OntheWilderSide

Green Party Urges Support for New Orleans Families Threatened With Eviction

• Greens urge national support for 100 families threatened with eviction from New Orleans apartment complex. 

• Protection needed for low- and middle-income residents facing fast-track development and powerful real estate interests in post-Katrina city; Common Ground, assisting tenants, cited as leader for housing rights 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Green Party leaders urged national support for 100 families who face eviction from the Woodlands Apartment Complex in the Algiers area of New Orleans. 

“In New Orleans and other Gulf Coast areas, middle- and low-income working people have been forced out of their homes twice — first, because of Katrina, and then because of development plans designed to benefit wealthy real estate companies and landlords,” said Louisiana Green Party member Romi Elnagar. “The Green Party supports the Woodlands tenants and Common Ground, the New Orleans based non-profit that managed the property for the past five months.”  

Malik Rahim, who ran for New Orleans City Council in 2002 on the Green Party ticket, co-founded the Common Ground Collective <http://www.commongroundrelief.org> in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The collective distributed aid and established a community health clinic, drawing support from across the U.S.  Common Ground has worked to transform Algiers and other neighborhoods into a model for just and sustainable alternative communities, and had succeeded in holding the rents at Woodlands to pre-Katrina levels — the lowest in the city.  Common Ground rehabilitated 100 units at Woodland, helped establish a strong tenants’ union, and ran a workers’ cooperative with paid skills training. 

Rents in New Orleans are now double what they had been before the storm. Powerful developers and landlords are evicting members of the historically predominant African American population and other working and poor residents from their homes. 

Common Ground has called the landlord’s actions illegal, noting that the previous landlord, Anthony J. Reginelli, along with two local police officers, had seized information and files from the Woodlands management office without warrant and taped eviction notices to the doors of Woodlands residents informing them that the complex had been ‘transferred’ to a new owner, Johnson Properties Group, LLC, which seeks their eviction. 

The tenants, represented by lawyers from the New Orleans Legal Assistance Corporation (NOLAC) and supported by the Louisiana NAACP, are calling on Johnson Properties Group to share documentation of the improvements made in the last several months and to honor the tenants’ current leases.  But the new landlord has rebuffed attempts at communication. 

“We’ve witnessed similar schemes by developers with enormous clout in city halls throughout the U.S. But the evictions in New Orleans show a city placed on the fast track for displacement of current residents to turn one of America’s oldest cultural capitals into an enclave for tourists and the wealthy,” said Rebecca Rotzler, co-chair of the Green Party of the United States and Deputy Mayor of New Paltz, New York. “Green Party leaders, candidates, and officeholders have consistently supported the rights of working people — tenants and homeowners alike — to stability and security in their homes. Common Ground, responding to the post-Katrina emergency, has emerged as a leader and a national model in the movement for housing rights.” 

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