I'm far from on top of the public housing debate...

Which is why I'm surprised nobody's really addressed or mentioned DeBerry's column in Da Paper on Friday:

A fight broke out in the New Orleans City Council chambers Thursday as people opposed to the demolition of some of the city's housing projects struggled to exert some kind of influence on that morning's meeting. But if we were to go back 15 years or so -- about the same time Chuck D was the frontman for Public Enemy -- one imagines that a similarly activist crowd would have been decrying what they saw as the government's grand scheme to ghettoize and pin down the poor.

He makes a valid point here. Prior to the storm, public/affordable housing advocates in the city didn't have a problem with tearing down the projects. The argument was always over how to provide for the people displaced once they were torn down. Now, activists are trying to preserve these buildings. Asking which is it to be is a fair question.

Then there's DeBerry's money shot:

Wednesday morning, I visited the home of a 71-year-old woman who can't understand why Road Home has suddenly declared her ineligible to receive money to repair her home. She told me of her personal struggle as a factory worker and domestic to get out of the Fischer projects and buy the home that now needs repair. She'd wept, she told me, when she saw footage of people trying to fight their way back into the kind of environment she'd worked so hard to escape.
When she was there, she thought the projects were a bad place to live. And all these years later, she still thinks the same thing.

I think about some of the families who were living in the projects so they could afford to send one kid in the family to Redeemer, in the hopes that at least one kid would "get out."