“We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” –A Louisiana State legislator quoted in the Wall Street Journal in Hurricane Katrina’s immediate aftermath
“The buildings will be built around a court with play space for children and yard space for each living unit…. This arrangement not only provides light and ventilation but eliminates traffic hazards for children. The negro project will include a community building with provision for a nursery school where mothers may leave their small children while they are working, an assembly room and smaller meeting rooms, as well as the office of the administrator.” –Description of the planned St. Thomas and Magnolia Housing Project in a 1938 article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune
America’s experiment with public housing started here in 1937, when, with the country’s sails full of the optimism of the New Deal, President Roosevelt signed the loan to commence construction of the St. Thomas and Magnolia Housing Projects, the first authorized spending under Senator Robert Wagner’s Housing Act.
This was a time when more than half the city’s people were living in substandard homes due to a lack of affordable housing after the city’s population swelled with people from across the South drawn by the possibility for work and opportunity during the Great Depression. These apartments and boarding houses were saturated with “desolation, despair, squalor, poverty, and frustration–the whole sordid and dangerous group of sinister elements that form the components of the slum,” as the 1937 “Report of the New Orleans Housing Authority” described it. The people who ran the government here and in Washington, DC, thought that our citizens deserved better than these slums, and they were committed to changing the situation.
Now, seventy years later, after the largest natural disaster in our country’s history destroyed tens of thousands of homes and led to a massive internal displacement, the city again finds itself in a housing crisis, with the city’s poorest citizens again jammed into crumbling old shotgun houses with ever increasing rents, while the less lucky remain far from home, stuck in Houston, Atlanta, Jackson and elsewhere. But the St. Thomas is gone, victim of the wrecking ball by 2002. The Magnolia is mostly vacant and faces a similar fate as part of a new national experiment in public housing, one that seeks to raze housing projects across the country in favor of mixed-income housing for the supposed benefit of the poor.
On Tuesday, February 23, 1941, the Times-Picayune announced that the first family had moved into St. Thomas, the housing project reserved for needy whites (the Magnolia was constructed for black New Orleanians), with the headline “Housing Project Being Occupied by New Tenants” and this lead: “The St. Thomas Street low rent housing project was transformed into home, sweet home Monday as families began moving into the recently completed buildings.” In the pictures of the “first family” moving in to 707 St. Andrew Street, Mrs. Cecilia Booker and her children, John, Bettye, Sammy, Grace Lou, Henry and Cecilia Oisonach, move furniture into the brick apartment building, build a fire in the fireplace and examine the new “electric refrigerator” in the kitchen. In every picture, the whole family is grinning widely. Their evident satisfaction reflected the realities of the housing available on the private market, dilapidated old homes with no running water, no bathrooms excepting backyards and little light or ventilation in low-rent neighborhoods with nicknames like Bedbug Row, the Buzzards, the Yellow Dog, Red Devil and the Lizards.