New Orleans City Council Gets A Clue, Resists Nagin’s Charm

New Orleans residents continue to fight for fair housing after natural disasters such as hurricane Katrina and the re-election of Mayor Ray Nagin.

Those of you who have followed our series on New Orleans City Council’s wildly misguided war on homelessness will not be shocked to learn that the city’s illustrious leaders are now considering a proposal which would literally criminalize homelessness. Under the proposed measure, members of the homeless population would have a choice: go to whichever shelter the police sends you to, or go to jail. The measure would make refusal to enter a shelter an arrestable offense, provided that the shelters had space, which they don’t, so it’s all a bit premature at any rate.

Fortunately, however, recent activism on behalf of homeless residents may have made a dent in the the otherwise thick political skulls currently running New Orleans. After allowing HUD to demolish most of the city’s subsidized low-rent housing (at a tax cost of over $700 million), the city saw a spike in homeless encampments in public parks. City Council passed an ordinance outlawing camping in public parks, and an encampment grew in the Claiborne Avenue freeway area. Council members seem to be slowly coming to the realization that the act of simply shuffling ordinances is having no real effect on the homelessness situation, which was already dire due to spiking rent prices after the destruction of so much housing during hurricane Katrina.

Councilmember Stacey Head, who previously brought us such hits as What do you mean they’re not all crazy? handed the questions over to Councilmember Shelly Midura during the recent council meeting, who asked remarkably sane questions including “Who is going to want to hire someone who has a record of being homeless?” in reference to the notion of criminalizing homelessness. The Council could do better, like acknowledging that some of these potentially hardened criminals are the same people who will not consent to live in FEMA trailers on the silly little technicality that they seem to be poisonous. But the recognition that criminalizing homelessness will not solve the basic problem of a lack of affordable housing is an improvement in the Council’s process, no matter how small.

Not surprisingly, the criminalization measure was proposed by none other than our illustrious Mayor Ray Nagin, incidentally recently voted “The Basement’s First Choice For Darwin Award Recipient.”* Nagin would clearly be happier to simply continue shuffling the homelessness problem (and responsibility) from pillar to post, but council members insisted that a task force scrap the proposed criminalization measure and begin anew. Whether their brief foray into rationality will continue remains to be seen; residents recall that the council recently had the opportunity to refuse HUD’s demolitions but instead allowed the destruction of the city’s low-rent housing complexes without second thought. Residents can only hope that the council members have begun to see the larger issue underlying the rise in homelessness, and can shape a more reasonable and/or helpful policy, despite Mayor Nagin’s personal, lifelong commitment to corruption and stupidity.

*See Lazlo’s Basement message board for vote details

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