It literally sits on the levy-built land of Lake Pontchichain. So we're not over here on the riverfront. I'm in the planning and urban studies department there, where I've been for about a year and a half now. And so I'm happy to kind of adopt my home of New Orleans. But I am not in Louisiana Native. I'm from Jersey. And so the presentation earlier, as someone who will kind of marry the two worlds of which I somehow live in. So one of the presentations, we really are, I was going to say just blessed, to have an electric panel of scholars, researchers, activists, and practitioners in a number of different fields who are with us today to share their thoughts on, yes, the title, evacuation, eviction, and immigration. But from a much wider time space lens, then the conversations typically take place here within the city of New Orleans and surrounding areas. Like most cities right now, the city of New Orleans is in the midst of an affordability crisis. And that is making much of the conversations about shelter and relationship to storms, being about the kind of existential crisis of those being, quote unquote, displaced and those being, quote unquote, replaced. But what this panel offers us an opportunity to do is think a lot more conceptually about what does it mean to be settled and what does it mean to be in migration from that place of settlement, that place to which you feel belonging. And I think that it was very apatical that our panelists for the first part of the day really laid out the reality of our lack of placidness here in this particular site right now in the fact that we are one of many collectives of individuals who have been here, built a space belonging here in this particular square footage of site. Prior to us, our antecedents are many. They are slaves and slave owners. They are native populations and the colonialists that force them into, yes, the hinterlands of the bayous and wetlands throughout the south of Eastern United States and beyond. And so with that in mind, I'd like to introduce our panelists for today. We have Jay Narina, who's lived and worked as a community and labor organizer in New Orleans for over 20 years. And he's the author of Driven from New Orleans, How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization. He is currently an associate professor of sociology at the College of the University of New York, CUNY's College of Staten Island, and is now writing a book on the contending movements to privatize and defend public schools in Newark, New Jersey. Dr. Monica Ferris is in the middle there, is an associate professor of research and director of the UNO Center for Hazardous Assessment, Response and Technology chart, one of our sponsors today. Her current applied research includes the examination of local repetitive flood loss data to assist communities in the identification of appropriate mitigation strategies, hazard mitigation planning, implementation of the community rating system, and education outreach focused on disaster resilience. Dr. Ferris has published on the subject of building capacity for disaster resilience and has presented multiple times on risk reduction and disaster planning. Next to her we have Farah Kambris, who is an assistant professor in the division of social work, behavioral, political sciences, university. Her research in interest include race, class, community building and disaster. Her research in Hurricane Katrina has resulted in several peer-reviewed publications in the journal Black Studies, the journal Global Policy and Resilience, and the journal of Urban History. She's also done quite a bit of research here in New Orleans and so some people actually might just mistake her for a local. The non-profit responsible for New Orleans ten-year housing strategy and implementation plan. Housing NOAA offers a roadmap to ensure that strategic choices are made to address inequity issues in housing. Last year, Gamut Weekly named her New Orleansian of the year because of her role in housing NOAA's historic efforts to create 33,000 affordable housing opportunities to end the city's housing crisis. And as I responded to presentations from the four of these individuals, we have Susie Flores, who's an assistant professor of sociology and Latino career studies at Brunch University. Her research investigates race and class inequality as mediated by the built environment. She's the author of Locked In, Locked Out, Gated Communities in a Puerto Rican City, Winner of the American Sociological Association's 2014 Routy Park Award. Current projects include an examination of racial aesthetics in the real estate market and projects on the global circuits of planning ideas, an audiovisual project on Caribbean technicians of place, and a collaboration examining mobile segregation. And lastly, I'll add that myself, who does research on both chronic and acute risks to the built environment and the communities that it houses. And currently, my research is focused on constructions that disproportionately house people of color and their businesses. And I've done research previously and published previously on particularly that the building stock of railroad companies and how the bankruptcy of companies created a disaster for the communities around which rail transportation was so vital, both to just their everyday livelihoods, but also to the ability for those communities to become much more racially and economically integrated through a combination of people who were more transit dependent as well as those who were served by the highway system. And so I'm happy to speak with people on this panel who have an understanding of disaster that is broader than just the one storm. And we're going to be talking today more after their presentations about that temporality, that continuity of prices that people are experiencing and the ways in which it's being addressed and exasperated. And so, first, have Jay. Folks, I want to thank the organizers for inviting me here. It's always great to get back to New Orleans and no longer live here, but I still kind of consider it home. And when I did get the invite, I reached out to some comrades here in New Orleans and told them where it was. And they were like, where is this place? Why are they holding it here? I'm glad that some of the folks were able to make it here. But after further research, I think this is a very appropriate place, both symbolically and literally, to hold this conference here to address democracy and retreat and master planning, and to address the questions of this panel around who leaves their home the landline at home. Now, where we are sitting is a part of the 72 acres Joseph Canizaro and his fellow investors acquired in 1991 for $11 million. And over the subsequent, about a decade, I calculated he was able to kind of flip the property for about $70 million, a pretty nice return on his investment. And some of that, I think it was about five acres, was donated, he was a former member of the Tulane's president cabinet, to Tulane University for this facility, if we can get the tax right up. Now Canizaro arrives in New Orleans in the mid-1960s after dealing with some issues in Mobile, and to make his mark on in real estate. And that is at the same time that the fire industry tourism begins to go into ascendancy and becomes the dominant political, economic, and cultural force in the city, in many cities around the country. And they use, and their kind of definition of development becomes hegemonic. And they use their power to marginalize and drive out politically and physically industrial capital. And as opposed to industrial capital, their focus is driving up real estate values, driving up property values above all, as well as containing and exploiting labor, but at times expelling labor. Not wanting to exploit it, but to expel it all together. And the local state, what Sam Stein and a great excellent book just out of the capital state, focuses on the role of the real estate state, particularly the local state, is crucial in driving up those land values, in carrying out what Adolf Reid calls a red intensification agenda. And I think that's a more useful term than gentrification, which makes it appear that this is just an inevitable, uncontrollable process. Whereas, red intensification focuses on the political and economic actors and their decisions that they carry out to drive up property values. And so this is not an inevitable process. And it is that the heart of it is displacement and a dispossession of working class people.  And they were ready and eager to carry out that red intensification agenda to assist in that. I interviewed, as part of my research, James Singleton, who is the longtime city councilman from this area. And he was actually very proud to talk about the efforts that the local state had taken to help increase the values, particularly in this area where Canadero invested, which Canadero was both knew well, Mr. Singleton. Things like closing down single room occupancy, hotels, zoning changes around that, multi-family housing, the World's Fair, the HUD subsidies, supposed to be for low income people that were used for the World's Fair, which became the first part of the convention center, and helped to transition from light industrial to fire use here in the Warehouse District. So the local state was central to all of that. And in a particular target for the red intensification agenda was removing the impediment of public housing. That was a top priority. And people like Canadero, Kavokov, other members of the fire capitalists, I just had a discussion with a member of a future panel of a meeting that was held in the mid 90s by Kavokov, the local architects of how we can remove this impediment to the red intensification agenda. And the, let me get to some, I'm not good on the PowerPoints. These aren't as fancy as some of the other folks, but this is the area, the general area, the micro track, we're somewhere in there. But the local state was very central to help carry out the attack on public housing. And this is a photograph from 1988 after the Barthel of the administration had released the Rochon report, which was a plan to massively downsize the public housing in the city, particularly going after the St. Thomas and the Iverville, which were the center of the red intensification agenda. And as you can see, it was not well received, this is Jim, the late Jim Hayes, and this was defeated. So there is potential to resist this agenda as well. It was put on the back burner for a few years, but later because of the assistance at the national level, the real estate state in the form of the Clinton administration, the whole six agenda, eliminating the one rule, that assisted in the eventual demolition of the St. Thomas. This is all pre-proteinment, pre-proteinment, cutturing them. It's hard to say that word, right? It's just scary talking about cutturing them. But also in assisting in this agenda, and this kind of came up with the other panels, was the philanthropic funded nonprofit complex, which interestingly enough, considering who was targeted for this, kind of was the promoter of a self-determination anti-racist ideology that helped take residents away from direct action and resisting the displacement, kind of into these insider negotiations that facilitated the expulsion of the residents. And as well, we have to look at the role by discipline, the role of sociology and this whole theory of de-concentrating poverty, which really goes into ascendancy in the 1990s, and the propagators, the sociologists, the propagated that as public housing became a free fire zone for the fire capitalists at that time. Now, I don't know how much time do I have, I was trying to cut this short a little bit, but I'm doing okay. So post-Katrina, we kind of know that story, right? Canizaro talks about another fire capitalist talk about a clean slate, right? That they have a clean sheet, as they say, to do what you wanna in New Orleans. And they carried out a massive privatization against public housing, public schools, the public hospital, opening up those properties to the fire industry, driving out the people that relied on those organized labor and power, working class power that is embedded in those public services. We saw the road and home program, right, facilitated funding, homeowners, particularly more affluent homeowners, where the overwhelming majority renters were left out altogether. We had the green spacing plan of the Great New Orleans Black Commission, which they did have to step back because of the resistance of that. But there was kind of a combination of the iron fist and the velvet glove to undertake these attacks. And I think these can be, are crystallized in the attack on the Lafite public housing development, which an architect, the Orishev called its destruction of human and architectural tragedy of vast proportions. It was built in the late 30s, early 40s by Creole artisans in the Tremay area. But with the assistance of the, well, there was police actions like this depicted here. We have one of our guests, Mike Howells, was there in a direct action reoccupation of the development and then the police forces hauled people out. And this was the final end of the Lafite development. But there was also consensual mechanisms. So you had outfits like Providence Community Housing, part of the archdiocese of New Orleans, funded by philanthropic outfits. The local priest in the neighborhood, Fr. Jacques, Leah Chase, the restaurateur. And they're kind of what Michelle Boyd calls a Jim Crow nostalgia ideology, which portrayed the redevelopment as a recovering of an authentic, self-directed, self-reliant black culture that had been decimated by a culture of poverty promoting welfare state. So that kind of legitimated part of the consensual mechanism, the actors and the ideologies that were also important post-patroning. And then at the national level, you had the National Low Income Housing Coalition, led by Sheila Crowley legitimating this whole attack and putting local activists within the framework that was acceptable to fire working with the low income tax credits and such. But it is important to remember, there was resistance to this agenda. And that was very important in unmasking the attempt to portray this as a consensual process, welcome to the common sensical. In unmask, it showed the deeply authoritarian nature, anti-democratic nature of the master planning that was carried out by the local and national state and their fire allies. That was very important. And but even more important was that this resistance and the public housing movement was maybe the most significant. They didn't just fight against these attacks, right? Against this master of the planning by the masters. But they also put forward their own program, right? Not in these phony planning sessions that were going on post-Katrina, but they planned out what they wanted, what was the world that they were fighting for. And so this is a march on the first Martin Luther King Day after Katrina, after the city, under the Nagan administration had abandoned the historical starting point of the lower nine court, which was to send a message that the nine court is not gonna be rebuilt. But they were fighting to bring everybody home through a mass, democratically controlled public works and public services program to rebuild New Orleans, rebuild the golf golf. That was their planning agenda. Finance, and that was also brought up by taxing the wealth and income of the billionaires and millionaires and also ending their war machine. And we see that that has played a part, right? In helping get on the political agenda the demand for a massive green new deal. So when we evaluate social movements, it's important to look at the timeframe, right? That's one of the successes of that movement. Although public housing was lost, that helped get on the political agenda with the struggles of others, the Howie Hawkins campaign, and that's helped lay the groundwork for people at AOC to put this on the agenda. And we do see some movement in that, in that direction. Some of the work with the Jagabit, we have one of our guests Daniel Aldana Cohen, I think that was an important work that he just published on the need to put public housing as a central part of the green new deal to address climate change and growing inequality. And that's real success. I mean, talking about public housing had been revolting, right? It had been demonized. And that is the returning to the political agenda. But, you know, so we call for that, that that's gotta be a central part. But I'm thinking, and right here, I'm gonna wrap it up. I think we need to look critically on how this is gonna be carried out, right? The Democratic Party, which the current advocates of the green new deal are working through, is more dominated by the fire industry than even the Republican Party. So I think if we're really gonna seriously make advances on winning a real green new deal that we understand, a direct government, public service, public jobs program, that movement is going to have to have their own democratically controlled electoral arm in order to make advances in that direction. Thanks a lot. Thank you for the opportunity to be here this morning. I'm Monica Farris with UNM chart. But the comments this morning will focus on some recently completed work by chart on evacuation planning here in the city of New Orleans. One slide on who we are, or an applied social science hazards research center that partners with and supports Louisiana communities in efforts to achieve disaster resilience with a focus on mitigation. Here are just a few pictures of faculty, staff and students that represent departments across our campus, political science, urban studies, planning and engineering, sociology, depending on the nature of the project really dictates who we go to for certain projects. Chart is actually also part of the planning and urban studies department at the University of New Orleans. Some of you may know the stats by heart they may have been mentioned here this morning. Approximately 1.5 million people evacuated before Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29th, 2005. At the same time, an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 individuals remained during the storm. Some chose to stay, while others did not have the opportunity to evacuate to the lack of resources. Following Katrina, the city of New Orleans developed what's known as the city assisted evacuation plan in an effort to address gaps in emergency preparedness and planning, especially with cities most vulnerable. Very generally, if you don't know, the plan is a coordinated effort of the city of New Orleans and the regional transit authority, the RTA, where there are 17 pickup points or evacuees spots and you see that picture of the metal golly kind of looks like it's hailing a cab, that's an evacuee spot and they're located throughout the city. In the event the mayor calls for mandatory evacuation, people will be able to go to these evacuees spots, these points, and be brought to a central location by the RTA, where they will be picked up by yet another set of buses sent by the state and brought out of the risk area to various shelters. The plan is heavily dependent on a group of volunteers called a vacueteer. The plan was actually activated for Hurricane Gustav in 2008 and about 20,000 residents participated in the city assisted evacuation. UNO Char did conduct a study shortly after where they talked to about 364 people who did utilize the plan. Surprisingly, maybe to many of you, almost three-fourths were satisfied with the experience. Over half rated the experience as good or better. But of course, many challenges were noted through that survey process. Miscommunications, negative experiences in the shelters, concern over the return process, lack of confidence in our government to name a few of those challenges. As research shows, disasters disproportionately affect vulnerable populations and the fact that the city estimates that between 35 and 40,000 people may need help evacuating before the next major hurricane, the city applied for funding in 2015 from the Federal Transit Administration to evaluate the evacuation plan. The project team included the city, the RTA and UNO Char and a vacueteer also played an important role in the study. Specifically, the focus of the project was to answer these two questions. What can be done to better serve the vulnerable populations to ensure that no person or group is left out of the process and how the technology and risk communication practices serve community members who are often overlooked? The project funding allowed the team to do a lot. I'm gonna focus today on the results of community mapping exercise we did in terms of vulnerable populations and these evacuees spots. We were also able to plan and implement a tabletop and a full-scale exercise of the plan and to conduct interviews and focus groups of local nonprofits that work with vulnerable populations, those who are registered with the city's special needs registry and individuals who use the city-assisted evacuation process in the past. Things produced a lot of qualitative data regarding the city-assisted evacuation process. These data were coded and themes emerged as we analyzed the data regarding positive issues as well as opportunities for improvement. Our recommendations follow sort of these categories or these themes listed on this slide which also inform many of the when, how, and how questions related to evacuation. The decision to evacuate is a continual process for individuals and families. Many factors can impact that decision process. Beyond the geographic and physical vulnerabilities that of course we discussed earlier this morning and many were discussed during the course of our project and data collection. Each of the following slides or six, of course bonding with the themes I just showed, reveal examples of quotes from the interviews, focus groups, and the recommendations made were based on the data collected, again organized by these categories. And I'll be back with a positive. Many stakeholders did describe positive experiences with the RTA and the evacuation planning process. Recommendations were made to continue the special needs registry to continue the RTA special, lift services, and to continue the plan as it was presented. While positive comments were made, other stakeholders did not know or knew very little about the process itself. Recommendations were made regarding the addition of signs at the evacuation spots, which I think signs have been added to many of those spots, those statues. Implementing a variety of outreach methods to target different stakeholder groups and developing materials in plain language and making them more accessible for all populations with disabilities. When it comes to evacuation, it's important to understand what vulnerability exists in the community and where concentrations of these vulnerable populations may be. Our GIS analysis, as well as interviews and focus group data reveal issues with the evacuation spots themselves with the location of those metal statues. In relation to where the vulnerable populations actually exist. Overall, many of the evacuation spots are not optimally located. Multiple ones are located in areas with marginal amounts of vulnerable population, while others with high degrees of social vulnerability have minimal or no evacuation spots. And I don't know how well you can see this map, but let's see, in the top right of the map where you can see, I guess it's sort of coming out to be like mustard color, green color, New Orleans East, Gentilly. There's only two spots for that entire area. If you're interested in seeing this data, we have several maps like this and the report is available online. I'll be glad to show it to you later, because I know it's hard to see with the light. Oh, I'm sorry. Oh, we've got a server. So recommendations here based on this analysis include further analysis of the spots in terms of social vulnerability. The addition of the evacuation spots and or a show service to make sure that people do have access to the ones that do exist. The relocation potentially of evacuation spots to improve walking distances for evacuees and to improve the accessibility of the actual evacuation spots for residents with disabilities. And again, I don't know if you can see, there's little yellow dotted lines around each one. Those are half mile buffers. To give you an idea of how far you would have to walk. And a half mile is pretty far, especially for someone who has a disability. So again, just to kind of get you an idea of what we were looking at. Some respondents expressed frustration with the non-disaster everyday RTA in paratransit services offered in the city. Problems were emphasized when asked about their experiences during Katrina and Gustav. Many respondents pointed out the need for shelters to be designed for specific disabilities. Some discussed the uncertainty about where they would go in the event of evacuation, as well as distrust of the city's plan overall. Which of course could prevent many of the city's most vulnerable from leaving a dangerous situation. Others revealed the name of the special needs registry that the city does have might deter residents from signing up or understanding that they should sign up for the registry before the event occurs. Still others emphasized the need for confidentiality when discussing health issues during the overall process. Our next thing, integrating cultural competencies into the plan. Through our discussions issues of the language emerged. Many respondents in the Vietnamese and Latino communities stated that there was not enough information about the actual plan in other languages. They also expressed the need for more translators to be involved in the process itself. Beyond language, participants explained that the undocumented community is hesitant to go to the central hit-up point, which currently is the Union passenger terminal. Which I believe there are discussions about moving that central location at this point. I don't know if anybody's here with the city, but I've heard that. But fearing that these undocumented members of the community could be detained or harassed by immigration officials. The interviewees also explained that there are many day laborers that act as first responders and rebuilders in the event of a hurricane, such as Cucingham. And do not plan to evacuate the city, referring to stay behind and work. Final theme, trust. Residents distrust in the city and the CAE or the city as a student evacuation process often cause them to rely on their own resources during a disaster. Some residents feel attached to their homes in their neighborhoods and do not want to leave. Residents that recently relocated because of a disaster to stable housing are less likely to leave now because they were afraid they would not be able to return. Some expressed distrust or uncertainty surrounding the transportation of pets and service animals. Additionally, advocates for immigrant and Latino communities repeatedly brought up concerns about evacuating people without documents as there were difficulties in the past with documents and shelters. As undocumented immigrants also face increased state and federal scrutiny, many community members say that many will not evacuate if there are no sanctuary shelters designated. So following our report completed in 2017, I should mention that the city has taken many steps to address the recommendations, the opportunities that were brought up in the report. It's developed an updated communications plan. It's revised its website quite a bit. More plain language, more actionable steps that can be taken in preparedness. Videos like the one here, explaining the city assisted evacuation process and how to prepare to participate in it. And many other materials written in other languages. The city hopes we'll provide people with additional information to make that an important decision around evacuation. And that's where I'll end. I don't need to present today or to join the discussion. I'm Sarah King-Brights. I'm an assistant professor at Prairie View A&M University outside of Houston. I'm always proud to say that New Orleans was where I started my career, but conflicted to say that my career was really launched primarily by Hurricane Katrina. So I'm gonna take you back a little bit. From 2005 to 2014 when I left New Orleans, I worked on three projects. This is not my original PowerPoint, so I'm sorry, I worked on three projects that were Katrina related. The first project was my dissertation research, which focused on community building in Contra Train Park. In 2005 I had this idea that I write this dissertation on how residents in Contra Train Park built their community or created community solidarity through the use of their organizations and their community institutions. Well, in August of 2005, I had conducted two interviews with residents and the month before that, I had done several observations in the community only to have to evacuate the city like the residents of Contra Train Park. So as you can imagine, after leaving New Orleans like many residents did, I was completely at a loss. I did not know what was gonna happen to my research. But by the time I came back to New Orleans in January of 2006, after being evacuated and living in Mississippi, I saw that residents were coming back and that it would be worthwhile to examine how these residents rebuilt their community in the aftermath of disaster. So that was my first project. And so that was my dissertation research that started in 2005 and ended in 2008. But by the time that project ended, I was invited to be a part of the Ultra X Project, which was a group of scholars from Tulane University of New Orleans and also Xavier University where I worked at the time. And what we wanted to do is kind of compare the recovery of three neighborhoods or three areas in New Orleans. So I was invited to be a part of the project because I worked in Contra Train Park, but we also looked at the Lorne Night which Josh actually worked on this project with us. And we looked at, what was it? Holley Grove. And that was also kind of earthy advance kind of conducting those observations in Holley Grove. So that was another project. So that was from about 2008 into 2011. So by this time I had Contraina wiped out and I'm tired of talking about researching Contraina. However, I had other unanswered questions because I was a full time faculty member at Xavier University working with students on a daily basis. Many of whom had been children at the time that Hurricane Contraina made landfall in New Orleans. So for me, I really wanted to understand and I still had these lingering questions of what it was like to come of age in a post-disaster context. Several of the students that I mentored at Xavier were actually in the process of becoming a merchant adult with demographic between 18 to 25 where you're trying to figure out your life and the transition to adulthood has kind of been extended. So you're trying to get credentials for education or you're starting your career paths. And I wanted to understand how all of that had been influenced or if it had been influenced by being a youth in the post-disaster projects. I think that I would like us to consider race class and social vulnerability in our discussion broadly. So initially New Orleans Black middle class did not receive much media or scholarly attention in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The city's problems with crime, substandard housing, poverty, and in decaying public school system often overshadowed the fact that New Orleans was home to a thriving middle class with strong groups in the New Orleans community. Now only did the city's social circles and organizations reflect the presence of the Black middle class, but local HBCU such as Xavier Dillard and Southern University of New Orleans had long produced Black graduates who would eventually become part of the Black middle class. At least that is if we define middle class by education or use education in our definition of middle class. At the time of Hurricane Katrina, there were several identifiable Black middle class enclaves in Eastern New Orleans and Jim Tilly. I carried out my research in Pontchartrain Park or the Pontchartrain Park neighborhood. The neighborhood was marketed as a suburban style subdivision that would provide home ownership opportunities for the city's postal workers, teachers, and loan shortening. And although the original residents who moved to the neighborhood in the 1950s and 1960s were considered middle class, they were economically vulnerable and discrimination stifled in socio-economic positioning of Blacks, even Black middle class. Consistently, researchers have demonstrated that when compared to White middle class Americans, Black middle class Americans are financially vulnerable and that members of the Black middle class often have less wealth and assets than their White middle class counterparts and are more likely to live in segregated spaces. Pontchartrain Park and its Black middle class residents suffered in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. High levels of floodwater devastated their neighborhood homes and hampered the pace of the neighborhood's recovery. Majority Black neighborhoods, White Pontchartrain Park, were more likely to have lower pre-storm values than White middle class neighborhoods and the Road Home program used those values to calculate grant amounts. Most of the Road Home grants awarded to Pontchartrain Park homeowners were between $40,000 and $65,000, whereas White middle class neighborhoods, like Lakeview, received grants ranging from $115,000 $115,000 to $150,000. The disparity in grant amounts demonstrate the financial cost of residential segregation for African Americans. And I don't know if you can hear. So this is just a pre-Katrina. This is what I left Katrina in that August. This is what the neighborhood looked like and this is the neighborhood I was studying. And then when I came back, this is what the neighborhood looked like. I didn't keep a lot of pictures from Katrina, so I wasn't able to dig up a lot. So in the years, seven years after Katrina, I still had questions about the recovery. I was curious about what happened to Black youth who left New Orleans, but ultimately returned to New Orleans months or years after Katrina. The individuals in my study were between the ages of 12 and 17, when Hurricane Katrina made landfall. After seven years, they described memories of leaving and returning home. These memories were still etched in their minds. In the years after Hurricane Katrina, researchers from the Great New Orleans Data Center observed a gradual emergence of more knowledge face jobs such as those in higher education, legal services, and insurance. By 2009, jobs in higher education surpassed shipbuilding, heavy construction, and engineering to become the fourth largest economic driver in the metropolitan area. The rate of entrepreneurship also increased significantly in the years after Hurricane Katrina. And the aftermath of Katrina in New Orleans was becoming a place for startups. From 2010 to 2012, about 501 out of every 100,000 adults started up a business annually in New Orleans and this rate was nearly 60% higher than the national average. So at this time, when I'm doing my research, it looks like New Orleans had become this new New Orleans, a new place filled with opportunities for everyone. However, my respondents to my research painted a different picture and their voices told me different things. The signs of growth in the new New Orleans did not have a positive economic impact on all groups. In the New New Orleans, American men were still underrepresented significantly in some of the better paying and faster growing industries. Emerging adults from my research described Coast Katrina, New Orleans as a place that had failed to meet their educational and employment needs. Finally, I feel like my research really tacked into the social psychological burdens of leaving and wanted to return to a city that had been devastated by flooding no matter what the cost might be. My research participants described a longing for a space, community, rituals, and culture and wanting to return home no matter how damaged the city was. And I always like to share the voices of my research participants because for me, being a sociologist is all about the voices and the experiences. So whenever I get an opportunity, I just like to share those voices with an audience and kind of bring to life some of their experiences. So this is an excerpt from an interview I conducted in 2013 of a young woman. She was 20 years old. She's a college graduate. And we were talking about the evacuation, the recovery, and the return to New Orleans. And her energy, her words were so powerful at the time. I actually used them in an article that I submitted. So I will just share those with you today before I conclude. She told me, I just wanted to go home. I did not care if there was mold. I did not care if it was ruined. I just wanted to be really close to my environment. It was not until I got to Georgia when I started to see how much the city was a part of me. Stuff that I did other people did not. I was Catholic. People in Georgia would ask me things like, why do you talk like that? It would really frustrate me. I just felt so alienated. My grandmother was not in Georgia with us and my aunt Niki was gone. I think what I missed the most was the culture. It was the little things. They did not have crawfish, no snowballs, French fry, seasoning, and red beans. But the little things do add up. And when they are taken from you and it's like every which way you look, everything is different. Eventually you are like, what do I have left? So those were the words from one of my research participants and I think it really speaks to the experiences of a lot of those who evacuated New Orleans and left New Orleans and longed to come home. So again, thank you for having me today and I really hope that we can add to this discussion by talking about race, class, and social vulnerability. And I too want to thank you all for convening this event and inviting me to speak here. I'm gonna talk to you guys about Housing NOLA so you understand what it is, what it does, and how it works. So first we have to talk about the vision of something like Housing NOLA. We often mention how audacious and bold it is because it is those things and it is because we are centered around a notion that this community can provide the housing necessary for each and every one of its citizens to allow them to thrive. That is audacious, that is bold. It seems common sense, but it is not because we look at the numbers as you heard from the earlier presentations. It is not how we function in this city. It's not how we function in this state. It's not how we function in this country. And it's certainly not how we function on this planet. We want our county themselves and helping their decision makers understand what they want, they need, and they themselves are possible to solve this affordability crisis. We also want to make sure everybody understands what we mean by saying affordable housing. We don't simply mean subsidized housing. We mean living in housing that you can afford, and that is something that everyone needs. When we get too caught up, and I'm just going to be blunt with you guys, part of the reason we got here is that we've allowed the term affordable housing to be misrepresented. It is code to most people for subsidized housing, which is code to for section eight or public housing, which means poor black people. And that, and that's what we also want to talk about is from a racial equity lens, because no matter how progressive you think you are, this is the last benchmark of true progressivism. We don't, progressives don't talk about housing. Some of the most conversations I've had with housing where they dismiss section eight, where they dismiss poor black people who need housing assistance and not realizing that they are being bigots. So, so when we started housing NOLA, this was in 2014, and it was almost 10 years after Katrina's floodwaters had damaged the city, income at 37,000, in the city of New Orleans, it's important to call out these numbers in this way. We're talking about New Orleans is not yours. When you calculate the area, you can use the eight metropolitan areas, eight parishes in the metropolitan area, and the suburbs skew higher. So AMI, about the size of about 62,000 for the metro area, but in New Orleans, it's 37,000. Median rent was about $907, drastic increase from pre-Katrina levels. An average home value was about $192,000. So you cannot buy a home, an average home in the city of New Orleans if you make the average wages. So there's a huge mismatch in 2014. The initial partners, as I mentioned, is the public-private partnerships of the Greater New Orleans Housing Alliance, which started in 2007 as a coalition to help the hundreds of thousands of folks who wants to come and help and invest in New Orleans, and also the dozens of new CDCs that topped up that kind of didn't know anything about housing, the best of intentions, making sure that they can understand how to navigate the environment, and also talking about genuine advocacy, making some of these rule changes, making more sense. The Foundation for Louisiana, a local philanthropic justice organization and the city of New Orleans. There were previous plans, there were previous attempts to address this issue. You've got, for the good and the bad, the Bring Back New Orleans Commissions, the You Not Plan, the City of New Orleans Launched New Strategies, Comprehensive Master Plan Ordinance, a 10-year plan, and he also got in on the act, so anybody who's here post-patronum remembers the battle of the plans. One of the problems with these various plans, besides the fact that they all existed all at the same time and there was no attempt to kind of loop it together, is there's not a single accountability feature in any of them. And there was also a lot of them make big nods about community engagement, but there's also not a, again, how, what does community engagement look like? So we spent a lot of time discussing that, and so we have an executive committee that is comprised of folks of the public-private partnership and a leadership board that is a large advisory committee that is engaged, and a community engagement strategy that just didn't talk about it. We center our work around, we start with community and we end with community. They have the first and the last word of what we're working on, and we've used data. So part of the community engagement process meant could be people needing to understand what we're talking about. I actually heard some facts today that are actually wrong, and they are part of the conventional wisdom, they're a part of the story of Katrina, and it is what decision makers who have no interest in real equity, zero in on. If you don't have your facts together, if you don't have your facts right, and, again, as academics, you guys might think that that's unfair, but as a black woman who's walked this earth only as a black woman, I know I have to come correct and I have to know what I'm talking about. If I intend to have an impact, and if we want community to make decisions, they have to come in that. So we have to, when we talk about racial equity, we have to talk about racial reality. We cannot simply send community off to chum and think that if they just are passionate enough and they're excited enough, people will listen to them. That is not how the world works. So we wanted to make sure that community understood what this environment was, and also we also had to deal with the biases associated in this. At this time, I was a developer and working with community. I consider myself still a community, person rooted with community. This is my conversations I would have to be community members of all races and creeds, the excoriating poor black people. Once we had a community leader who was a woman of color say that the Tremay neighborhood had enough poor black people and they didn't need any more. And also in the same Tremay community, a white citizen saying, why do the residents of public housing have the right to stay in my community? And saying this out loud. And so at that point, but this had to be an equitable process. And how do you give that same reaction from two people of color? And how do you say to a black woman, you can't say that, you can't say that. How do you have to do it with respect? You have to do it with love. We also have to talk about the facts and how that attitude leads to a devaluing of your property because you're, I tell folks all the time, white people cannot tell a difference between different kinds of black people, right?  So we need to stop talking about us like good and bad and hoping that they can figure out the difference because they can't. That's been proven time and time and time. So what does that mean? We need to talk about the facts. We need to talk about the data. So making sure community understood what has happened, why this was happening and that affordable housing was not a dirty word. You want affordable housing. You actually need affordable housing in order to thrive. This frustrated a lot of people, particularly folks who signed up for our policy working group because they just wanted to fix the problem and we told them know you have to wait because community has to be able to participate in this process. So you have to wait and you have to take your cues from them. And then we also have community engagement. We have volunteer review team members who review all of our documents and are the last word when everybody does all the work and all the information is done and as we set the agenda, they come in and get the thumbs up or thumbs down to what goes into the plan and when it is applied and when it is actually executed. So we also came up with some real goals about what this plan needed to do that we were talking about preserving home ownership, I mean, I'm sorry, preserving housing and preventing future displacement, fair housing, sustainable design and accessibility. I'm gonna go quickly because we just talked about community engagement. We wanted to talk about why this was necessary. I wanna make sure y'all see this. So pre-patrina rents, 45% of the rental market rented between $300 and $499. Post-storm, those homes and apartments were replaced by units starting at $750 going up to $1,500 and wages didn't change. Pre-patrina, 60% of the homes that people owned were valued at $100,000 or less. Those have been replaced by homes starting at $200,000 going up to the million. And I wanna make sure you don't notice the quite droopling of homes between the $500,000 and million dollar marks. So housing supply, we had done a lot of work rebuilding, building new, about 90,000 subsidized housing units came online and we still ended up with affordable housing prices. We calculated real demand and that's where we get the 33,000. So we talked about the loss of units, we talked about adjustments for vacancy and what in the pipeline, the number is 33,600 affordable housing opportunities and that's a very specific phrase. We are not simply talking about building or constructing 33,600 new units. Although we could, right, we can totally fit that here. Vacant properties, blind and abandoned properties, the fact that this was a city built for 650,000 and don't have 400,000 means we have room for all of this. But what we're also talking about is preserving a community fabric and allowing people to stay in the neighborhood. So if you are living in a neighborhood that is meeting your needs in all other ways and you just can't afford to be there, how do we create that home, make that home or apartment affordable? And so that's why this is such a complex policy discussion. We're talking, we look at insurance, we look at property taxes, we look at utilities. Your home, there are, because of our utility rates here in Louisiana and in New Orleans in particular, we have a lot of people who are cost burdened because of their utilities. Their rent or mortgage is okay. Their utilities, because they live in a brandy old house. And so how do we make that unit energy efficient? It's one of the reasons why we stood shoulder to shoulder with our friends in environmental justice and energy efficiency to oppose the new power plant in New Orleans East because it's only going to increase our utility costs. We could take that money and invest in energy efficiency, not solar panels or some other whack-a-doodle or the dismissive things that people come up with like windmills or things like that, but real energy efficiency, which means investing in the homes of the people of New Orleans. Partners, as I said, we've been working with the public partners. They actually committed to, this is the state, the federal government and the city looking at their pipeline. They said, we can kick in 7,700. We run that down to 7,500 units on this 33,000. So those would mostly be focused on the most vulnerable, right? And we break down the 33,000 by income band and tenium type and bedroom size. So we know what people need at every level. And so that still leaves us with a huge amount of units that we need. And one of the things that's very interesting is that there's a huge demand, of course, for the low-income traditional concept of people making less than 30% AMI. So that's minimum wage workers here in New Orleans. But there's also a strong demand for people who don't qualify for any assistance. Again, that middle class that needs help. And we have to acknowledge that because that's how we're pitted against each other in an equity, in this racial equity strife, right? The middle class is told it's the poor people who are keeping you away from this. And if you push them off the government teeth, you can get what you need. They're dragging you down when we're all actually not getting what we need. So we also included, like I mentioned, accountability features. So we do an annual report card. So we've done one every year. It's been very interesting and enlightening because folks realize that we're not going away. And so as we move through this, we see now the current state of housing because those report cards have seen a decline because we're lacking the political will necessary to implement this plan correctly. We've got, so the current state of housing is still, incomes are still very much where there are, rents are going up, average home sales are going up. So what do we do about this, right? We've got a plan that we know from the data, from the policies, it will actually work if we implement it. So we've got a number of external challenges at the federal level or the federal foolishness, like I like to call it. Local Louisiana is incredibly hostile to New Orleans in a number of ways. And here in New Orleans, we have our weapons of mass distraction that we deploy on a routine basis to move us off this. And so we started thinking about this differently from a political power perspective, right? How do we get this? So we conducted a poll where this was determined affordable housing must be second biggest issue to likely voters that do everybody's minds. We saw overwhelming support for the policies that we were struggling to implement. And so we've launched put housing first, which is a campaign to make sure that there's accountability not simply in this plan, but also with our elected officials. So this year, our priorities are to implement our smart housing mix. There's a handout about what it is. That's our version of mandatory inclusion in Arizona, which I'm very pleased to say, got cast yesterday by our city council. So we're doing okay. Thank you. And you're quite a talky too. They have massively failed at delivering those 7,500 units. Last year, we actually lost the report with negative 126 of our sub-size affordable units. So we've got to get them to get their act together, as well as securing more funding for this. And so again, coming back to what we do, this roadmap that Valen mentioned, and how we intend to commit to our vision of making sure that New Orleans can provide high quality, safe and accessible housing to all of its citizens. Thank you. Sociology, I'm very happy to be here. Thank you for having me. Thank you for being here. I'm happy to be part of this panel and this conversation. As a respondent, I was tasked with bringing in comparisons of who, when, how, and why people move in the conversation and seeing where the convergences are, lit up there on islands and countries, which shaped on September 20th, 2017, in Puerto Rico, to great devastation. It has the unshining start of the idea of development. You can see, so I'm moving geographically here. And in particular, housing by looking at Puerto Rico. So, you know, a temporary shelter to a permanent shelter. And seeing as becoming more stable, the development comes from, and I'm thinking you're the international sort of types of development in equality. And so I'm from the time that development really began to take a hold, which is in the middle of the 20th century, in the 1950s. You see this spike rising in equality. So, or the appearance of certain dynamics of migration and movement, and then event and migration as a way of life. And this image comes from a paper by a Colombian Caribbean house building, a dialogue between archaeology and humanitarian shelter. And what they see here is that three Colombian shelters were resilient to hurricanes. And so they show us architecturally why the design was resilient, but one evidence was about movement. The fact that these shelters were rather easy to take down and put back up was part of what made them Muslims. What if we thought about the Caribbean as always a site of movement and migration? And in sort of yesterday I was, I enjoyed the panel. Yesterday we're, right? And what if we thought of movement rather than static, you know, 1492 from the very, you know, the watershed moment is a place of constant movement. I think of myself and African people that were captured and brought and put to work as slaves, the migration has been jumping islands, right? Including myself, migrating from Puerto Rico to the US, but every generation has been living in the Caribbean in a different island. So that this is true of Caribbean way of life and the authors speak of this architecture as a Caribbean mode of architecture. So what if we think of the many reasons why Puerto Ricans have left their homes in the 20th century and the response is the housing that has been created to shelter those moves or to address those moves. So I'm thinking here about the 1950s external migration as a result of the industrialization programs both for the island but also sending Puerto Ricans off to the metropole to New York and the Midwest to become the laborers of the factories in the US. I'm also thinking of rural tourism migration as a result of that industrialization that sort of to inflect modernity and provide economic opportunities that shifted the focus of the economy from the sugar plantation economy to industrial urbanity. And then also the creation of a result of informal housing to squatter settlements that then there was a demand for formal housing and the creation of single-family developments on the one end for worldly mobile people but then on the other hand, public housing for who were considered to be low income communities. And then the impact of insecurity and lack of safety or un-safety as a result of not only violence but also climate disaster later in the 20th century. So I wanna put this, this is just, I was just in Puerto Rico and this is a picture from last week but this is the sugar mill in Fonse, the southern town of Fonse and it showcases, it's obviously abandoned, right? And it showcases the consequences, right? Of massive economic infusion of writing the former plantation in a colonial type of situation which I think it's important to retain as we think of development, right? As the, let's make it all beautiful and static and stable but that it comes with sort of legacies and dynamics of colony and empire that results in ruins at the end. So what are the ruins? Some of these migrations, right? That result in ruins, the move from the US to New York, more prominently places like the South Bronx where you have the, I know I'm going to be talking about the South Bronx later but to the both promises, right? Of what that migration would result in to the, let's get rid of the slums what we're considered slums and water settlements in Fangito there on the top left to the Spick and Stand public housing where Dorico became the second largest public housing system in the federal US system that would be our own story but just take that away and then the residential development tracts and for Dorico becoming a laboratory for a lot of this suburban type of single family development that defined how we would ascend, how for Dorico would ascend from these inadequate housing there on the left to formal single family ownership housing. So the move is always, has always been part of the policy with some designated housing configurations of how to house that movement within a political economic system, right? That defined what were not only the ways in which people should be moving but also the places where they should end up in. And then insecurity and crime and I've written about this results in a new type of design which is getting communities where we have an island that is mostly fenced off residentially to the insecurity of the hurricane where development culminates, right? In investments that make the island more vulnerable. So going from shining star to unshining star is literally a reflection of the creation of an inadequate power. At some point, right? It was considered to be the best in the Caribbean, the best model for the Caribbean. So some of the responses from that development now as a result of hurricane, where people have seen as an opportunity to redefine, right? To reimagine efficient sort of efforts by individuals to address these that had been created that people were largely unaware of during the 20th century. And so here housing is seen as one of the keys to Puerto Rico's recovery. And what now has come into view is inadequacies of that development that just two years ago seemed to be, well, more than that, given a fiscal crisis, but that seemed to be fantastic for the island, a model, right? Puerto Rico's would say, yeah, we have power and look at places like the Dominican Republic next door, like, you know, they go dark and, right? Like it was the shining star, right? It stopped being so. So now the cracks have shown. And what we started to see is things like there is a lot of informal housing in the island, that has been given proper, created properly, and many abandoned spaces and funds then are being sought to see how to address this. So we see some markers of this for the public housing authority who has been in crisis for a long time. We see now investments into mostly cosmetic renovations, but also things like the creation of what was unheard of before Puerto Rico of mixed income communities, a whole section of, we were talking yesterday, because of the mass amount, the large population that lives in public housing, but the sort of attempts at, in fact, they have been rather segregated ways prior to the hurricane. And whether this is possible, it's still to be seen. This is some of the, you know, a modern city, a modern life in an old city is sort of the, what is being helped, purported as no idea, but really is an old idea that to mix reviews has been happening in the US. Other things that have happened is that things like this where an abandoned Hano Flores became housing for some families, some families decided to make that their housing. So thinking about these abandoned, quote unquote, abandoned structures of development, right, themselves, of the educational system that the US has funded in some, in many ways, defined, they become other type, for other uses. We see other self-sufficient efforts, like using shipping containers. Maria La Viera Loz and Carlos Castigli talk about their shipping containers and how they are more of Florida that's with very low median income, your living and incomes. In the island, the catch is that they are building it for whoever can pay, you know, without financing. And then there are efforts like this, which is the Cicero Gabrera in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. And this is actually an effort by, that looked like this, where, and open your houses. There's a lot of consensus that it has been a positive thing for the community. Look from down there, it looks pretty and what a great project. If you start going up those stairs on the left, you start seeing the cracks of the project. So most of these houses have blew away the people that never returned and some, a few that stayed, that have spread on the informal housing that is there. So to replicate this idea that these communities are here, when in fact, they have been in motion and movement. And so part of my proposition here is to not only define race by the initial capitalism that continues, and also to the challenges we see out of the discussion. Because in this self-sufficient, in reimagination, we sort of devise that people can go around their main way, right? For themselves, the responsibility from policy. So how do we think about undoing, right? A lot of what the effort, quote unquote, master planning, which I hate the master part of that description, but how do we return to a way of interfacing with these communities in moving, right? In quite literally, the political economic system that we've been a part of. I love a quote by Stuart Hall and he says, you know, you can't go back through the eye of the needle in Caribbean history, we cannot un-stitch it from its colonial situate, its colonial realities. And so his proposition here is, how do we enact a new modernity, right? Not the old modernity where we're gonna build the US in the Caribbean, we're gonna build the public housing for the Puerto Rican or the Caribbean that replicates the best practices of the empire, but how do we rethink this idea of movement? And so in bringing in these pre-Columbian structures, how might we reimagine precisely what that looks like, right? Where we're not necessarily moving into fixed city and stability, but into a more, into understanding movement as part of what needs to happen. So thank you. Lunch to really mull through, at least jumpstart some of those conversations that will take place over a meal. And I do wanna first provide the panelists with an opportunity to engage with each other's work, heart-wrenching about all the work that you all are doing and all the other term of engagement. And it's such a, it's such a, it's important it doesn't really capture what people are acting as if you can retreat back into some space in which you're no longer engaged. Of this symposium, I want to ask you all, this hypothetical, rivals with a institution for community, competency, ecological policy, and disaster policy, and land policy, development policy, so forth. And so what happens when steps back, excuse me, as chart, what is the infrastructure for those of us who can take the map a lot of a job? It is one of the things that is frustrating part of my career actually as a bureaucrat working at the housing authority, then became a developer, I come to this, patients that do incredibly good work that I don't think should go away. I think we should evolve. I think doing this right means that there is a new system in place that is built with understanding and acknowledging the disparities, the racial inequities, and that community is why we start and stop the community, the review team members that we work with, we actually compensate them because they have to be a part of any, when we get data analysis, when we get policy analysis, these are things that nonprofits and government entities pay for. So why aren't we compensating our community members to make sure that they understand that their input is not simply, it's not a check the box, it's not perfunctory, it is actually value that people grapple with because you hear people say all the time, particularly the wider progressives, so short, well, they shouldn't be paid to care about their community, right? As if we're here for free. As if it was someone, I said, well, you're being paid to care about the community, you're not here for free. So why shouldn't they, that they have lives, and I mean, again, it's about how you think about this equitably, right? That on top of everything that we ask, the folks who make this city what it is, the musicians, the maids, the healthcare workers, everything that is necessary, but what do you think about New Orleans and the people who are responsible for that? I think they are talking about it beautifully, the folks who desperately wanted to come back to the city because they are the reason it's back on its feet. Even though they have not gotten a fair shake, it is for them, it is because of them. So all of those people, when they're doing everything they gotta do, and then we gotta say, you also need to come to a meeting and be your best self for nothing. It works. So we say, no, we have to do more than simply empower. We have to educate, make sure that there's space, they empower themselves. And then again, that's what we move into. We move very quickly into this political movement concept because we need a new system. And once we have a new system, systems are really good at protecting themselves, right? But we've gotta break down the one that we have and rebuild another one. I know the person that introduced this whole event said things could get contentious at times, so that's a healthy thing. So let me throw a little contentiousness into this whole discussion. For Andrea Nique, I'm pronouncing... No. Well, Sharon Jasper, your former panel board member, told me that was the correct pronunciation. Ms. Morris. I would, the problem is the public-private partnership. That has gotten us to the crisis situation that we are in. Now that public-private partnership is central to the whole fire capitalist model of their increasing the rent intensification agenda. I mean, if we look at the St. Thomas tragedy, right? That's where my research was. And I thought your research was excellent. I hope you'll share your PowerPoint, much more impressive than mine. But St. Thomas was 1,510 public housing units. There were problems there. People had real solutions. They recognized the problem. But going into the public-private partnership with the big developers, with community activists and with the city in Hanau, what did it end up? What was the product of that? That was a huge disaster. Most people were displaced. No one was really followed. How many people died being displaced? People talked about the attachment to place. Farah did a great job of that. That kills people, right? And that furthered the huge gentrification of the surrounding area, right? And these philanthropists, which are part of the public-private partnership, right? They put people on the payroll because they're gonna follow what is acceptable so they're funders, they're not idiots, right? So yeah, we need people in a movement to be, they need a salary. But if they're being on the payroll of these philanthropic organizations, which are key partners in this whole public-private partnership, it's not gonna end with a happy ending for working-class people. So I'll end it here, because I don't like going to presentations where the audience, when I'm part of the audience and I don't get a chance to talk and ask questions, but I would say the starting point for making any advance is ending, breaking the public-private, shattering the public-private partnership that has gotten us into this crisis. Well, I think, I'd rather hear. Yeah, that's what I could do. Well, I can do it. I don't have much to add besides what I said towards the end of my presentation about the trappings of thinking that you can just flow money into communities and that that will resolve the issues because that is also a measure, a way to reproduce inequality. I think that we have to hold government and policy accountable as well. Questions? Yes, go ahead. We'll start there and then we'll go to the back and then come back. Another two. Being a pre-Katrina New Orleans who earned his MA and PhD from New Orleans in political science who went on to become a Katrina survivor, a holdout who refused to evacuate, who was part of the first movement to try to help define what post-Katrina New Orleans would be about. I had faced a lot of repression. Then on to becoming, trying to return movement with an emphasis on public housing. I'd been active before the start of that but that was kind of our focus on to being somebody who to this day is involved in many social sub-justice struggles but with many emphasis, a great deal of emphasis on housing, affordable housing, kind of a, I have every feeling you can imagine when it comes to trying to talk about these issues. You know what the world I've seen? I was in academia, okay? Then I checked out, okay? I'm a tarot card reader on Bourbon Street. Okay, that's what I was on, oh, I was a tarot card reader on Jackson Square when Katrina hit. And so the world that I have seen is a world that could be seen partially through your eyes and partially through the eyes of a Katrina survivor and a working class person just struggling to get by. Okay, I just wanted to get across just to get off in the chest. Okay, now I'm a socialist and I have been forever, I moved here in 83 and so I see the world through that perspective, okay? And I remember walking the streets of New Orleans when there was practically no one here in the areas that weren't flooded and thinking what's next? And this is from the eyes of the survivor. I was busy hustling trying to survive for myself and my partner, but I was also thinking what's next? And then I've heard of Amy Goodman. She had to be in town and ran into me to the one bar that was open in the quarter. She asked me to give her a tour of the places we could go to. And one of the first places I emphasized that we should go to is the Iverville Housing Development. So as a member of C3 Hands Off Iverville because I knew it might got a feeling they were gonna go after public house and sure enough they did. Iverville was the last one they shut down because basically with our limited army, which was a mixture of residents and community supporters, that was stopped. And that was because the Bush administration refused to let Ray make and bully them into knocking back project. I thought they were happy but knocked down all the other projects. So my starting point for having fair housing in New Orleans, how can you have a fair housing regime in this city if you don't have public housing? Do you know that the state law prohibits rent control in Louisiana and because it prohibits rent control in only form of really effective rent control that's been demonstrated in this city's history is public housing, low income public housing. And I can remember the time walking through the French floor, right after Governor Blanco, Republican Nancy, lifted the order prohibit evictions. You talk about evictions, I walked through just block after block after block of people's possessions being dumped out on the sidewalk. And these weren't the possessions that people's houses had been flooded, which they would've been thrown out anyways. These were possessions that had survived Katrina. And because the people couldn't get back, they just dumped their possessions, all their worldly possessions in a time of incredible need on the floor, on the sidewalk.  So as far as the evacuation plan, I think that's one thing that needs to be put into it. No evictions and not just for a month, but for months, maybe a year. No evictions, okay, because I saw what that did to so many of the people who were fortunate enough to live in a place that survived Katrina, but then, because of politics, they got their possessions thrown out on the street while they were still just trying to recover from the flooding. All right, okay, but I have a couple of questions and I'll answer that. I just wanna make sure that other people can answer. I understand, I understand, I understand, I'll take a log in the mic, okay? It's just, I don't get any opportunities just I do not work with a non-profit and not with an academic institution and I don't get many opportunities to speak. I understand, I speak the city council basically, but I understand this, okay? I have several questions. All right, first of all with regards to four homeowners. Okay, so I'm working with other members. Has, like, how has he known, thought about suing the city of New Orleans for utilizing PacificSource.com to conduct auctions of people who are behind on their property taxes because the Louisiana Constitution prohibits that. And there was a 2014, there was a vote to legalize it and the voters rejected it. That's one question. And then there's the question of public housing, right? We had 14,000 public housing units when I moved here in 83, we've got 2,000. Obviously, given the conditions in Louisiana, central to rebuilding affordable housing is re-clenching our public housing stock. Is there anything attempted, being attempted, thereby any people on the panel other than, you know, I go to meetings and they're a little vigorous. Those are the main things I'm stating right here. Thank you. And I think we can add in another couple of questions. And while we're doing that, I just wanna say, I do think that, you know, one of the things that we didn't get a chance to really, eviction is this huge topic, right? Which is an old conference. There are a couple of exhibitions going on in the city around that topic. And I don't want to dismiss that as a vital part of this conversation. And there is a really blurry line between eviction and evacuation. When, you know, not being able to come back is not always a financial matter, but sometimes a legal matter. And that's the place that you once called home is by law no longer your home, even though you may see it that way. So I do thank you for raising that point. Sorry to the back. First off, I'd like to thank the entire panel for their communication. Now, the past didn't work. You know, as one of my backgrounds in retail management, I'm a non-traditional student at L.A. We have to agree that the past didn't work, but how do we go to the future? Now, the respondent showed us one option, but to create that sense of urgency, we need to go to, I believe we need to go to that fire industry or capitalist system and to show them the options. Yes, we have the respondent's option, but long as the tourist hangover, do we go either that way or do we go the way of Venice, how they don't have a service industry in Venice? And it's just a tourist trap. Do we go that way or do we go, what way can we influence? Let's not throw the baby out of the bath room. Let's look at what will be best for you all. We'll take one more question so that then you have enough questions for the panel to answer. Okay, so I would like to thank everybody on the panel. All of your presentations were really good. I have a few questions. So my first question was for Ms. Morris. Ms. Morris, you said something about real energy efficiency in homes and I wanted to know when you said, you know, not all that wacky stuff and you were very specific about what it was that you meant. I wanted to ask you if you could say more about it, especially because our next panel is about grain washing. And I know that people in the city had issues with solar panels and things like that. So I was asking you to speak more on it. And then also for the respondent, I found your pre-Columbia structures to be very interesting. I'm also thinking back to the last panel on Ms. Verdin's presentation where you showed the house with the plummetto rooftop. And so I'm thinking about, you know, as the gentleman said, the past didn't work. But it seems like we're looking back toward past structures and previous structures that did work, that did seem to have more, I don't want to say resiliency, but the ability to be able to take on water, hurricanes and be more into motion and movement that we're more accustomed to. So I wanted to know if you could just speak a little bit more on that as well. Thank you. So to recap, we've got Civic Source, energy efficiency. Sorry, just to recap, architecture and the broader subject of. Repenetrating public housing. Repenetrating public housing. And the question about. Yeah, industries play in the universe because Civic Source is a proper company. So I wanted to clear when I was saying, quote unquote, wacky, I was not trying to dismiss energy, you know, green infrastructure. I'm trying to make sure that folks understand how it can be dismissed, right? How, oh people, we can't do solar panels, we can't do windmills. And the green infrastructure and energy efficiency industry does not do themselves any favors in how they come back is, it is, I think, emblematic of that two coast thinking, right? You get the East Coast and the West Coast and they're just thinking, oh, y'all are dumb in the South and y'all don't know what y'all are talking about. And I know that because I work with a number of energy efficiency partners at a national level and they are missing the opportunity here when we talk about the green new deal. Louisiana, interestingly enough, New Orleans is at the crossroads and there's a lot of investment that's coming because of the coastal plants, because of our watershed planning that we can implement a lot of these strategies if we center equity, if we talk about racial equity when we come up with these plans, instead of doing green investment that enriches white owners, right? Making their property more valuable for the sake of that and then there's an indirect benefit to the renter, their light bill might be a little bit lower, right? We need to be talking about how do we keep black land ownership, how do we keep black homeowners who are struggling to pay their utility bills, who are also struggling to pay their property taxes. So how do you know that isn't considering suing? Mike, one of the things that we're, what we are working on is how do we freeze property taxes for low income homeowners so they can stay in their homes and then also adding energy efficiency to that making those investments because code enforcement and district landmark commissions, those are kind of predatory elements that also puts you in the crosshairs of a civic source. So we're looking at how do we maintain and increase black home ownership, black land ownership because one of the original sins around housing and this goes way back before Clinton and Bush, Reagan's a big highlight in this but this goes back to the GI bill and the sins that led to redlining. We like to think of this as simply something that bigots did and banks did but this is something that our government also did, right? By affording only whites the opportunity to take advantage of the wealth building opportunity that is homeownership in this country. And now what we have coming full circle is, well, you know, homeownership isn't working for black and brown communities. So they don't need it, right? Even though the land, the ownership of land and the lack, the fact that black and brown communities have not been able to access this as a generational wealth building opportunity is the reason for the racial wealth divide, right? When we talk about not solving that from that perspective, when we don't talk about that, we miss the boat and I must, I feel the overwhelming need to address two comments or to make, to deal with the elephant in the room. Jay, you and I have known each other for 15 years. You've never bothered to learn my name, like you and I have known each other as well and the fact that you all feel the need to disconnect from this work is one of the biggest problems when we talk about the racial issues. That is white men who don't live in public housing. You can step away from this issue.  That's how you heard how to pronounce my name. Even though I was introduced twice, I introduced myself. And it seems like a small impending thing but I want you guys to understand this and that's why I felt the need to point it out. The ignoring, pretending like it doesn't exist is emblematic of this problem. If we're talking about power with themselves, that is what we are talking about. White people have too much power over determining my fate and the fate of black and brown people in this country. And that has to stop. And that has to stop by you listening to black and brown people, especially when they have the temerity to disagree with you, especially then. You sound exactly like John Luther who is the Executive Vice President of the Home Builders Association who stood up yesterday and said that he has not been granted a seat at the table because he's in opposition to our smart housing mix. He has not been invited to speak at the table while I was pointing at him. Well, he's not in that either. I know who he is. He said, Jay just talked about this. And Mike, you talked about it too. You talked about the fact that you don't work with us. You're still here. We're still here. Well, you don't bother to work with me. You've never done anything to try to connect with us. And that's the song of black. He has signed up. He has tried to not acknowledge our existence by whisper. That's a big part of it, by whispering campaigns. You worked at Hanna. You know what was going on at Hanna. Yeah, because I do know what was going on at Hanna. I actually do know what's going on.  When they voted, they knocked them down. Well, housing only didn't exist then, but we want to talk about what I do. Yeah, what did our leaders, what leaders? You mean the black leaders of this community? Well, the people who know who our leaders of housing know what now. I'd like to know. That's me. That's me. What did I do? What did I do? I encouraged the redevelopment of public housing. I don't shirk away from that. I don't shy away from that. And when you talk to African-Americans in this city and they talk about the fact that they wanted public housing redeveloped for our brothers and sisters, that we did not want black people to have to be confined to the conditions that was public housing before the storm, that black people do not have to live in garbage communities and garbage housing. Mr. Humanity, please. Excuse me. OK, OK, OK. So this is obviously a conversation that extends far beyond the scopes of this town. And that's not to dismiss this debate, because this is what the debate is. This is the debate that's going on outside these walls in the city, in this country. This is that there are more characters in this story than are present in this room. And if all of they were here, the whole, we wouldn't need a program, because I mean, and that's but I think that it needs to be acknowledged that those other voices that would be as passionate in this debate aren't present here today. And that's what we are, as organizers, complicit in. Ways in which the topics of this conversation, broadly speaking, as a symposium, are represented by all those of us who are involved in this work. How do we represent the work that we do, such that those people feel invited? When they got the thing, the notice, in a lot of cases, they saw the flyers. But do they feel like this was a space to come in and talk about their issues? To talk about what they, as a maybe mid-career professional, changing their plan for their future, what place they have in this, is this an industry that they can come work in? Is this a field that they can become educated in? And so I do want to make sure that as we continue in the program today, that yes, there is space for these debates to go on. We still have to keep rolling with the program. So I do want to give Jay the time for a chance to speak, and I know that everyone can just be earlier as well and come back to it no matter what, but just keep that in mind. Thank you. So, again, contentiousness, I think this is good. We need more of this. But to respond to Ms. Morrison, I'm going to butcher your first name again and get attacked. But I think it's really, we should not, when we, we don't refer to the white community, right? It's divided by class, by political ideologies, many different ways. Likewise with the black community. And you said, who spoke for the black community post-Katrina around public housing? Was there one voice? No, there were different voices. There was the black political class who were uniformly down for smashing public housing as part of a renaissance of the city. And there were many people in the nonprofit complex that were all for that. People like Barbara Major, who was fur down with involved in the same time, said we got to give this stuff up. You as part of Providence community housing. You were on the front. I don't ever remember dealing with you one-on-one. I read about you in the paper. I knew who you were, but I never had any interactions with you. But I knew that it worked that you were involved in. You were on the other side of the barricades. There were other black people, right? Like the gentleman who had that apartment who was trying to reoccupy that were opposed to your agenda, to those white and black on the other side of the barricade. So I don't think this gets anywhere of talking about the black community. There were different tendencies. So we got to break that up. I think that's important. And getting back to the other question of where we go, I think in the back, I don't want to give Zaire a chance to also respond to the question directed to her. But what I liked about this conference is that it put the big issues on the agenda, right? Democracy in retreat, right? We've got these right-wing fashes, proto-fashes around the world arising in the context of this capitalist crisis. We've got the climate crisis. It's real, right? And so we've got to be bold on how we respond. And what I see as exciting is the demand for a green new deal. Now, it's kind of an empty vessel. And the danger is on one side where the Republicans are attacking this openly. But the other attack is through the Democratic Party, the philanthropic capitalist sector who are gonna fill it and kill it right with their public-private partnership definition. But if the new green deal is gonna be effective, it's got to be what we were arguing for, the grassroots forces, black and white, immigrant and Latino, in the post-Batrina period. Who knew New Orleans had serious problems before Batrina? Everyone knew that. But we rejected the disaster capitalist agenda, their solution that they were ramming down our throat. And that was, yeah, a multi-racial movement, the disaster capitals. And it was black and white, Latino, immigrant. But we were arguing for against that agenda. And four, we needed a direct government employment, democratically controlled. That's gonna be, and I think that's missing from the current discussions around the green new deal. That's gonna be democratically controlled. And the resources are crucial. You need that. But they have to be democratically decided. And to do that, it's not gonna be win-win. It's gotta be win for the working class and lose for the ruling class. We've gotta take that wealth back. And that is going to be a huge, momentous struggle. And we're gonna have to have ideological fight against the public-private partnership and that ideology and how we build a real working class movement. And I think we gotta have struggle with Jacobin, where Daniel has been writing in that whole project of questioning what's gonna be the political vehicle. I don't think there's been enough serious discussion about that. And having a politics where the movements control our candidates that we run, that they are beholden to us, so an AOC is up there and she's done tremendous work. She's very talented in getting the word out and combating the right wing. But she's also gotta be democratically beholden to that movement, because there will be powerful force.  I don't think you're gonna be able to, the gravity is too strong to be pulled to the other side. But I'll end here and hope for more discussions in during lunch and I wanna give it a second. Thank you. So, I mean, it's hard to jump in here in this conversation, but in response to the questions about what are the options, I resist giving solutions because I don't think, I think that has been the modus operandi past efforts, sort of like this is what needs to happen and people feel very strongly about what needs to happen and to benefit and what it looks like. So, I resist that and what I'm trying to offer here is more like rethinking our reimagination yesterday when Aurora Morales learnings, they talked, narrated this poem that she had written about what if, what if, and every line was what if we, and reimagination is really hard, right? Like we are socialized, we are, we're productions of this whole enterprise, right? This colonial imperial enterprise. And so, in going back to that paper and again, I say story, oh, we cannot go back through the needle, we cannot suddenly like flatten our landscape and put up huts, right? I mean, that's not where we are, we are here, but how might we rethink the way we approach this from a policy perspective? Not from everybody figure themselves out because I think that gives way to the same sort of model of survival of the fittest, rational action that dictates, has dictated where we are now or market, market balances itself out or not, you know, rather not, but it's presumed to do that. So, with the, when I went up to that community which has become this colorful, you know, thing which is being celebrated, I was disgruntled because I thought it was the effort of one artist who decided Orman was not involved. So, these efforts after the hurricane have been celebrated massively, like things like that or people organizing a food community food kitchen or there are funds who are now going to different community organizations and saying we're gonna give you money to figure out how to think here instead of, you know, signaling the ineptitude of government in the whole production. So, you have a little patchwork, you know, solutions that don't really address the fact that a community like that is disinhabited and there are three people, right, or three families that are keeping it up, that are keeping it alive. The fact that some people lost their homes in that community and could not return and weren't able to get FEMA support because they didn't have property titles. So, that gets sort of painted over by this. So, I mean, towards solution, I think it's rethinking that tendency. So, not only construction, but what makes you an owner? And I think Puerto Rico, because there are about 55% of the structures are informally built and have no titles, it's an opportunity to not say everybody is on their own and, you know, how pretty, but to redefine what it means to own a home and also to redefine sort of some of the ideas of, you know, when you leave, what is abandonment, what is vacant, and who it belongs to. So, it's still very abstract, but it's more of an inspiration to engage policy in that way. Thank you.


The Republic of India was born on January 26th, 1950. Many nations have taken shape through the ages, but this was the largest and boldest experiment in democracy ever. A people comprising one-sixth of humanity with a rich diversity of cultures spread across a land the size of a continent were undertaken to build a new destiny for themselves. Indians call Mahatma Gandhi the father of the nation. He was the foremost of a galaxy of leaders who stirred up India's hitherto feudal conservative society with liberal humanist ideals. Inspired by them, the Constituent Assembly, which was elected when India became independent on August 15th, 1947, formulated one of the boldest and most detailed charters for a nation. The constitution created a democratic republic, the President is the head of state, but he must act on the advice of a council of ministers headed by the Prime Minister. The council of ministers in turn must have the confidence of the House of the People, which is elected now by 650 million voters, the largest group to vote a House of Representatives into being ever, anywhere. There is also a council of states in India's parliament for the constitution organised India into several states, each with a unique culture. At a time when women in many industrially advanced countries did not have the right to vote, many were skeptical about whether universal adult franchise could work in such a poor and underdeveloped land as India. Members of India's parliament come there through a trial by fire. That only makes them all the more determined to keep the government constantly on its toes. Although they fight each other fiercely in debates, discussions and questions as if they were sworn enemies, India's parliamentarians work together with the United Will to take the nation forward. With such basic unity of purpose, India's democracy has proved resilient, whether a single party wins a majority or not. Minority governments and coalitions have been formed at various times with never a whisper of a threat to the democratic system. India today is the largest democracy in the world and a vibrant one at that with free press and a democratically elected government, one succeeding the other, has sent a message to the rest of the world loud and clear that democracy does work. Democracy can be made to function regardless of the size of the nation and the diversity, both religious and ethnic and cultural. And if it can work here, there's no reason why it shouldn't work in other countries. The tensions between the individual's liberty and the need to build fraternity across a nation has troubled political scientists for centuries. India's constituent assembly faced a great challenge on this front since large sections of India's population had been socially, economically and politically dispossessed for centuries. These were the tribes that live mainly in forested pockets and the caste groups at the lower end of the social hierarchy. So the constitution reserved seats for these groups in legislatures and in education. The constitution established a number of checks on the government. The comptroller and auditor general, for example, has independent authority to check all government expenditure. Its reports are regularly sent to parliament. At times, this constitutional ombudsman has caused a storm that has shaken up India's politics. And India's courts keep a hawk's eye on governments at every level. In 1993, the constitution was amended to extend democracy in a rarely major thrust. Another level of democratic representation was created, much closer to the people. India has had an ancient tradition of village councils with the status and respect almost of a religious institution. Drawing from this haloed tradition, the constitution now provides for elected bodies in each village and town across India, which take decisions among the people that affect their daily lives. These bodies are revolutionary in the world's annals of democracy, for they reserve a third of all seats, including those of chairpersons for women, apart from reserving seats for the most backward castes and tribes. Even the poorest Indians in the most remote parts of their vast land have come to value the right to vote and to use that power. No wonder Indian elections are some of the most colourful and lively anywhere in the world.