Too Close for Comfort

Other than showing another example of the "Starve the Beast" mentality at work, this article that I read the other day from the LA Times, Limiting Government's Role, was puzzling.

For example, the authors observed that "Two days after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced plans to issue emergency vouchers aimed at helping poor storm victims find new housing quickly. . . . But the department suddenly backed away from the idea after White House aides met with senior HUD officials. . . the administration focused instead on a plan for government-built trailer parks, an approach that even many Republicans say would concentrate poverty in the very fashion the government has long sought to avoid. . . .

"Instead of offering $10,000 vouchers, FEMA is paying an average of $16,000 for each trailer in the new parks it is contemplating. Even many Republicans wonder why the government would want to build trailer parks when many evacuees are now living in communities with plenty of vacant, privately owned apartments."

However, today when I read this piece in Common Dreams by Naomi Klein, Purging the Poor, it began to make more sense.

"New Orleans is already displaying signs of a demographic shift so dramatic that some evacuees describe it as 'ethnic cleansing.'"

"Rather than rebuild ghettos, New Orleans should be resettled with 'mixed income' housing, with rich and poor, black and white living side by side. . . . [But, this] urban integration could happen tomorrow, on a massive scale. Roughly 70,000 of New Orleans' poorest homeless evacuees could move back to the city alongside returning white homeowners, without a single new structure being built. . . thousands of livable homes were sitting empty."

Ahh yes. If vouchers are given out, the displaced poor could return to New Orleans and move in to those empty homes. But, this would in fact result in "mixed income" housing and, despite the expressed desire for this outcome, that is the last thing that many in those neighborhoods would want. A variation on the NAMBY theme -- not in my next door. Much better to built trailer parks for those people. Elsewhere. Even if it costs more.