Duncan Plaza Being Vacated

While agencies are moving the homeless out of Duncan Plaza, they are calling on landlords to make more housing available:

Agencies are counting on permanent case management services for those with physical and mental disabilities, which is part of a hurricane recovery permanent supportive housing plan under the Louisiana Recovery Authority. Nonprofits are counting on Congress to finance some 3,000 permanent supportive rental vouchers designated for low-income people with severe mental and physical disabilities.

UNITY and other agencies hope to get the homeless out of hotels and into apartments by January. The agencies can't continue to pay for low-cost hotel rooms for much longer and need landlords to work with them to lower rents. So far, 157 landlords are part of the effort.

Open leter to Barbie (Barb): Come on Barbie; lend a hand. Your hubby, The Pamp, stole enough from the City of New Orleans. Give back by renting to these people.

New Orleans City Council Unanimously Support Public Housing Demolition

Everyone has heard by now that the New Orleans city council has approved demolition of four public housing complexes in New Orleans. Sure, some protesters were physically beaten but they have vowed to keep on fighting.

Endesha Juakali, a protest leader arrested on a charge of disturbing the peace, said Thursday's confrontation with the council was not the last breath from protesters.

"For everything they do, we have to make them pay a political consequence," Juakali said. He vowed that when the bulldozers try to demolish the St. Bernard complex, "it's going to be an all out effort."

For weeks, protesters have been gearing up to battle with bulldozers and have discussed a variety of tactics, including lying in front of the machinery.

Let's see what the 'political consequence' will be. Do politicians, in New Orleans, ever have to face political consequences for their actions?

Penalties Increase for Disaster Related Fraud

The House on Wednesday unanimously passed legislation making it a crime punishable by up to 30 years in prison to fraudulently seek disaster assistance. The bill also increases fines to $1 million for mail and wire fraud when those methods are used to get bogus disaster aid, placing the offense on par with bank fraud.

The Senate passed the bill earlier this month, and President Bush is expected to sign it.

The Justice Department asked Congress to develop a new category of fraud after the number of cases following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. The Government Accountability Office has estimated that $1 out of every $6 FEMA initially paid out in the two storms was claimed improperly in a wave of fraud amounting to billions of dollars. |Read on|

Tulane University gets more

How nice for Tulane:

Tulane University has been given a 15-story building in downtown New Orleans. The Murphy Oil Corporation donated the structure, which includes a 204,500-square-foot building and adjoining parking garage.

A former chair of Tulane’s governing board, Cathy Pierson, helped secure the donation. Ms. Pierson is the sister of the chief executive of Murphy Oil. Tulane officials plan to use the building to continue the expansion of the university’s medical school.

Too bad SUNO never reaps any benefits.

New Orleans Should Wake Up

It will be interesting to see how the council will vote.

The New Orleans City Council is scheduled to vote on Thursday on whether to sign off on the demolitions of three projects. HUD already has its bulldozers in place, engines warm and ready to roll the next morning.

Arguing that the housing was barely livable before the flooding unleashed by Hurricane Katrina, federal officials have cast their decision as good social policy. They have sought to lump the projects together with the much-vilified inner-city projects of the 1960s.

But such thinking reflects a ruthless indifference to local realities. The projects in New Orleans have little to do with the sterile brick towers and alienating plazas that usually come to mind when we think of inner-city housing . Some rank among the best early examples of public housing built in the United States, both in design and in quality of construction.

On the contrary, it is the government’s tabula rasa approach that evokes the most brutal postwar urban-renewal strategies. Neighborhood history is deemed irrelevant; the vague notion of a “fresh start” is invoked to justify erasing entire communities.

We all know the notion of fresh start is not the real reason.

My Sentiments Exactly

I had to quote this article from jaunted.com because these are my same sentiments. People need to ask themselves why UNO is so critical of New Orleans and chooses to report erroneous information.

The latest University of New Orleans poll that shows more than half of respondents think the city is one of the nation's most dangerous. The same survey says a third of people think the French Quarter was one of the hardest hit areas during Katrina, and about one in four people think parts of the city are still underwater.

Wrong, wrong and wrong. The Quarter was largely spared major damage and flood waters are long gone. While New Orleans does have some crime, you probably won't get caught in it unless you go looking for trouble. (We suggest you don't.) But USA Today, which ran the AP story about the poll early this morning, isn't helping correct misconceptions with the headline "New Orleans crime may be keeping visitors away."

We beg to differ: 3.8 million folks stopped by in 2006, and New Orleans will host 6 million by the end of 2007. That's not bad, given the fact that airlines slashed service to Louis Armstrong International after the storm and entire tracts of the city remained evacuated for months.

We hate to sound boostery, but the last thing New Orleans needs after so much progress is more "scary" headlines.

UNO pollsters need to discuss the real reason why they are so mean spirited as if we do not already know why this institution is such a New Orleans' basher. We all know the motivation behind their tactics.

Is Crime Really Keeping Visitors Away?

According to a UNO poll, crime is keeping visitors away from New Orleans.

Just over half of respondents to a University of New Orleans poll released Dec. 10 rated the city a 1, 2 or 3 in crime on a scale of 10, with 1 being "the worst city in the U.S." The poll of 775 people was taken Nov. 29-Dec. 4 and gauged the impressions of Americans outside Louisiana. Its margin of error was plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.

Can we really trust anything UNO does? After all they have never had anything positive to say about New Orleans. Wonder why...as if we don't know.

Council Appoints Interim

Now you see it now you don't:

The New Orleans City Council appointed Carol Carter as the city's interim Recorder of Mortgages and set a special election for Oct. 4 to fill the post permanently. A runoff is scheduled for Nov. 4 if necessary.

Keep in mind the words permanently:

The election will precede by just three months the dissolution of the recorder's job, which along with the registrar of conveyances and the appointed job of custodian of notarial archives are scheduled to be folded into the operations of the Clerk of Civil Court starting in 2009.

To be dissolved:



"Even though this office is being merged and eventually will be dissolved, we still need to have an election called to fill the vacancy," Council President Arnie Fielkow said.

You gotta love it. This is their brain; this is their brain on #####.

Who Killed Two LSU Students?

Leads eluded a four-agency task force even as it stepped up its hunt for the killers of two Indian students at a US university with help from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

But the task force has not definitively determined a motive in the murder of two Ph.D. students, Chandrasekhar Reddy Komma, 31, of Hyderabad, and Kiran Kumar Allam, 33, of Kurnool, Kelly said. There was "not enough information available right now to rule anything in or out".

Authorities are in the process of inventorying the apartment - where they could not find any sign of forced entry - to see if anything was missing, Kelly said. Police have determined that there are some items in the apartment that could be unaccounted for, but he would not elaborate.

They are still looking for three men who were seen hurriedly leaving Allam's apartment on Thursday night and entering a car driven by another man, who drove into a nearby neighbourhood, Kelly said. Police planned to hand out fliers seeking information about the shootings and hoped to talk to people who live along the streets the car drove down.

Stepping up outside patrols and seeking evidence, task force officers knocked on all doors to interview residents at the Edward Gay Apartments where the two students were fatally shot in the head.