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E-book
Author Arena, John.

Title Driven from New Orleans : how nonprofits betray public housing and promote privatization
Published Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2012

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Description 1 online resource (345 pages)
Series Book collections on Project MUSE
Contents Introduction : nonprofits and the revanchist agenda -- Confronting the new boss : struggles for home and community in the postsegregation era, 1965-1985 -- Undoing the black urban regime : resistance to displacement and elite divisions, 1986-1988 -- Neoliberalism and nonprofits : selling privatization at St. Thomas, 1989-1995 -- No hope in HOPE VI : dismantling public housing from the nation to the neighborhood -- When things fall apart : from the dreams of St. Thomas to the nightmare of River Gardens, 1996-2002 -- Whose city is it? Hurricane Katrina and the struggle for New Orleans's public housing, 2003-2008 -- Managing contradictions : the coalition to stop the demolitions -- Conclusion : lessons from New Orleans
Summary In the early 1980s the tenant leaders of the New Orleans St. Thomas public housing development and their activist allies were militant, uncompromising defenders of the city's public housing communities. Yet ten years later these same leaders became actively involved in a planning effort to privatize and downsize their community--an effort that would drastically reduce the number of affordable apartments. What happened? John Arena--a longtime community and labor activist in New Orleans--explores this drastic change in Driven from New Orleans, exposing the social disaster visited on the city's black urban poor long before the natural disaster of Katrina magnified their plight. Arena argues that the key to understanding New Orleans's public housing transformation from public to private is the co-optation of grassroots activists into a government and foundation-funded nonprofit complex. He shows how the nonprofit model created new political allegiances and financial benefits for activists, moving them into a strategy of insider negotiations that put the profit-making agenda of real estate interests above the material needs of black public housing residents. In their turn, white developers and the city's black political elite embraced this newfound political "realism" because it legitimized the regressive policies of removing poor people and massively downsizing public housing, all in the guise of creating a new racially integrated, "mixed-income" community. In tracing how this shift occurred, Driven from New Orleans reveals the true nature, and the true cost, of reforms promoted by an alliance of a neoliberal government, nonprofits, community activists, and powerful real estate interests
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 227-283), and index
Notes Print version record
Subject Public housing -- Louisiana -- New Orleans
Nonprofit organizations -- Louisiana -- New Orleans
Privatization -- Louisiana -- New Orleans
Hurricane Katrina, 2005.
BUSINESS & ECONOMICS -- Infrastructure.
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- General.
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Sociology -- Urban.
Nonprofit organizations
Privatization
Public housing
SUBJECT New Orleans (La.) http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n79007238
Subject Louisiana -- New Orleans
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2012008139
ISBN 9780816682003
0816682003
9781452948102
1452948100