Discussion about life in New Orleans before Katrina often reduces the city to its former public housing projects (with a sometimes-special-mention of the Lower 9th Ward), as if these were the only places black people dwelled. I’m not sure why this is exactly, but I think it may have to do with the way those projects were known as exceptionally prodigious compared to their counterparts in other cities.
New Orleans’ public housing game is well-documented, for better or worse, for a number of reasons. As the architect Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote in The New York Times in 2006, New Orleans’ public housing buildings “have little in common with the dehumanizing superblocks and grim plazas that have long been an emblem of urban poverty. Modestly scaled, they include some of the best public housing built in the United States.”
Depending on who you talk to, those architectural accolades have been widely circulated for one of two reasons: Either as a way of keeping low-wage, black people in certain areas, quarantined from New Orleans’ middle-class and gentry; or because the buildings truly have proven themselves solid examples of resilience—of community and against weather.
[For more of this story, written by Brentin Mock, go to http://www.citylab.com/housing...music-videos/402298/]
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