 |
|
Brod Bagert Jr. (right) meets the press at a recent rally against the proposed St. Thomas / Hope VI development plan.
|
Photo by Tracie Morris/Donn Young Studio
|
At noon on a balmy November day, the atmosphere
across from City Hall is that of street party-meets-corporate-convention. Men
in suits and women clutching Chanel portfolios stand next to people sporting neon
hair and tie-dyes. Bands play as people wave signs that proclaim slogans like
"Wal-Mart Will Eat Your Children."
The rally -- a day before the Nov. 22 City Council vote that
ultimately approved financing the proposed St. Thomas/HOPE VI redevelopment
plan with its Wal-Mart Supercenter -- has drawn about 200. Barbara Jackson,
president of the St. Thomas Resident Council, tells the crowd to pipe down.
"I want Brod to come up here and explain this." She hands the microphone to
26-year-old Brod Bagert Jr.
Loud applause greets him. Most people here have heard of Bagert,
whose master's thesis in economics focused on the St. Thomas project. His study
proclaimed what everyone here believes -- that the original proposal for the
St. Thomas housing plan should be followed, and the retooled plan by developer
Historic Restoration Inc. (HRI) would do more to enrich HRI than it would to
benefit the poor people for whom HOPE VI grants are intended.
"This project was created to start mixed-income
communities, to create healthy, vibrant communities," Bagert tells the audience.
"What's happened at St. Thomas since then has been one of the biggest tragedies
in public housing that I have seen and studied!"
The crowd, galvanized, punctuates Bagert's
speech with cheers and claps or boos and hisses. Bagert continues: "It's a scam!
It's deceit!" Wild applause, and a woman in the crowd yells, "Bagert for mayor!"
It's a significant reception for a guy who
wasn't even on the radar until a few weeks before the pivotal Council vote on
St. Thomas. While New Orleanians raged and debated on HRI's proposal -- which
would use tax revenue from the planned Wal-Mart to help finance the development
on the former public-housing complex -- Bagert was in England studying comparative
literature at Oxford University and, later, social policy at the London School
of Economics.
He began his master's thesis last fall, saying
he wanted to study the federal HOPE VI program, which aims to find better alternatives
for public housing than the traditional concentrated housing project. He figured
the HOPE VI project happening in his hometown would be a good subject. Bagert
spent a year researching his report, "HOPE VI and St. Thomas: Smoke, Mirrors
and Urban Mercantilism," which he released to the public in September.
The report targets HRI as a developer out
to make a lot of money off public funds, and the federal Department of Housing
and Urban Development (HUD), the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO), the
City Council, and the state as public entities letting it happen. He earned
a "Distinction" on it, the highest grade the London School of Economics bestows.
"My focus was not HRI," Bagert says. "HRI
is a private developer. If we relied on the goodwill of developers to develop
public housing in this country, we wouldn't have any public housing. With a
valuable, prime piece of land like St. Thomas, everyone who looked at this should
have seen that the first thing that developers were going to try to do, without
appropriate regulation, is make a lot of money off of it. So the failure is
of the public agencies that have supported this project."
Bagert and HRI president Pres Kabacoff don't
disagree on everything. Both, for instance, say the other's numbers for the
St. Thomas plan simply don't add up. Both also say they believe fervently in
seeing the best solution for New Orleans, and its poorest residents, established
on the former site of the lower Garden District housing development.
Bagert is "a pain in the ass," Kabacoff says.
"I'm taking on the difficulties of public housing ... and it's a tough thing
to take on. It really wasn't that tough until Bagert threw his missile in here.
And what he's promising, he can't deliver."
One of the main points dividing Bagert and
Kabacoff is the hundreds of high-end condos, apartments and upscale seniors'
housing that HRI envisions for the St. Thomas site. "These are clearly people
who are at the top end of the luxury market," Bagert says. "The problem is that
those kind of units are planned at all for the site. To have those kind of luxury
units for a HOPE VI is crazy ... the mixed-income communities that actually
work are working-class and moderate-income people, with public-housing residents."
HRI, says Bagert, plans to waste lavish amounts
of money on building costs, because subsidized homes will have to be on the
same scale as the planned upscale units. "The materials used are the highest-end
materials involved, so the overall development costs are high," he says. "The
reason they are so high is the other phases of the development include real
luxury units. These units can't be next to housing that's anything but upscale."
If HRI pared down or eliminated upscale housing
and subsequently spent less on each unit, Bagert maintains, it could build about
350 less-expensive public-housing units at St. Thomas. That's the figure named
in the original 1996 HOPE VI grant, which also called for about 200 median-income
homes and about 200 upscale, or market rate, developments.
Kabacoff agrees wholeheartedly that he is
spending more than the average at St. Thomas. He says it's warranted, since
New Orleans needs to attract wealthy people to the city.
"Bagert thinks what the cities ought to be
doing is putting all their money into affordable housing. I think he's wrong,"
Kabacoff says. "I'm suggesting that if this city doesn't get some market rate
back in here, it's not going to have any money to take care of the poor. ...
"I think that there's a national concern of
gentrification," he says. "In New Orleans, we've got 25,000 vacant, abandoned
sites. We could use a little gentrification. We could use a return of income
to our city. That's what we desperately need. Bagert is skewing reality by arguing
that rich people are going to live there. And you know that pisses off poor
people. But that's what we need. You see what he's doing? 'It's the fat cats,
it's Kabacoff trying to get his snoot in the public trough and trying to steal
from the public,' and it's all kinds of hyperbole."
Kabacoff also refutes Bagert's claim that
a mere fraction of the people who want to move back to St. Thomas will be able
to do so: only about 200 former residents have expressed interest in returning,
says Kabacoff, who insists there's enough housing on and off the St. Thomas
site to accommodate them. Where he and Bagert differ is the notion that the
off-site housing will accomplish HOPE VI's goals of diluting the concentration
of poverty. Bagert believes the practice merely shuffles the poor back into
impoverished areas.
Kabacoff maintains the original HOPE VI proposal
has been altered for good reason. "The original grant called for 563 affordable
units and 200 market rate. You could not do it, and I would not do it," he says.
"Mr. Bagert says $142,000 per house is the standard for Hope VI housing. I would
do nicer houses that would attract market-rate people, but let's say you spend
(only) that much. If you multiply 563 by 142,000, that's about $80 million.
We got a HOPE VI grant of $25 million ... I knew damn well it couldn't work.
So I do what I do, which is find sources of money to make it work."
Making it work meant retooling the residential
income ratio to attract more market-rate residents and adding the Wal-Mart Supercenter,
says Kabacoff. "I have to create a project that puts off taxes, right? Extraordinary
sales. What produces extraordinary sales? Wal-Mart."
Bagert couldn't disagree more. "Very frequently
the interests of businesses are not in line with the interests of citizens,"
he argues. "The effect of a retailer is totally different from the effect of
an export industry; an export industry has multiplier effects ... but the sort
of monolithic logic that has been governing New Orleans politics since as long
as I can remember puts [an export] industry in the same category as a gambling
casino and a Wal-Mart Supercenter. The wages paid by Wal-Mart are the lowest,
zero percent of Wal-Mart's workforce is unionized, and the profits go elsewhere."
The day after the rally, dozens of opponents
have packed the City Council chambers and are filing one by one up to the podium
to ask council members to reject the plan to use funding from Wal-Mart to help
finance the St. Thomas redevelopment. One of the speakers who commands the most
time, attention and support is Bagert.
He has brought some notes to the podium, but
doesn't seem to need them as he stands under the banks of bright lights, pleading
with the council to listen. "What this vote today is about is whether the city
of New Orleans is going to take a stand for the rational and sound use of funding
for which it was intended."
In the middle of Bagert's fervent presentation,
his voice trails off. "Take your time, Brod," supporters call out. "Break it
down, son." His face drains of color, and he falters. His sister, photographer
Jenny Bagert, puts her video camera down and rushes to him. "Do you want to
take a break?" Council President Eddie Sapir asks Bagert, who sinks into his
front-row chair and drains two bottles of water as supporters fan him with placards.
Much of the crowd gives him a long, loud standing ovation.
Ten minutes later, after Audubon Institute
CEO Ron Forman has addressed the council in support of HRI, Bagert returns to
the podium. "I'm sorry about the disturbance," he tells the council. "A lot
of us have been working extremely hard on this project, working day and night."
He finishes with a veiled threat to councilmembers
that a vote for Wal-Mart could spell their political downfall. "Do you represent
our interests?" he asks them. "Do you represent the interests of our poorest
residents, for whom this project is intended?" He sits down again, staring at
the council as the crowd rises in a second ovation.
Kabacoff later remarks on Bagert's council
appearance: "He's either the greatest actor that ever happened, or he's terribly
impassioned about the problems of poverty. He isn't a bad guy. When I was younger
I was impassioned, too ... but you've got to earn your stripes. You've got to
have a little bit of a track record to be taken as gospel."
Bagert says he never intended to get as deeply
involved in the St. Thomas opposition as he found himself in late November.
"After I started seeing what the development was actually about, it really took
me by surprise," he recalls. "As I started really to understand how egregious
a use of public funds it was, I started being concerned that maybe there was
a chance to do something about it."
Before the council meeting, Bagert had worked
for hours, "stapling up posters until the wee hours of the morning," he says.
"We worked really hard to try to organize for the rally and for this meeting,
and this is a difficult community to organize because it's so scattered around
the city."
The experience left him with a sense of purpose.
"We didn't win," Bagert says, "but if we want to win in the future, we've got
to get people together who are going to be real organized and real disciplined
and make sure that any elected official knows that they have to do what's in
the interests of the residents they represent. If they don't, they'll cease
to be elected officials."
 |
|
'He isn't a bad guy,' Kabacoff (pictured) says of Bagert. 'When I was younger I was impassioned, too ... but you've got to earn your stripes.'
|
Photo by Donn Young Studio
|
In recent weeks, Bagert has received job offers
from "every nonprofit in the city," he laughs -- and urging by community members
to run for office: "I can't think of a worse fate, and I question how much they
really like me when they tell me I should run!"
Instead, Bagert chose a path that, at least
temporarily, leads him out of New Orleans. He's accepted a job with the Industrial
Areas Foundation, a national nonprofit aimed at broad-based community organizing.
"The people who spoke (at the meeting) ... a number of them would be an excellent
leader and an excellent elected official," he says. "But what it's going to
take for those people to have a shot is a lot of very successful and dedicated
long-term organizers. So that's where I want to spend my time, and I don't see
myself running for elected office."
The IAF job is going to take him out of New
Orleans for about a year, Bagert says. The organization follows a philosophy
that new employees should start off in an environment where they must learn
how to make connections, instead of relying on existing contacts. The son of
former Councilmember-turned-children's book author Broderick Bagert Sr., nephew
of attorney and ex-state senator Ben Bagert, and grandson of the late Criminal
District Judge Bernard Bagert, the 26-year-old says that IAF "won't hire you
in your own hometown, especially when you've got a name like Bagert. But I do
plan to come back as soon as I can."
Until his job starts in January, Bagert plans
to help with a class-action suit on behalf of St. Thomas residents against agencies
involved in the redevelopment. "It's an extremely strong case," he says, "so
I'm going to stay involved at least in that regard for the next couple of months
or so."
It's this type of action, Kabacoff replies,
that will only mean potential delays for the St. Thomas redevelopment, and will
drive up its costs even more. "I've got a hard-working group against me. They
get up at 7 o'clock in the morning and work all day trying to figure out how
they can confuse this thing," Kabacoff says. "It's getting worse now; it's an
aggravated street fight because of this Bagert guy, but the Council understood
it, thank God. And I think anybody else who takes the time to analyze it will
understand that this is a benefit for the community."
Bagert definitely had an impact on the citizens,
Kabacoff says. "He whipped the poor -- who are getting more than they bargained
for -- into a frenzy, because they're so desperate. It's a terrible thing; it's
wrong and it's misleading and it's dangerous, actually. When I was in the City
Council meeting, somebody came up to me and said, 'If I had an incendiary device
I'd throw it on you.'"
One point that Bagert and Kabacoff do appear
to agree on is that low-income citizens don't have a very strong voice in New
Orleans. "The real power behind this was the anti-Wal-Mart crowd," Kabacoff
says. "Because the poor, at the end of the day, don't have the lobbying strength
to make a difference."
Says Bagert: "A lot of people became informed
and have taken a very strong position on this. And it didn't do a damn thing.
And I think the reason is there's not a strong enough tradition of powerful
community organizing in this city."
And of the St. Thomas plan itself, Kabacoff
makes a statement that could have come from either of the two men. "This is
the most important project we've ever done in the city of New Orleans," he says,
"and it will have a more dramatic impact than anything that we can conceive
of."
