Public Housing - DISPLACING Blackness: Cartographies of Violence, Extraction, and Disposability

The Formation and Dismantling of Public Housing Through Displacement

In 1936, the Louisiana Housing Act formed the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO), allowing the City to participate in the federal low-rent housing program established by the Housing Act of 1937, also known the Wagner-Steagall Bill, which created the United States Housing Authority. These acts set the stage for the displacement of thousands of low-income Black residents as their neighborhoods were torn down.

In 1938, New Orleans became the first city in the country to receive federal funding under the Wagner-Steagall Bill. Within its first three years, HANO secured $30 million in federal loan contracts to construct public housing. By 1942, a year of the U.S. entered World War II, the city’s first six public housing developments were fully occupied—the Magnolia (1941), Lafitte (1941), Calliope (1942), and St. Bernard (1942) for Black families, and St. Thomas (1941) and Iberville (1941) housing projects for whites. By 1954, HANO’s public housing waiting list for ‘Negro housing’ stood at 30,000 families, frequently prioritized ‘families displaced by public agency actions.’

Locations chosen for public housing through slum clearance policy analyses and federal funding guidelines frequently displaced and confined Black people to racially and economically segregated neighborhoods that would not compete with the private real estate market—often re-housing residents in the very same public housing developments that initially displaced them. The City enacted urban renewal policies at the expense of Black residents, using various federal housing policies to systematically segregate Black families in public housing while providing homeownership opportunities for white families.