Driven from New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization

In the early 1980s the tenant leaders of the New Orleans St. Thomas public housing development and their activist allies were militant, uncompromising defenders of the city’s public housing communities. Yet ten years later these same leaders became actively involved in a planning effort to privatize and downsize their community—an effort that would drastically reduce the number of affordable apartments. What happened? John Arena—a longtime community and labor activist in New Orleans—explores this drastic change in Driven from New Orleans, exposing the social disaster visited on the city’s black urban poor long before the natural disaster of Katrina magnified their plight.Arena argues that the key to understanding New Orleans’s public housing transformation from public to private is the co-optation of grassroots activists into a government and foundation-funded nonprofit complex. He shows how the nonprofit model created new political allegiances and financial benefits for activists, moving them into a strategy of insider negotiations that put the profit-making agenda of real estate interests above the material needs of black public housing residents. In their turn, white developers and the city’s black political elite embraced this newfound political “realism” because it legitimized the regressive policies of removing poor people and massively downsizing public housing, all in the guise of creating a new racially integrated, “mixed-income” community.In tracing how this shift occurred, Driven from New Orleans reveals the true nature, and the true cost, of reforms promoted by an alliance of a neoliberal government, nonprofits, community activists, and powerful real estate interests.

History

Arena, John

Americas

Univ. of Minnesota Press

In the early 1980s the tenant leaders of the New Orleans St. Thomas public housing development and their activist allies were militant, uncompromising defenders of the city’s public housing communities. Yet ten years later these same leaders became actively involved in a planning effort to privatize and downsize their community—an effort that would drastically reduce the number of affordable apartments. What happened? John Arena—a longtime community and labor activist in New Orleans—explores this drastic change in Driven from New Orleans, exposing the social disaster visited on the city’s black urban poor long before the natural disaster of Katrina magnified their plight.
Arena argues that the key to understanding New Orleans’s public housing transformation from public to private is the co-optation of grassroots activists into a government and foundation-funded nonprofit complex. He shows how the nonprofit model created new political allegiances and financial benefits for activists, moving them into a strategy of insider negotiations that put the profit-making agenda of real estate interests above the material needs of black public housing residents. In their turn, white developers and the city’s black political elite embraced this newfound political “realism” because it legitimized the regressive policies of removing poor people and massively downsizing public housing, all in the guise of creating a new racially integrated, “mixed-income” community.
In tracing how this shift occurred, Driven from New Orleans reveals the true nature, and the true cost, of reforms promoted by an alliance of a neoliberal government, nonprofits, community activists, and powerful real estate interests.

Idioms Delight

Education & Teaching

Academic Therapy Pubns

Expelling Public Schools: How Antiracist Politics Enable School Privatization in Newark

Exploring the role of identitarian politics in the privatization of Newark's public school system &nbsp; In Expelling Public Schools, John Arena explores the more than two-decade struggle to privatize public schools in Newark, New Jersey--a conflict that is raging in cities across the country--from the vantage point of elites advancing the pro-privatization agenda and their grassroots challengers. Analyzing the unsuccessful effort of Cory Booker--Newark's leading pro-privatization activist and mayor--to generate popular support for the agenda, and Booker's rival and ultimate successor Ras Baraka's eventual galvanization of the charter movement, Arena argues that Baraka's black radical politics cloaked a revanchist agenda of privatization. Expelling Public Schools reveals the political rise of Booker and Baraka, their one-time rivalry and subsequent alliance, and what this particular case study illuminates about contemporary post-civil rights Black politics. Ultimately, Expelling Public Schools is a critique of Black urban regime politics and the way in which antiracist messaging obscures real class divisions, interests, and ideological diversity.

Politics & Social Sciences

Sociology

University of Minnesota Press

This useful and practical guide for teachers and parents contains the latest updates (through August 2006) to the 2004 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).Throughout the book is a focus on both the intent and spirit of the law. How to Write an I.E.P. takes into consideration the role of the family and clearly states the rights of the parents and child in the I.E.P. process. Also included are samples of the ways that goals and objectives can be written for use by special educators in all fields.

How to Write an I. E. P.

Schools & Teaching

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Books by Arena, John