NEW ORLEANS - The HUD-appointed Housing Authority of New Orleans Board Chairman C. Donald Babers officially handed the housing agency over to Diane Johnson, a public housing and community development expert, to serve as the new HANO Chairperson. Johnson, a career HUD employee, began her official duties today.
"I will never forget the incredibly strong families I've met on this journey. The people who, with God's grace, endured Hurricane Katrina's wrath and survived," said Babers, as he led his final board meeting today. "It was my desire to make a positive difference and I hope those families will continue to believe that a new, better day is coming for them and future generations in this great city."
Johnson, a 30-year HUD veteran, was introduced at today's meeting. Babers, who was appointed to the position in April 2006, will return fulltime to his responsibilities as the Deputy Regional Director of HUD's Regional Office in Fort Worth, Texas.
"Don's leadership set HANO on a path that we believe will make New Orleans a model for mixed-income communities nationwide," said Paula Blunt, HUD General Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Public and Indian Housing. "We are confident that Diane will continue to lead the way to a better tomorrow for New Orleans' low-income families."
Johnson, the Director of HUD's Field Office in Newark, N.J. since 1993, will oversee practices and procedures of operations at HANO. Karen Cato-Turner, the HUD-appointed Executive Administrator, will continue managing day-to-day operations.
Johnson has held numerous leadership positions at HUD, including Regional Director of HUD's New York and New Jersey Field Offices and Acting Field Office Director for HUD's Detroit Field Office. During her HUD career, she has been instrumental in turning around troubled housing agencies, including in 1990 at the Passaic (N.J.) Housing Authority where she served as the Executive Receiver and as the HUD Oversight Administrator at the Newark Housing Authority in 2005 after HUD found serious failings at the agency.
Over the past two years, Babers led HANO's recovery through numerous obstacles that threatened to thwart HUD and HANO's efforts to bring better housing and safer neighborhoods to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina devastated much of the city's public housing stock.
Soon after Babers was appointed, he accelerated the return of public housing residents to the city. The HANO staff repaired units and currently there are nearly 2,000 families living in open public housing units, approximately 5,700 families living in New Orleans utilizing the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program, and 885 families remaining on HUD's Disaster Voucher Program.
Babers forged positive relationships with HANO resident leaders, local elected officials, the New Orleans City Council and private partners to gain support for HUD's plan to redevelop four of New Orleans' large public housing communities. Today, the demolition of three communities slated for redevelopment - C.J. Peete, St. Bernard, and B.W. Cooper - is near completion. HANO expects construction to begin late summer for these developments. The developers for Lafitte, expects to complete demolition late summer.
Babers has also overseen the restart of construction in the Upper Ninth Ward at Abundance Square, formerly Desire. In addition, he welcomed residents to new public housing that was opened at the Fischer and Guste Communities and he congratulated HANO families for becoming first-time homeowners using a HUD homeownership program.
I done been to Newark, done did that................... Written by
on 5/22/2008
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Tasha Solomon opened the grimy plastic blinds of her first floor-apartment in the Millard E. Terrell Homes, a housing project hard by the Passaic River.
She need not have bothered.
Although the river is only 100 yards from her apartment, Ms. Solomon, a 25-year-old mother of two, cannot see it from her window. Her view is a wall of rusty shipping containers that rises more than four stories, taller than any of the 12 buildings in the rundown housing complex.
“Is there a river over there?” she asked one recent afternoon.
Like drugs and gangs and poverty, the containers have simply become another unavoidable fact of life here, residents say.
For decades the project, operated by the Newark Housing Authority, has been flanked by storage depots where thousands of corrugated, trailer-size containers — a byproduct of the brisk commerce at the port in Newark and Elizabeth — sit stacked one atop the other in the barren cityscape.
There used to be some daylight.
An expanse of concrete between Ms. Solomon’s building and the murky river once served as the complex’s recreation area. Older residents recall mother-daughter kickball tournaments, dance contests, and summer evenings spent watching the lights from downtown shimmer in the distance.
“This is where we used to let it all hang out,” said Valerie Hall, who moved to the project in the mid-1960s and is one of the few who remember life before the containers. “When you’d look at those lights, it was like you could go downtown, and all you had to do was stand here.”
But about 15 years ago the housing authority, a troubled agency that barely avoided a takeover by the federal government in 2005, leased the gritty three-acre recreation area to a private container storage company. What once was a baseball field is now an expanse littered with shards of glass. And a patch of open space that allowed residents to look out on the river now provides a view of ripped and rusted cargo containers.
Keith Kinard was appointed executive director of the housing authority 16 months ago after a federal investigation called the agency “absolutely dysfunctional” for much of its 70-year history.
Initially, a spokesman for Mr. Kinard said there was no record of a lease or rent payments to allow containers to be stored on the premises, but two weeks later he said the agency had discovered an agreement in perpetuity in 1993 with the container storage company, Palmer Industries.
The agreement allowed Palmer, which had stored containers on each side of the housing project, to let them spill over onto the baseball field for $650 a month, linking its properties together with rows of containers. Now Mr. Kinard says he intends to have the containers removed, although other problems must be addressed first. “I want them off my property,” he insisted.
But residents are not ready to break out the barbecue grills just yet.
“The city won’t do anything about them,” said Claire Johnson, 80 years old, who said the containers had been there for as long as she could remember. “They don’t care. Besides, they get a lot of money to park them there.”
While the few dozen containers on agency property are only a tiny fraction of the more than 27,000 that tower over this hardscrabble section of Newark, they were enough to seal residents off from the river.
Today, waist-high weeds stab upward through the concrete, and the homeless who make this neighborhood their home string clotheslines between broken container doors.
One man, known by friends in the project as Florida, was found dead last month, the police said, locked inside a container in the depot alongside the homes. The death is still under investigation. High up in the stacks, a container overflowed with trash, evidence of someone’s precarious third-story dwelling.
Reaching the complex requires trekking through some of the most dense and polluted industrial corridors of urban America. Every several minutes, the roar of jets taking off from nearby Newark Liberty International Airport drowns out any hope of conversation. The rancid smell of garbage — perhaps from the Newark incinerator a mile away — permeates the air at the slightest gust of wind.
Just down the road is a dioxin-tainted Superfund site, where about a million gallons of Agent Orange was produced during the Vietnam War.
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