Makes sense to me

Another tale of Katrina stupidity

New Orleans had 18,000 people in the waiting list for public housing before Katrina. The need now is even greater. But, HUD, in its wisdom, has decided to reduce the inventory of available housing.

They are doing so by demolishing 4534 apartments for low income residents and rebuilding far fewer in total and far, far fewer for low income residents. For example, in one project which had 1400 apartments for low income, there will only be 160 if HUD has its way. This rebuilding will cost a pretty penny, much more than repairing the existing apartments. At first, HUD said it would be cheaper to demolish and build new rather than repair. But their own data shows otherwise.

A sad part of the story for architecture buffs is that some of the projects to be torn down are not at all what you imagine the typical housing project to be. The buildings are not more than a few stories tall and contain at most eight apartments. In the words of an MIT architecture professor, new buildings would be of lower quality and have a shorter life than the existing buildings.

Maybe part of HUD's reasoning is that the new construction will be by private developers, who will split almost $100,000,000 in Community Development Block Grants and be eligible for $34,000,000 in tax credits.