The March to Fulfill the Dream traveled from the Highlander Center to Louisville to continue documenting the spread of poverty across the U.S. and amplify the voices of the poor. The housing crisis in Louisville mirrors the national problem highlighted by two growing trends: the demolition of public housing and the rise of foreclosures. We met with local PPEHRC campaign group, Women In Transition (WIT), to learn about the face of poverty in Louisville and to help them organize more poor folks to attend the USSF.

Over the last 10 years the city has demolished the largest public housing projects in Louisville and replaced them with more expensive residencies, gentrifying neighborhoods and breaking apart poor and low-income communities. The amount of affordable housing available to poor people has dropped significantly. Driving through West Louisville tall chain-linked fences now surround football-field sized empty lots where hundreds of families used to live before the projects were knocked down.

Hope VI is the massive program of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) that gives cities huge grants, sometimes up to $50,000,000, to partner with private companies to tear down public housing projects across the U.S. and replace them with mixed income units. The new units are constructed and managed by private development corporations that get lucrative contracts from the city and then have control over who can live there. The national average is that about 11% of original public housing residents move back into the new units. In Louisville, according to local research, it has only been about 3 – 6% of original residents who return, mostly because they can’t afford the higher costs or they don’t meet new eligibility criteria. The rest of the original residents are placed in scattered Section 8 (government subsidized) housing throughout the city. Deadlines, costs, and other eligibility requirements place the lives of poor families in the hands of the city and private developers and many end up homeless in the process.

For every 300 units of public housing torn down under Hope VI there are 100 new public housing units built, 100 mixed income units, and 100 scattered Section 8 housing units. That means a net loss of affordable housing for the poor. Every public housing project in the city is at risk of being destroyed.

“The government wants to get out of the business of housing people,” Khalilah Collins told us, director of WIT, a local PPEHRC campaign group committed to building the leadership of the poor to claim economic human rights. “Developers are getting rich from gentrifying neighborhoods and forcing poor folks to leave.”

This national trend reflects the larger pattern, which really exploded in the 80’s under Reagan, of taking services out of the public sector and putting them into private hands. The social safety net that so many workers and unemployed people fought for during the 20^th century is quickly being dismantled by corporate power. The idea that the government should provide for people in need of housing, health care, education, or other human rights is under fierce attack by the private sector which controls political decisions and seeks to profit from all basic services.

Khalilah explained to us that the destruction of public housing is also the destruction of poor communities and families that have sometimes lived together for generations. In some of the old projects people had over the years collectively organized childcare systems and emergency funds for those in need. After the projects were torn down everyone was given Section 8 vouchers and scattered throughout the city apart from each other. These kinds of divide and conquer tactics have long been used to keep poor people from organizing and keep the powerful prosperous.

The other piece of the housing crisis in Louisville is the unprecedented rate of foreclosures. According to Khalilah, “Independent research confirmed that 1,200 foreclosures were filed in a six month period by Bank of America, Chase, and Wells Fargo.”

PPEHRC and WIT teamed up with folks from the Kentucky Social Forum and Kentuckians for the Commonwealth to hold a demonstration in a public park downtown against the banks profiting most off foreclosures. The action was right next to a giant PNC Bank building. ABC News watched as the big banks were one by one auctioned off to the lowest bidder! We figured they already got enough of our money in bailouts and overdraft fees, so people bought them for a penny and nationalized them.

We canvassed poor neighborhoods, met with organizers and other locals, hosted an open mic event, and held an educational session about the impacts of globalization during our extended stay in Louisville. WIT has a couple vans of poor folks traveling to the USSF to join tens of thousands of others in building a movement to claim our economic human rights to housing, health care, jobs, and education. Other groups in the area have already committed to sending two additional buses to Detroit!

Labels: May 2010 Month of Action, USSF 2010

// posted by Jeff Rousset @ 1:37 PM