According to the Gambit Weekly, the Housing Authority of New Orleans, or HANO, will not provide a time frame for residents of the housing developments to move back home. HANO has only completed fifty percent of the soil samples necessary to place temporary trailers in public housing developments. No other single force has so many lives on hold as HANO (except maybe FEMA, and the federal and local governments). People are waiting to come home and work, but have no place to live.

I speculate, and I’m not a genius, nor the only one to come to this conclusion, that the city has other plans for the buildings. Long before the storm, when the city got rid of Charity Hospital’s walk-in clinic two years ago, proposals to redevelop the Iberville Projects began to circulate. Many of the public-housing properties are located in parts of the city where the process of gentrification in moving fast. Iberville, bordering the lake side of the French Quarter, would be a convenient location for hotels or condominiums.

The St. Thomas development was demolished and rebuilt as the River Garden, a “mixed-income housing” unit. Fifteen hundred housing units of St. Thomas were replaced with more than 1,600 new apartments, but only 120 units were designated for public housing. The remainder were developed as market-rate apartments, which (according to my personal vocabulary and pocketbook) means beyond a middle-class income. Even now, several years after completion, only 40 former St. Thomas residents have moved into River Garden.

Adding insult to injury, alarm-systems have been installed in the vacant housing developments; HANO really could have been so thoughtful as to put the alarms on the buildings while people were living there. HANO is surrounding the buildings with chain-link fences topped by barbed wire placed around each one. It seems a little late to worry about looters.