Iberville

Where Storyville once stood

The 23-acre block between Basin Street, Canal Street, St. Louis Street, and North Claiborne Avenue carries a layered history of deliberate erasure. Before the Housing Authority of New Orleans broke ground on the Iberville Housing Development in 1941, the site held the remnants of Storyville, the legally segregated vice district the city had created in 1897 and that federal authorities had ordered shut down in 1917 when the Navy declared it a threat to the soldiers at nearby Camp Strachan.¹ By the time public housing rose on the land, two decades of abandonment and piecemeal demolition had already thinned the blocks. The federal Public Works Administration funded the construction under the Housing Act of 1937, and the project opened as a segregated white-only development in a city where housing discrimination was official policy.²

The racial geography of postwar New Orleans reversed that assignment within a generation. White families with access to FHA-backed mortgages left for the new subdivisions in Gentilly, Lakeview, and the West Bank. The city’s Black residents, systematically excluded from those same mortgage programs by FHA underwriting rules that redlined Black neighborhoods and refused loans for properties in or near those neighborhoods, had far fewer options.³ Iberville integrated formally following the pressure from civil rights litigation in the years after the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, and by the 1960s and 1970s the development had become a predominantly Black, low-income residential community.⁴ At its peak in the demolition era, Iberville held 858 units of low-rise housing. The families who lived there were not there by preference alone. They were there because the city’s housing market, shaped by decades of federal and local discrimination, left them nowhere else to go.

Image pendingAerial view of the Iberville Housing Development in New Orleans, showing the low-rise brick buildings between Basin Street and Canal Street north of the French Quarter.Sought from HANO / HUD, 1975

The Big Four before Katrina

Iberville was one piece of a public housing system that, at its mid-century peak, sheltered tens of thousands of the city’s Black residents in four large developments and a scattering of smaller ones. The B. W. Cooper development, known to residents as Calliope, rose in the Central City neighborhood. The C. J. Peete development, known as Magnolia, occupied the Uptown blocks around Harmony Street. The Lafitte development spread across Tremé, the oldest Black neighborhood in the country. St. Bernard covered the Seventh Ward. These four, collectively called the Big Four, together with Iberville represented the full architecture of the city’s commitment, however inadequate, to subsidized housing for its poorest Black residents.⁵

Life inside the Big Four was not simple. The Housing Authority of New Orleans had a long record of deferred maintenance, administrative dysfunction, and political neglect. Federal disinvestment from public housing accelerated through the 1980s, when the Reagan administration cut the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s budget by more than 75 percent over eight years.⁶ Residents in all four developments lived with deteriorating plumbing, failing roofs, and electrical systems the authority lacked funds to repair. The crime rates that public officials cited in arguments for demolition reflected, in significant part, the consequences of concentrated poverty, disinvestment, and the near-total absence of economic opportunity in the surrounding neighborhoods, conditions that the authority and the city had themselves created and perpetuated.

The residents who stayed built institutions regardless. Churches, mothers’ groups, tenants’ councils, and youth programs ran inside all four developments. At Iberville, the tenants’ council organized summer programs for children and advocated with the authority over maintenance failures. At Lafitte, residents had sustained a neighborhood fabric continuous with Tremé for decades, attending the same churches, patronizing the same barbershops, and participating in the same social aid and pleasure clubs as the wider neighborhood.⁷ The Big Four were not “the projects” of political caricature. They were communities with deep roots, organized social lives, and residents who had every reason to fight to stay.

Katrina, displacement, and the window HUD opened

The Federal Flood of 2005 changed the political calculus in ways federal officials and their developer allies moved quickly to exploit. Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005. The failure of the federal levee system, not the storm itself, flooded 80 percent of the city. The Big Four developments, built on slightly elevated ground, survived the flood with their structures largely intact. Engineering assessments conducted after the storm confirmed that Lafitte, C. J. Peete, B. W. Cooper, and St. Bernard were structurally sound. Iberville, on higher ground near the French Quarter, suffered no flood damage at all.⁸

The approximately 5,100 households who had lived in the Big Four before the storm were scattered across Houston, Baton Rouge, Atlanta, and dozens of other cities. They had no way to return. HANO had locked the developments. The authority told residents who had received vouchers or rental assistance in other cities that they could not use those vouchers in New Orleans because the city’s rental market was too tight and the voucher values were too low. Residents who wanted to come home had nowhere to go.⁹

HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson announced in December of 2006 that HUD would demolish all four Big Four developments. The announcement came before most of the displaced residents had been able to return, before the city had rebuilt its rental housing stock, and before any replacement housing had been financed, let alone built. Jackson’s stated justification was that the developments were “obsolete” and that mixed-income replacement would better serve their former residents. Critics, including the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, and a coalition of former residents, argued that the demolition decision served as a pretext for permanent displacement, an opportunity to remove poor Black residents from valuable urban land under cover of the disaster.¹⁰

New Orleans City Council member Cynthia Willard-Lewis, who represented the Seventh Ward neighborhood around St. Bernard, demanded that the council hold hearings before approving the demolitions. The council scheduled the vote for December 20, 2007.

Image pendingResidents and housing advocates outside New Orleans City Hall on December 20, 2007, the day the city council voted to approve demolition of the Big Four public housing developments.Sought from Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, 2007

December 20, 2007

The city council meeting on December 20, 2007 became the most visible confrontation between displaced residents and the demolition machinery. Hundreds of residents and supporters traveled to New Orleans, many of them from Houston and Baton Rouge, to testify against the demolitions. The council chamber filled. When the council voted to close the chamber doors on the crowd waiting outside, people who could not get in protested in the street. Police used pepper spray on the crowd. Officers arrested several people, including residents who had traveled specifically to speak at the public hearing. Inside the chamber, the council voted to approve the demolitions seven to zero.¹¹

C3/Hands Off Iberville, the direct-action organization that had formed specifically to fight the Iberville demolition, was among the groups that organized the December protest. The coalition included United Front for Affordable Housing, the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice, and residents organized through the Right to Return Campaign. Mayday New Orleans, a housing-rights collective, documented the arrests and filed complaints with the city’s Office of Inspector General.⁶

The Advancement Project, a national civil rights organization, and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund had filed a federal complaint with HUD in October of 2006 arguing that the demolition plan violated the Fair Housing Act and the Uniform Relocation Act by proceeding before displaced residents had received adequate notice or a meaningful opportunity to return.¹⁰ The complaint did not halt the demolitions. HUD’s own Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity reviewed the complaint and declined to find a violation, a decision that critics characterized as the department reviewing its own secretary’s decision.

The political weight behind the demolitions was substantial. The Louisiana Recovery Authority, the state agency charged with managing post-Katrina rebuilding, supported them. The Bring New Orleans Back Commission, convened by Mayor Ray Nagin, had recommended consolidating public housing into mixed-income developments in its January 2006 rebuilding plan. Developers with existing HOPE VI experience in other cities, including the McCormack Baron Salazar firm, had been in contact with HANO well before the storm.⁵ John Arena’s forensic account of those relationships, in Driven from New Orleans, showed that the organizational groundwork for privatizing the Big Four had begun years before Katrina created the political opportunity to proceed.

Demolition, displacement, and the arithmetic of replacement

Demolitions of the Big Four proceeded between 2007 and 2010. Lafitte came down in 2008. St. Bernard in 2008 and 2009. B. W. Cooper in 2009 and 2010. C. J. Peete in 2009. HUD and HANO announced the Iberville HOPE VI grant in 2010. Demolition of Iberville’s 858 units began in 2013 and continued in phases through the close of the Bienville Basin project in 2020.¹²

The replacement arithmetic is the essential fact. The Big Four held approximately 3,200 units of public housing before Katrina, the great majority of them deeply affordable, defined under HUD standards as housing affordable to families earning 30 percent or less of the area median income. The Bienville Basin replacement at Iberville produced, by HANO’s own 2013 projections, 304 units of deeply affordable housing on the original site, supplemented by scattered-site units the authority promised to finance in surrounding neighborhoods. The Big Four replacements combined, across all four sites, produced public housing units at far below the original counts.¹³

“Deeply affordable” in HUD vocabulary does not mean free. A family of four earning 30 percent of the New Orleans area median income in 2015 earned approximately $16,000 per year. Rent at 30 percent of that income runs to roughly $400 per month. The new mixed-income units at market rates rent for three to five times that amount. For the families who had lived in the Big Four before Katrina, the question was not whether the replacement housing was pleasant. The question was whether they could afford it at all. The answer, for the majority of pre-Katrina residents, was no.¹³

The Urban Institute’s Susan Popkin, who had tracked HOPE VI residents in Chicago and Atlanta before Katrina, found in follow-on work on New Orleans that former Big Four residents who received Housing Choice Vouchers after the demolitions faced a rental market in which voucher values were too low for the available rental stock, landlords frequently refused to accept vouchers, and the neighborhoods with affordable rentals tended to lack the services, transit, and schools that had made the original developments survivable as communities.¹³ The scattered-site model that HOPE VI proponents offered as a replacement for concentrated public housing produced, in practice, concentrated poverty in different neighborhoods rather than actual economic integration.

Image pendingDemolition of Iberville Housing Development buildings on the Basin Street side of the complex, with the French Quarter visible in the background.Sought from HANO / HUD, 2014

What the residents said, and what the record shows

The resident objections to the Iberville demolition were specific and documented. C3/Hands Off Iberville organized a series of hearings at the Iberville Community Center in 2008 and 2009 at which current and displaced residents gave testimony about the replacement promises HANO had made and the gap between those promises and what the authority was actually delivering. Residents pointed out that the scattered-site units were slower to materialize than HANO’s timeline projected, that the promised right-to-return guarantees contained occupancy requirements that many displaced families could not meet after years of displacement, and that the income thresholds for the new mixed-income units effectively excluded the lowest-income former residents.¹⁴

The Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, which tracked the post-Katrina rental market in detail, documented that the combination of Big Four demolitions and Katrina’s broader destruction of the rental stock produced a severe tightening of housing available to low-income renters across the metro area. Between 2004 and 2011, the number of rental units affordable to extremely low-income renters in New Orleans fell by more than 34 percent, while the number of extremely low-income renter households increased. The Fair Housing Center’s testing program documented ongoing racial discrimination in the rental market that further narrowed the effective housing options available to former public housing residents.¹⁵

Edward G. Goetz, in New Deal Ruins, conducted the most systematic comparative analysis of HOPE VI demolitions and replacements across the country. Goetz found that the program, measured against its own stated goals, consistently under-delivered on replacement housing counts, concentrated voucher holders in other high-poverty areas rather than producing genuine deconcentration, and relocated former residents to neighborhoods with higher poverty rates than the redeveloped sites rather than lower ones. The New Orleans case, Goetz argued, was HOPE VI in its most accelerated form, with the disaster providing the political opportunity to move faster and with less resident input than the program had managed elsewhere.⁵

The Advancement Project’s 2010 analysis, A Devastating Failure, documented that HUD had processed the demolition approvals with less procedural rigor than federal regulations required, that relocation plans filed with HUD were deficient in required elements, and that HUD had effectively waived, through administrative discretion, the one-for-one replacement guarantee that had nominally governed public housing demolitions since the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act of 1998.¹⁰

The resistance: C3, the United Front, and the Right to Return

The organizing that resisted the Iberville demolition drew on and helped sustain several interlocking institutions. C3/Hands Off Iberville was the most direct-action-focused of the groups. The organization formed in 2007 specifically to contest the Iberville demolition and drew membership from current and former Iberville residents alongside housing justice allies from across the city. C3 staged occupations of vacant Iberville units to demonstrate that the buildings were livable, organized bus caravans that brought displaced residents from Houston to New Orleans for city council hearings, and documented cases of residents whom HANO had denied right-to-return placement on technical grounds after they applied.⁶

The United Front for Affordable Housing, a broader coalition, had been working on New Orleans housing policy before Katrina and expanded its work in the post-storm period to include the Big Four campaigns. The Front connected the Big Four fight to the broader loss of affordable housing in the city, linking the demolitions to the expiration of the Soft Second Loan Program, the conversion of affordable rental stock to short-term tourist rentals, and the loss of other subsidized housing programs during the same period.¹⁶

The New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice brought day-labor organizing experience into the housing fight and made the connection between the displacement of Black residents and the simultaneous influx of predominantly Latino day laborers into the reconstruction economy, a workforce that was itself experiencing wage theft, housing instability, and contractor exploitation.¹⁷

The Right to Return Campaign, organized partly through churches in the Tremé and Seventh Ward neighborhoods, framed the demolitions in the language of civil rights and displacement that connected to the longer history of urban renewal in New Orleans, including the earlier demolition of Tremé homes for the construction of Armstrong Park and the I-10 highway.⁷ The campaign sustained the argument that the right to return to one’s home after a federally declared disaster was not merely a policy preference but a legal right under the Uniform Relocation Act and the Fair Housing Act.

None of these organizations stopped the demolitions. The combination of federal authority, state support, local council votes, and developer financing was too concentrated to dislodge through organizing alone. What the organizations accomplished was to build a documented record of what residents had asked for, what officials had promised, and where the gap between promise and delivery stood. That record survives in the archives of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, in the court filings of the Advancement Project and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, in John Arena’s documented account, and in the oral histories collected by the Amistad Research Center at Tulane.¹⁸

Image pendingC3/Hands Off Iberville members holding a banner outside the Housing Authority of New Orleans offices, protesting the demolition of the Iberville development.Sought from C3/Hands Off Iberville, 2008

Bienville Basin and the language of transformation

HANO and its development partners named the Iberville replacement the Bienville Basin, invoking Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, the French colonial governor who founded New Orleans in 1718. The name gestures toward the colonial-era basin that once ran along the site. The branding performs a kind of historical layering: the city erases a community, then names the replacement after the colonial geography that preceded the community, skipping over the century of Black residential life in between.

The Bienville Basin development, as built across the 2013 to 2020 demolition-and-construction cycle, contains mixed-income housing with units at market rates, tax credit rates, and a smaller number of deeply subsidized units. The design draws on the New Urbanist vocabulary of front stoops, street-facing facades, and varied rooflines, a deliberate departure from the visual uniformity of the original development. Housing researchers have noted that New Urbanist design on HOPE VI sites has consistently failed to produce the economic integration its proponents predicted, partly because design cannot substitute for the income mixing that requires subsidized units affordable to the lowest-income former residents.⁵

HANO’s accounting of how many former Iberville residents returned to Bienville Basin is not publicly available in a form that permits direct comparison with the pre-Katrina population. The agency has reported that it notified all former residents on its waiting list of available units, but independent researchers who tracked displaced residents in other HOPE VI cities found that the populations most in need, those with the lowest incomes, the worst credit histories from periods of housing instability, and the weakest connections to social services, were the populations least likely to navigate the reapplication process successfully.¹³ The families who returned to Bienville Basin were, by construction, the former residents whose circumstances had improved most since the demolition. Those whose circumstances had not improved had no place to which they could return.

What New Orleans’s rental market looks like now

The transformation that HUD marketed as a path out of concentrated poverty has produced a New Orleans in which low-income Black renters face a rental market tighter and more expensive than the one they faced before Katrina. The short-term rental explosion following Katrina, driven partly by the tourist economy and partly by the influx of new residents attracted to the rebuilt city, converted large numbers of long-term rental units into Airbnb properties. The loss of the Big Four public housing units, combined with that conversion, created a deficit of affordable rental units that the city’s housing agencies have not closed.¹⁹

The Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center’s most recent testing data documents that racial steering and discriminatory denial remain prevalent in the New Orleans rental market, that Black applicants with Section 8 vouchers face refusal rates substantially higher than white applicants with equivalent qualifications, and that the neighborhoods with the most affordable rentals are predominantly those with the fewest services, the worst schools, and the highest crime rates, exactly the conditions that HOPE VI claimed to correct by dispersing former public housing residents.¹⁹

The population of New Orleans itself has not recovered to its pre-Katrina level. The 2010 census recorded 343,829 residents, compared with 484,674 in 2000. The Black population fell from approximately 325,000 to approximately 220,000 between 2000 and 2010, a decline that researchers studying displacement, demolition, and the barriers to return have attributed in significant part to the policy decisions made in the period between 2005 and 2010, of which the Big Four demolitions were among the most consequential.²⁰

Transfer: what other cities face

The HOPE VI story at Iberville is not unique to New Orleans. The program ran from 1992 through 2010 and spent approximately $7 billion demolishing public housing across the country. Its successor, Choice Neighborhoods, launched in 2010 and continues under the same basic logic: demolish concentrated public housing, build mixed-income replacement on the same site, provide vouchers to displaced residents, and expect market forces to produce economic integration. The evidence base for that expectation is weak. Systematic reviews of HOPE VI outcomes by Goetz, by the Urban Institute, and by researchers at the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University find that replacement unit counts consistently fall short of demolition counts, that the lowest-income former residents are the least likely to return, and that voucher recipients face rental markets structurally hostile to their participation.⁵¹³

The Brownsville neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, the subject of another essay in this atlas, shares the HOPE VI geography. The Brownsville Houses and the Van Dyke Houses represent a parallel architecture of concentrated public housing, federal disinvestment, and proposals for mixed-income transformation. The organizing lessons from New Orleans travel directly: document the replacement arithmetic before the demolition begins, track the right-to-return guarantee with specific names and addresses rather than aggregate statistics, and maintain an independent audit of where former residents end up rather than accepting the authority’s own reporting.

Adolph Reed Jr. has argued that the HOPE VI and Choice Neighborhoods programs represent the application of neoliberal urban policy to public housing, a process in which the language of community transformation substitutes for the substance of economic redistribution.²¹ Reed’s critique is that the programs diagnose concentrated poverty as a spatial problem soluble by mixed-income design when the actual problem is income inequality soluble only by redistribution. Moving poor people from one neighborhood to another, or replacing subsidized units with market-rate units and a smaller number of deeply subsidized ones, does not change the income distribution. It changes the address of the poverty.

The New Orleans Iberville case is, in this framing, a laboratory for what the language of transformation can accomplish and what it cannot. It can produce better-designed buildings. It can disperse a population across the metropolitan area. It cannot, by itself, give a family earning $16,000 per year the housing security that a city’s labor market refuses to provide. The present-day affordable-housing fight in New Orleans, sustained by the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, the Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative, and the Low Income Housing Institute, proceeds from exactly that analysis. The organizations pushing for expanded rental assistance, anti-displacement ordinances, and the preservation of remaining subsidized units are the direct successors of the residents and advocates who testified outside city hall in December of 2007.

The record they built, like the record that the Terminal Islanders Club and CSU Dominguez Hills built at Terminal Island, is what makes accountability possible. The record documents the destruction. The record documents the organizing. The record documents the gap between what officials promised and what they delivered. The atlas holds all three.

Footnotes

1. Alecia P. Long, The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and Respectability in New Orleans, 1865--1920, Louisiana State University Press, 2004. ↩

2. Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America, MIT Press, 1983. ↩

3. Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Liveright, 2017. ↩

4. Housing Authority of New Orleans, Iberville HOPE VI Revitalization Plan, 2013. HANO public records. ↩

5. Edward G. Goetz, New Deal Ruins: Race, Economic Justice, and Public Housing Policy, Cornell University Press, 2013. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

6. John Arena, Driven from New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization, University of Minnesota Press, 2012. ↩ ↩² ↩³

7. Arnold R. Hirsch, “Creole New Orleans Before and After: Rebuilding Afrotopia,” in Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, Louisiana State University Press, 1992. ↩ ↩²

8. Amy Liu and Allison Plyer, A Review of Key Indicators of Recovery Two Years after Katrina, Brookings Institution, August 2007. ↩

9. Katy Reckdahl, “Public Housing Locked to Residents,” The Times-Picayune, September 30, 2006. ↩

10. Anita Sinha and William Quigley, A Devastating Failure: The Response of HUD and HANO to Hurricane Katrina, Advancement Project, 2010. ↩ ↩² ↩³

11. Katy Reckdahl, “Council Votes to Demolish Housing Projects,” The Times-Picayune, December 21, 2007. ↩

12. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, HOPE VI Program: Grant Awards 2010, HUD Office of Public and Indian Housing, 2010. ↩

13. Susan J. Popkin, Bruce Katz, Mary K. Cunningham, Karen D. Brown, Jeremy Gustafson, and Margery Austin Turner, A Decade of HOPE VI: Research Findings and Policy Challenges, Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, 2004. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

14. C3/Hands Off Iberville, Resident Testimony Submitted to the Housing Authority of New Orleans, compiled 2008--2009. On file with the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center. ↩

15. Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, A Formula for Failure: Patterns of Discrimination in Post-Katrina Housing, 2008. ↩

16. United Front for Affordable Housing, Displacement and Demolition: A Report on Post-Katrina Housing Policy in New Orleans, 2009. ↩

17. New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice, Construction Without a Permit: Reconstruction Labor in Post-Katrina New Orleans, 2007. ↩

18. Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, New Orleans Public Housing Oral History Collection, ongoing. https://www.amistadresearchcenter.org/ ↩

19. Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, Fair Housing in New Orleans: 2023 State of the City Report, 2023. https://gnofairhousing.org/ ↩ ↩²

20. Allison Plyer, Facts for Features: Hurricane Katrina Impact, Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, 2011. ↩

21. Adolph Reed Jr., “The Limits of Anti-Racism,” New Labor Forum, vol. 18, no. 1, Winter 2009. ↩