A History of New Orleans Public Housing, Through No Limit and Ca$h Money Music Videos

Discussion about life in New Orleans before Katrina often reduces the city to its former public housing projects (with a sometimes-special-mention of the Lower 9 Ward), as if these were the only places black people dwelled. I’m not sure why this is exactly, but I think it may have to do with the way those projects were known as exceptionally prodigious compared to their counterparts in other cities.

New Orleans’ public housing game is well-documented, for better or worse, for a number of reasons. As the architect Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote in The New York Times in 2006, New Orleans’ public housing buildings “have little in common with the dehumanizing superblocks and grim plazas that have long been an emblem of urban poverty. Modestly scaled, they include some of the best public housing built in the United States.”