New Orleans after the Promises: Poverty, Citizenship, and the Search for the Great Society

9. Making a Model New Orleans [Contains Image Plates]

CHAPTER NINE Making a Model New Orleans We meet this morning with an opportunity . . . to take advantage of untold millions of dollars. —Mayor Victor Schiro to the City Council, September 1968 In 1965 and 1966, several black neighborhood leaders complained that their areas were ignored by a disinterested Mayor Victor Hugo Schiro. By mid-April 1968, however, target-area residents had forced City Hall to take notice. Victor Schiro finally targeted the “slums” as a serious problem . According to the mayor, target areas contained only 25 percent of the city’s homes and provided only 6 percent of its tax revenue, but they took up 45 percent of city services and accounted for 50 percent of all major crime, 50 percent of “all major diseases,” and 35 percent of the city’s fires.1 Schiro and his liberal successor Maurice E. “Moon” Landrieu took advantage of the federal public housing, Urban Renewal, and Model Cities programs, among others, to improve housing, infrastructure, and economic development. Initially targeting the Lower Ninth Ward, Central City, and Desire, the rehabilitation efforts established some of the most direct paths to power for local African Americans and white progressives . The blend of construction projects with antipoverty and civil rights initiatives appealed to a wide range of interests and solidified the role of quiet patronage in post-Jim Crow politics and race relations. In keeping with the broader therapeutic trends of the War on Poverty, many of the policies were designed to improve the city by improving the ghetto 180 dweller as well as the ghetto. One local television commentator reported that 89 percent of the people living in the city’s “slums” were black, and those “slums” bred “an atmosphere of hopelessness and despair.” Upgrading real estate there would mean “improving the quality of life for all citizens.”2 From 1968 to the mid-1970s, the rehabilitation process produced a wide variety of education, housing development, and community participation programs and yielded some much-needed facility improvements in a few target areas. Federal programs also were used to underwrite massive projects in the downtown area. In 1972 when the federal government temporarily suspended all federal funds until the city stopped dumping raw sewage into the Mississippi River, then-mayor Moon Landrieu explained , “when federal funds are cut off in this city, it is like having your arteries stopped up.”3 Federal funds sustained the growth of biracial liberalism. Combined with Total Community Action, which was largely led by African Americans after 1968, the institutions responsible for administering Urban Renewal and, especially, Model Cities were a formidable bureaucratic triumvirate. For example, in 1969 TCA controlled almost $10 million, employed well over 500 people, and funded a variety of neighborhood centers and influential programs.4 Model Cities and Urban Renewal considerably increased the number of public sector jobs and private sector contracts available to minorities, especially after April 1970 when a racially liberal mayor took office. From 1968 to 1975, the Model Cities program generated over $20 million in federal funds and employed professional and subprofessional staffs for approximately 50 programs that included daycare, healthcare, education, credit unions, housing development , and bonding and capital pooling for minority contractors. The chief administrative entity was the City Demonstration Agency (CDA), which lasted from late 1969 until 1975. The Nixon administration’s support of these programs wavered, and securing appropriations was an annual , dramatic congressional battle until 1974, when Gerald Ford signed the Housing and Community Development Act. This legislation effectively eliminated Model Cities and redefined Urban Renewal in favor of a block grant system.5 Making a Model New Orleans 181 Housing Before the federal Model Cities and Urban Renewal programs were established , local housing reformers had limited options. One place was City Hall. Partially to encourage landlords to take better care of their properties, the city council passed the Minimum Housing Ordinance in January 1967 that gave more authority to the Division of Housing Improvement . In November 1967, the council created the Citizen’s Advisory Committee on Community Improvement to assist in deciding housing issues.6 Much of the city government’s housing improvement efforts, however, focused on encouraging tenants and landlords to have pride, to get along, and to conduct “voluntary maintenance.” Housing inspectors tended to emphasize “tenant responsibility.”7 Another housing effort was the local Catholic archdiocese Christopher Homes project that provided homes to a few local citizens in need...