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Don't be a turkey, housing advocates tell Vitter

Section: Politics

Barri Bronston

Public housing advocates and Katrina survivors had a special delivery for U.S. Sen. David Vitter, R-La., on Tuesday: a turkey with his face on it and more than 130,000 signed petitions urging him to support a housing recovery act that would let them return home.

Leaders of more than two dozen political action, faith-based and human rights organizations paraded to Vitter's office in Metairie and told his representative that they are human beings who deserve a place to live and enjoy Thanksgiving, just as Vitter will with his family on Thursday.

"When he is giving thanks, tell him to remember that a lot of us are not home," said Sharon Sears Jasper, a former resident of the St. Bernard housing development, one of four New Orleans complexes shuttered since Katrina. "Right now our hearts are broken."

"Don't be a turkey; eat turkey," said civil rights lawyer Tracie Washington of the Louisiana Justice Institute.

The Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Act, introduced by Sens. Mary Landrieu, D-La., and Chris Dodd, D-Conn., aims to provide those who lived in public housing before the storm with affordable options now. The bill would fill shortfalls in the Louisiana Road Home program and provide a selection of public housing and homes in mixed-income neighborhoods.

The House approved the bill, but it has been stalled by critics, including Vitter, who supports a plan by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Housing Authority of New Orleans to tear down the St. Bernard, C.J. Peete, B.W. Cooper and Lafitte developments and convert them into mixed-income neighborhoods.

Vitter has said that in their current form, the housing complexes are magnets for crime and drug abuse, and that rebuilding them would perpetuate poverty and derail true housing reform.

"I have offered multiple amendments in my countless meetings with Sen. Landrieu, members of the Senate Housing and Banking Committee and housing advocates and will continue to push them to ensure that we don't rebuild the failed New Orleans public housing projects as they were before Katrina," Vitter said Tuesday in a statement.
John McCusker/The Times-PicayuneRev. Robert Duplesis and James Perry carry boxes filled with petitions urging Sen. David Vitter to change his stance on the Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Act.
Opponents say Vitter's plan does not guarantee that affordable housing will be available for everyone who needs it, whereas the Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Act does.

"We want this recovery to be fair, and it's not," said the Rev. Charles Duplessis of Churches Supporting Churches, one of several organizations at a news conference outside Vitter's office. "We want to make the right to return (to New Orleans) a reality for our citizens."

James Perry of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, agreed. "We haven't moved forward quickly enough," he said. "We haven't moved forward aggressively enough."

Perry said the Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Act gives displaced residents a "hand up so we can help ourselves and move forward. This is a no-brainer, but Sen. Vitter has purposely stalled this bill. He prevents us from moving forward."

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