By Sally Jane Black
There are 20,000 empty houses in New Orleans. These homes range from blighted buildings left after Hurricane Katrina to places intentionally kept empty by investors. This number does not include the number kept empty for most of the year for the purposes of short term rentals.
1,188 people sleep without shelter in Orleans and Jefferson Parish every night.
For many, this lack of shelter means sleeping under the Claiborne overpass, in tents and small encampments. For others, it means finding one of the empty buildings and using it for shelter.
Yet the city council, mayor’s office, and NOPD have not opened up any empty houses to those in need. They have not worked with shelters to find solutions to the over-crowding issues they have. They have instead brought garbage trucks under the overpass, treating the possessions of those in need as waste. They have targeted people in the Quarter to take away their dogs (which many people rely on for security when they have no walls to protect them).
City officials attempt to sweep the issue under the rug, hide it from tourists, and arrest people for the crime of being poor. At the same time, landlords are throwing people out at a rate higher than anywhere else in the country, targeting people of color and women especially. These same landlords have raised the rent astronomically since Hurricane Katrina, and in many cases, converted homes and apartments to short term rentals instead. And it’s the homeless that the city treats as criminals.
Meanwhile, the city took steps to cover up the horrifying rate of death among the homeless population. Instead of taking heed of an escalating issue, the city shut down efforts to track and respond to the situation. They actually obstructed the work of people who had been informally keeping track of homeless deaths. No one knows how many were lost for lack of shelter last year, but it was on pace to be one out of every 15 people living on the streets.
The city has the resources to provide shelter for every person in the city, but the landlords and capitalists in the city profit more when they can threaten poor residents with eviction and homelessness if they don’t agree to pay inflated rental prices. No wonder a third of the city hands over half their income every month for rent. With housing, healthcare, and education all designed to provide profits to the rich instead of serving the people, the working people of New Orleans have nowhere to turn to for the resources we need—unless we organize to fight back.
There is no reason except capitalist greed that the empty homes in New Orleans cannot be opened up to those who need them. No one should die of exposure while rich people leave homes to rot for tax write-offs.