Soapboxing on YouTube

In response to a comment on one of my cemetery videos, my reply turned into a soap-boxing rant on gentrification. I still need it written down, but I'm sure my commenter doesn't want to hear my rant, when I'm only 8 years into my NOLA residency.

Thank you for commenting and visiting! I did not realize that was where the Magnolia Projects stood, I knew it was previously 'something' since all of the homes are newer, and I assumed it was likely many of the community housing blocks I remembered when I visited New Orleans in 2002. I recall a news report on some national nightly news that reported from Magnolia when it had been deemed "the murder capital of the country".  I agree, the neighborhood does seem healed in a way. I find a sad irony that most of the community housing buildings that were all over the city, were some of the only structures to survive Katrina, and the debate that ensued afterward about the direction the city should take in replacing those structures. It was easy with so many residents displaced to other cities and states to assume many would not return. While I think this area, and others have healed as you eloquently phrased it, after "40+ years of beatdown", I believe many families were no longer welcome because of the city's strict policy on who could live there. My understanding, and correct me if I am mistaken, is that a family had to decide to either kick out the troubled family member or the one with the record to live in these new communities, or they had to migrate like so many, out to The East to live together. I don't know what's right or wrong; a tormented community deserves to heal, it deserves to live in quality housing that makes one feel safe and proud - but I worry about the policy decisions in New Orleans that are gentrifying all of these historic and historically African-American neighborhoods and pricing them out (with property taxes alone) of homes and neighborhoods they have lived in for generations, forcing them further and further out of the city proper. I sort of want the "projects" buildings on Earhart to stand as a reminder, not for Katrina, but to tell the story of a New Orleans, a city that is predominantly African American, that despite a white-minority, took a "big city" approach of desegregating the population and giving people few options but to live in crime-infested, poorly-managed projects while paying starvation wages (still do). If you were lucky enough to own or rent a home, Katrina provided the corrupt power of New Orleans the moment to change the demographics of this city. When I film cemeteries like St. Joseph, I think about what that neighborhood might have felt like in 1900, and I wonder, were people feeling the weight of world in the same way as the people living there now. The tourists coming to New Orleans pay $30 to hear ghost stories, maybe tour a cemetery looking for a fright... when in truth, the scariest stories are on every block, every street, every home. I have never lived in a city that has so much pain... so much oppression; and I have never lived in a city with such beautiful and resilient people.