
you were discriminated against." So at least for him, even
though he was so involved, and he played a role, and he knew that we
found in that study that most of our testers were discriminated against,
because that person was so nice he just assumed, "No,
that's not happening to me!" He was ready to go and
rent it. And he really struggled after that. I kind of feel bad, because
I was just thinking about how at the beginning you said, back into housing, it's the civil rights project that has done it for you, and I've just been thinking sort of more broadly where you see that going, the big picture civil rights project in New Orleans.
In New Orleans?
Yeah.
Um, I don't know, it's—.
Or Louisiana, I guess, as you start to look more state-wide.
It's an interesting question, because before that Bourbon
Street investigation, which was spring of 2005, I would submit that
there wasn't an organized civil rights push in the city of
New Orleans. Our NAACP was pretty defunct. I think maybe in the fall or
winter of '04, just before the incident on Bourbon Street,
they were kind of rebuilding and revitalizing themselves. But there
really wasn't a local group that was aggressively pushing
just civil rights issues, you know. And of course we were doing the
housing civil rights issues but no one was broadly addressing civil
rights. So that issue happens, the Levon Jones incident happens, and the
NAACP at the same time elects a new president and gets a big grant, and
then they become really active and aggressive, more aggressive than
I've seen them in years. You know, probably in ten years. So
really just before the
Now since the storm, I don't know, I think that at least the NAACP hasn't really been able to keep up that steam. And lots of groups in all kinds of areas have lost their steam, because they don't know where they're gonna live, much less how they're going to try to help other people with their problems. So what happens down the line with civil rights, I don't know. I think what keeps happening, or one of the ways that the civil rights movement nationally, locally, state-wide, has lost a lot of its steam is that people perceive that it's just kind of inherent in other work. So for instance, if you set up a committee to do X Y Z, if you diversify the committee, then because it's diverse, whatever it's working on, then inherent in that is that it's going to achieve the goals of civil rights, that civil rights groups would have in the process. And I don't think that that's totally wrong, but I think that it really helps to have a group that's focused just on the issues of civil rights, instead of letting it get dismantled or broken up into parts and be just segments of other things. I think you're much more effective when you have a core group going at the issue. But I don't know, I think that for everybody, there's so many just fundamental, where-am-I-going-to-live issues, that I'm hesitant about how quickly groups are going to make the comeback.
One other thing I say there is that, for instance, with local NAACP
chapters, I think that most of the people there are volunteer. They
don't really have a paid staff. Which is different, of
course, from us, where we do have a paid staff, and I think
that's a huge, huge, huge, huge difference. And
it's just really hard to find a way to fund civil rights, you
know? And when it's volunteer work, a lot of times
it's hard to keep it up for
One other thing, this is a slightly different topic that I think will be interesting to see in five years, is what the architecture of the city looks like, you know. Particularly the Lower Ninth Ward, you know, has, for instance, Holy Cross, which is a nationally registered historic district and a local historic district, and other parts of the Lower Ninth Ward could qualify to be national registered historic districts, because there are more than enough historic properties. Excuse me. And inherent in a lot of the plans for rebuilding the city is, you know, whole swaths of neighborhoods that will become green space. Or I talked earlier about the idea of developers acquiring property and developing whole blocks of land. And so what happens to the historic properties that are there? And it's going to see what the fight is there, because it's a really tough fight for preservationists, where they're going to have to get in and say, "Don't tear down these historic shotguns, even though this owner hasn't come back, and hasn't cut the grass, and the property's been sitting in the same condition that it's been in since the hurricane hit and it's a year later now." It's going to be really interesting to see how that pans out, because I think that everyone realizes how important the architecture is to the city, and how much it's one of those things, if you just woke up one day and went driving down the street, you'd say, "Oh! I'm in New Orleans." And if you just woke up one day and you were driving down the street in Anywhere, USA, and you see a Wal-Mart, and you see an Exxon gas station, and a McDonald's, you don't know where you are. You can't just guess and figure it out. So it's going to be interesting to see if some parts of our city become Anywhere, USA, or if they keep our snap, our New Orleans snap.
One more question and then you gotta go?
I'm not, mmm—.
Oh, okay. I'm just curious, this might be a ridiculous question. But do you still talk to your folks about these sorts of things? You were talking about, they sort of ingrained you with—.
All the time.
—a sense of what to do. I'm curious what they're telling you and what the difference in the generation [is], you know. Do you argue with them, or [are] right on board with that?
Hmmm. We see eye-to-eye on most things. We agree on a lot of stuff and about the rebuilding. They still lived in the house I grew up in in New Orleans East. And while my house was in an area that was flooded—it's Esplanade Ridge—I didn't get any water, and people are largely back in my area. But in their area, you know, there are a few people who have some trailers, but for the most part the neighborhood is still empty. If you drive through there at night, it's pitch black, there's no power. And so. It's my family and it's my house because I grew up there, but they own the house and they were really living there. And so the connection that they give me is the connection for what people in the Lower Nine and New Orleans East are really dealing with. Because I went and gutted my parents' house with my father, and we've done so much work on the house since the storm to try to get it back into moving condition, so really, they are my link to see what the folks who had the most damage are going through on a daily basis.
And so for instance, we had been just going along and getting everything
going on their house, and then the Bring New Orleans Back commission
comes out and says,
It's just that everyone is all over the country and so it's hard to know what people are thinking at any given time. My mom is in Birmingham, Alabama, right now, and she has a lot of evacuees that she sees all the time, and so I can always find out what they're seeing or what their perception is. And it's really different, their perception of what's going on in the city is very different there, very different from what I think is usually actually happening.
How is—?
So for instance, let me see if I can give a good example. Well, a few
weeks back there was a big fuss where FEMA improperly located some
trailers too close to a neighborhood, too close to the backyards of some
houses, and so the Mayor got really frustrated and said, "No
more FEMA trailers. We're not allowing FEMA to put any more
trailers." Which really upset me, you know, I think there was a
great disparate impact argument there, but the mayor reversed his
opinion within the course of a week and a half or two weeks. But for me
that really said, if you're an evacuee, the mayor is not
working on your behalf. The mayor is doing something that actually
completely prevents you from being able to get back into the city,
because he's saying, "No more trailers!"
But they didn't even know about the issue, and their
perception was, "Mayor Nagin is hard at work to make sure we
can get back into the housing, and what?? He said no more trailers? No,
I just saw him on the news arguing about FEMA's inefficiency
with getting trailers to folks." And so that was a great
example: here in the city, the headlines were about him saying,
"No More Trailers!" while for them it was,
"He's working for us. He's making sure
things happen for us." And there've been a few times
like that, where what they saw was very, very different. I think, you
know, my primary news source is probably the Times-Picayune, and then the local news stations, but their news
source is the Birmingham newspaper, and the New York
Times, and the Washington Post, you know? And
they'll read the Times-Picayune on-line and
so forth, but I think that they just see all those other papers more
often.
Right.
So they get different perceptions of what's happening here. That's why I think I've been an asset for them, I've been able to give them, "No, that's not what's happening."
Okay. That's probably a good place to stop.
Okay.
Thank you so much.
END OF INTERVIEW