New Orleans Panel Questions Law as Solution to Homeless Colony

by René | April 22, 2008 at 11:05 am

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Please keep in mind that many of these 'homeless' actually work, though at relatively low-paying, and sometimes sporadic, jobs. Many also make use of daytime facilities available that includes showers, laundry, meals, and phones. They are not 'filthy vagrants'.

A month after Mayor Ray Nagin said he would move the Claiborne-and-Canal homeless camp, it remains, much to the consternation of its neighbors. Chase Chamberlain and friend Debra Redd live in a tent under the I-10 overpass.

Councilwoman Shelley Midura on Monday summarized why Mayor Ray Nagin's administration wanted a new public habitation law to move vagrants to a bunkhouse at the New Orleans Mission.

"What you're saying is that we need a way to round them up and get them into the bunk beds. Is that a fair statement?" Midura asked Anthony Faciane, deputy director of neighborhood stabilization for the city's Office of Recovery Development and Administration.

That was fair, he told the council's Housing and Human Needs Committee.

But more than a month after city officials announced an initiative to enact a new law, which outlaws people living in public spaces and replaces one declared unconstitutional more than 20 years ago, the homeless compound under the elevated section of Interstate 10 remains entrenched.

"Is it legal? Has it worked?" Midura asked.

"Has the method worked anywhere?" Councilman James Carter asked.

When told by Faciane that the city couldn't yet afford to house and provide social services to Claiborne Avenue denizens, Carter responded, "So, the ordinance is premature?"