A Bill Cosby moment in New Orleans, praise the Lord. Post-Katrina applicants for permanent public housing in New Orleans should be screened to determine their willingness and ability to be employed, says the New Orleans City Council President, two of his council colleagues, and a key federal overseer of the city's public housing stock. The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that Council President Oliver Thomas, an African-American, is speaking out about the need for higher expectations of public housing residents, as the city struggles to recover and repopulate after the floods and destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina last summer.

In surprisingly blunt language Monday, three New Orleans City Council members said displaced public housing residents who are unwilling to work are unwelcome to return. At a meeting of the council's Housing Committee, City Council President Oliver Thomas said that for too long government programs and agencies have "pampered" rather than improved lives. Consequently, former residents who don't want "to roll up their sleeves" are better off staying away, he said in remarks that generated murmured agreement from some members of the audience in the council chambers. "We don't need soap opera watchers right now," Thomas said. "We're going to target the people who are going to work. It's not that I'm fed up, but that at some point there has to be a whole new level of motivation, and people have got to stop blaming the government for something they ought to do." When he finished, Councilwomen Jacquelyn Brechtel Clarkson and Renee Gill Pratt said they backed Thomas' position....The remarks were confined to the availability of permanent public housing and had no bearing on the ongoing effort to get thousands of displaced residents into trailers scattered about the city, officials said.

Their comments came after federal housing officials explained new policies they said already are screening the people who would like to return to the city's traditional or redeveloped public housing complexes. Several public housing complexes took on deep water during Hurricane Katrina, and no decision has been made on whether all will reopen, but those that gradually are accepting residents again, such as the Iberville complex, are instituting a series of steps to regulate who can return, said Nadine Jarmon, the appointed chief of the Housing Authority of New Orleans.....In the Iberville complex, for instance, about 400 of the 800 families who lived there before the storm want to return, HANO officials said....

They dubbed the new wrinkles a "working preference" for future inhabitants. Basically, the questions center around pre-Katrina employment and post-Katrina employment plans. "Part of the overall process is asking about people's ability or willingness to work," Jarmon said. "If someone says, 'Well, my income qualifies me for public housing and I want to come home,' but they don't express a willingness to work, or they don't have a training background, or they weren't working before Katrina, then you're making a decision to pass over those people."

Officials and Katrina refugees in Houston, were unsettled by the politically incorrect sounds emanating from New Orleans. In response, they highlighted: Houston's (federally-subsidized) open arms policy of housing New orleans evacuees; and expectations of affordable housing in New Orleans.

But in a recovering New Orleans, expectations are rightly a two-way street. The lion's share of scarce public resources such as permanent public housing should indeed be granted first to those most willing and able to contribute to the region's economic recovery, by working.

Hat tip: Rosenblog reader Stephen Taylor, of Austin, Texas.

TECHNORATI TAGS: NEW ORLEANS, PUBLIC HOUSING, SCREENING, WILLING TO WORK, OLIVER THOMAS, NADINE JARMON, HOUSTON