The New York Times recently published an editorial about affordable housing in the gulf and the important Gulf Opportunity Zone tax credits, which Congress extended for one year in late December. Without another yearlong extension, many affordable housing development projects may not be completed. Below is a brief excerpt from the Times editorial:
The gulf states are still living with the destruction wrought by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which swept away more than 70,000 units of affordable rental housing.
Fewer than a third of those units, which are crucial to housing the poor, the elderly and the disabled, have been rebuilt. The 5,000 or so that are still on the drawing board might never be constructed unless Congress extends a program that encourages businesses to invest in housing by providing them offsets for tax liabilities.
With this urgency in mind, I invite you to join an upcoming interfaith call about Gulf Coast affordable housing issues that the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism is holding on February 23 at 3PM EST.
Joseph Gonzalez, an Isaiah Fund Board member and loan committee chair who is the Manager of Community Health and Investment Programs at CHRISTUS Health, will speak on the call, along with Fred Tombar, Senior Advisor to U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan; and Denise Graves, an organizer for the Micah Project, an affiliate of PICO National Network.
They will review the latest stories and statistics, and lead a conversation about what you can do to help. • Dial-in Number: 1-213-289-0500 • Participant Access Code: 820086
Our friends & partners at the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism are ramping up the advocacy alert on a number of critical votes in the lame duck session in Washington that are critical and timely (even urgent) for the Gulf Coast recovery after Katrina and the BP spill.
One of note that we've focused on here is the extension of the GO Zone tax credit, that must be renewed before January 1 or it will end. Other important votes, starting tomorrow (Wednesday) will also impact energy independence and clean up costs.
The GO Zone (Gulf Opportunity Zone) tax incentives are set to expire at the end of this year & their loss will be a setback to housing and business redevelopment in the post-Katrina era across the Gulf, including for many of our (and by extension the federation system's partners) who we've invested in through the Isaiah Funds. The Times-Picayune reports yesterday that:
Democrats are planning to bring up a package of "tax extenders," including the Gulf Opportunity Zone tax credits, during a lame-duck session of Congress that begins the week of Nov. 15. Previous efforts to pass the package were blocked by Republicans.
"It's one of Sen. Landrieu's top priorities," spokesman Aaron Saunders said Friday.
David Gilmore, administrator of the Housing Authority of New Orleans, said that if Congress fails to extend the Go Zone credits it will "make it much more difficult" for his agency to complete" plans for 678 more homes at and near the Lafitte public housing development.
We've been hearing about this issue for quite a while from our partners. The incentives, set up to expire in this 5th year, were created before the economic slowdown. The development climate over the past 2 years delayed housing starts in the region, so the opportunity presented by this program hasn't been full realized yet, thus the need for an extension.
Please, call your members of Congress and urge them to support Sen. Landrieu of this issue. After all that's been done for this region, and against them, they don't need this setback now.
Smart piece over at Bridge the Gulf by Chasidy Fisher Hobbs of Emerald Coastkeeper this week arguing that "a full recovery of the gulf coast must include an investment in a clean, renewable energy future" an analysis we agree with. She writes, in regard to the BP spill:
If anything good did come from this disaster, it is the increased awareness of just how much our economic health is dependent on our environmental health. Merely the perception of oil blanketed beaches was enough to cause economic destruction statewide, even though we were much luckier than our neighboring Gulf states.
Some folks have been preaching this very idea for years. Regrettably, the sermon typically fell on deaf ears, and we were considered "job hating environmental wackos" by those who have perpetuated a long, drawn out war of economic development versus environmental health.
The Obama administration announced yesterday that the 6-month moratorium on deep water drilling in the Gulf was over, starting yesterday. Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar’s announcement also noted that there were changes in the way Bureau Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (formerly the Minerals Management Service) work, in terms of oversight and inspection.
Is this good news? Bad news? On the one hand, this will bring back jobs to a region that needs them during a recession (or “jobless recovery”). On the other is reinforcing our dependence on oil and risking further degradation to the land. United Houma Nation, a Native American tribe living in Coastal Louisiana, faces the paradox of this situation. Their principal chief, Brenda Dardar-Robichaux, talks about the threat that coastal erosion from hurricanes and alterations that oil companies have made to the coastline have on their way of life but she also notes that many members of the Houma Nation work in the oil industry. You can read more of what she wrote here.
One thing is clear: we need oversight, regulations, and inspections from a government body with enough enforcement power to make sure that this kind of spill, the loss of human life, and the damage to economy and ecosystem never happens again.
The White House blocked efforts by federal scientists to tell the public just how bad the Gulf oil spill could have been, according to a panel appointed by President Barack Obama to investigate the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.
In documents released Wednesday, the national oil spill commission's staff reveals that in late April or early May the White House budget office denied a request from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to make public the worst-case discharge from the blown-out well. The Unified Command — the government team in charge of the spill response — also was discussing the possibility of making the numbers public, the report says, citing interviews with government officials.
The big "C word" (that would be censorship) is getting tossed around.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not naive. Administrations of both parties are bound to bend the story to their interests. And, when you get to the voting both you have to judge the performance of a politician in the totality, and in comparison to his opponent. But really now, really (as they are won't to say on SNL)! Does this square with the President's public message? Is this what one does when you want to keep the pressure on the company, to bring to bear public outrage?
And then folks wonder why liberals are less than energized about the coming elections. Unless of course this entire story is one big plot to repress the base vote, hmmmm....
As of this afternoon the WH hadn't commented on the story.
UPDATE: 6:38pm, NBC news is running with this story. Government was "overly casual" about the numbers & took BP's word on the estimates. WH says "worse case data" was "publicly available."
An oil rig surge has transpired at a platform within the Gulf of Mexico. Nobody died when one person was injured. There is no cause of blast yet. The blast happened in an oil platform on the shoreline of Louisiana close to Vermillion Bay. The rig is fairly far away from the Bp oil platform that exploded in April as it is owned by Mariner Energy. The Vermillion rig was luckily in really shallow water. This is much not the same as the Deepwater platform that erupted within the Gulf Coast. Post resource - Vermillion oil rig explosion hits Gulf of Mexico drilling site by Personal Money Store.
One hurt in oil rig explosion
Only a single person was reported to be hurt in the surge of the oil rig. First, the drilling platform exploded. As that was happening, 13 individuals went overboard. After 9 a.m., the brand new York Times reports the Coast Guard got reports. These reports indicated that a gas platform was on fire. Helicopters and Coast Guard vessels arrived about an hour later. All 13 workers that went into the water following the blast were rescued and accounted for. Since the Deepwater gas rig explosion killed 11, it is surprising that only a single person was injured.
Shallow waters
The Vermillion Oil Rig 380 was not drilling nearly as deep as the Deepwater Horizon oil rig was. The Vermillion oil rig sits atop only 340 feet of water, about 100 miles (80 nautical miles) off the Louisiana coast. 9.2 million cubic feet of natural gas and 1,400 barrels of oil were coming out of the rig, says CNN. The Coast Guard is trying first to get the fire out. As soon as individuals caught wind of the explosion, business shares went down. In fact, Mariner Energy dropped 5 percent.
Offshore drilling difficulties
Debate over offshore drilling has been hot for a when. It has been years. It looks really dangerous and has too numerous risks to the environment each and every time an oil rig explodes. Though British Petroleum has stepped up to the plate to take responsibility for the oil spill, resource extraction businesses rarely clean up their own messes, and working class often get stuck with another Superfund site.
Discover more information on this subject
CNN
edition.cnn.com/2010/US/09/02/louisiana.gas.rig.explosion/?hpt=T2#fbid=QdDzKvaTDgY and wom=false
NY Times
nytimes.com/2010/09/03/us/03rig.html?partner=rss and emc=rss
This morning, the Isaiah Fund, the interreligious, permanent disaster recovery loan fund that Jewish Funds for Justice hosts and manages, received a $100,000 Technical Assistance grant from the U.S. Department of Treasury's Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) Fund.
Jeffrey Dekro, President of the Isaiah Fund, received the award from CDFI Fund Director Donna Gambrel, Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, Congressman José Serrano, and U.S. Treasurer Rosie Rios (Dekro pictured below with Serrano, Velazquez, and Gambrel).
How long is five years? Not long enough for the Gulf Coast's full recovery from Hurricane Katrina. The five-year anniverary is just ten days away. In this moving article in Zeek, JFSJ's Jeremy Burton shares his reflections about the disaster's impact and some suggestions about what we can do -- as individuals and a community -- to help heal the Gulf Coast regioin in a post-BP world.
I met Robert Green, a resident of New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward, this June. He lives just blocks from a levee where, on August 29th, 2005, a barge flowed through the break and came to a halt just behind his home. His mother and his 5-year-old granddaughter died in that flood.
I sometimes lead groups of Jewish volunteers to perform community service in neighborhoods still recovering from Hurricane Katrina. That’s how I met Mr. Green. When my group was visiting his block, he came out to talk with us and noticed my kippah. He told us how pleased he was to see a Jewish group and about how a Solomon Schechter class from New Jersey had cleared out the debris on his property and prepared it to be rebuilt.
In front of his house, near where we were standing, was a memorial marker and flagpole honoring the women his family lost during Katrina. We had noticed stones at the base of the marker, just like you would see at a Jewish cemetery. He told us that the Schechter kids had explained the Jewish tradition of placing stones to honor the dead and asked if they might honor his family in this way. A new tradition was born in the community, and we too placed stones on Mr. Green’s memorial.
What Mr. Green really wanted to talk about, however, was his new house, built on his old property with help from the Make It Right Foundation. He brought us inside, to show us the ways in which his house was built for a sustainable future: elevated above the flood line, it features solar water heating, low-wattage lighting systems, and temperature-regulating windows.
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Mr. Green’s passionate interest in sustainability might at first seemed out of place in a neighborhood in which many homes remain unbuilt, and many families are still unhoused. As we listened to Robert Green talk about his community, however, his passion for sustainability brought home to us what many Americans recently learned as a result of the BP oil spill – the damage that 100 years of short-sighted business decisions have had on the Louisiana bayous.
The decisions made by our nation decades ago to foster oil and shipping industries are all too tragically coming back to haunt us and pull our economy down now. A country hungry for the fuel to drive our economic growth in the past century allowed drilling, first in the bayous – cutting through these wetlands to pipe oil out – and then off the coast on the deep horizon of the continental shelf. A nation eager to export the grains of the Great Plains sent the Army Corps of Engineers to dredge canals from New Orleans to the sea, most infamously the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet , to shorten the route to open water and cut hours off the journey to market.
Check out this video of Tracy Kuhns, a member of the Gulf Coast Fellowship's 1st cohort, and organizer/leader of Louisiana Bayoukeepers. Filmed this June, she talks of the struggles that shrimpers and other residents of Louisiana's coastal communities - out of work, losing their businesses, environmental and personal health impacts - are dealing with after the BP spill.
With props to the Gulf Coast Fund (our partners and collaborators in creating the Fellowship) who filmed this as part of the Bridge the Gulf Project a storytelling initiative promoting cultural survival, environmental justice, and sustainable development in Gulf Coast communities.
