HUD boss says New Orleans "not going to be as black"

WASHINGTON — President Bush's housing secretary has touched off a tempest by saying a revived New Orleans no longer may be a majority-black city and that some of the low-lying, predominantly black neighborhoods probably should not be rebuilt.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson said he expected New Orleans, a city of about 475,000 that was two-thirds black before Hurricane Katrina struck, to emerge only 35 to 40 percent black and with possibly 350,000 residents.

"Whether we like it or not, New Orleans is not going to be 500,000 people for a long time," Jackson told the Houston Chronicle, which published his comments Thursday. "New Orleans is not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again."

Jackson's remarks drew howls from some black leaders, who said Katrina's black victims would be alienated. Some housing experts said they reflected the absence of an administration policy to deal with providing affordable housing for tens of thousands of displaced families.

Jackson, who is black, in turn took the black activists to task. "I wish that the so-called black leadership would stop running around this country like Jesse and the rest of them making this a racial issue," he said, referring to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition.

Jesse Jackson, speaking from Detroit, where he was meeting with families that had lost their homes, said the housing secretary's comments would make evacuees feel they would receive a hostile reception when they returned to New Orleans, which they want to do.

"The displaced persons have a right to return home," Jackson said. He accused the housing secretary of promoting the gentrification of one of America's historic cities.

Jesse Jackson also found a political overtone to the housing secretary's prediction of a permanent decline in New Orleans' black community. Blacks have elected one of their own, Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., to Congress, and Jackson said black votes accounted for the margins of victory for Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu and Gov. Kathleen Blanco.

Alphonso Jackson said in his interview with the Chronicle that he told New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin that "I think it would be a mistake to rebuild the 9th Ward," the largely black area that lies mostly below sea level and was inundated after the storm. Any new buildings, the housing secretary said, should perhaps be on stilts, with parking places at ground level.

He conceded Nagin didn't respond warmly. "He wants to rebuild it like it was," Jackson said, "and I don't think I can give the president that kind of advice."

Bush has said that one way to bring low-income residents back to New Orleans is through "urban homesteading." Evacuees could receive federal land for free in return for a pledge to build homes on it.

Bruce Katz, a Brookings Institution housing expert who served as HUD chief of staff during the administration of President Clinton, said the federal government owned too few properties in New Orleans — perhaps 1,000 — to make much of a dent in the need.

At the same time, "the worst thing we can do is re-create New Orleans exactly as it was," he said. "It was a failure across the board" — particularly in its concentration of federally subsidized housing near downtown.

Katz's suggestion: The displaced should be involved in city planning and be guaranteed the right to return if they choose.

Michael Franc, vice president for government relations of the conservative Heritage Foundation, agreed with Katz on the need to avoid replicating the old New Orleans. But he called the administration's homesteading idea "an enormous step in the right direction."

He said it was wrong for Alphonso Jackson or anyone else to make the reconstruction of New Orleans a racial issue. "It ought to be about people, not race," he said.