Only ‘best residents’ to be allowed back in St. Thomas complex

U.S. Housing Secretary Alphonso Jackson shed little light Monday on the future of public housing in hurricane-battered New Orleans, but said that “only the best residents” of the former St. Thomas housing complex should be allowed into the new mixed-income development that replaced it.
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“Some of the people shouldn’t return,” Jackson said. “The (public housing) developments were gang-ridden by some of the most notorious gangs in this country. People hid and took care of those persons because they took care of them. Only the best residents should return. Those who paid rent on time, those who held a job and those who worked.”

Sounds logical, right?

If certain people were never on time with their rent and/or refused to hold continuous employment, threatened their neighbors, sold drugs or otherwise made trouble for the neighborhood, why should they be let back into this public housing project at tax payer expense?

But this is more ‘anti-poor bias’ from the Bush Administration, according to SusanG, upper eschalon Klueless Kos Kid.

She seems to think that any and all who were in the system before should just be allowed to mosey right back on into these taxpayer funded individual shelters. She says that the gangs on the housing projects are a “law enforcement matter, not one for public housing“.

Maybe she should tell that to the good, hard working people who lived in the St. Thomas complex and were afraid to go out after dark or who had their vehicles broken into or their TV stolen. I think she may have forgotten how corrupt the law enforcers in NOLA we’re before, during and after Katrina, which is probably how the gangs thrived in the project in the first place.

But what can I say, she’s a ‘progressive’. I guess keeping the gangs out of the projects would be putting them out of ‘employment’ and keep them from earning their ‘regular income’.