The latest segments from The Takeaway

The residents of Gordon Plaza – a subdivision in New Orleans’ Desire neighborhood – have been in a nearly three-decades-long fight with the City of New Orleans.In the late 1970s, the subdivision was built on top of an old landfill, and in 1994, the EPA designated the land a Superfund site. Since then, residents have asked the City to relocate them to safer homes, and the residents are finally seeing some results. 

We get updates from two residents, Jesse Perkins and Marilyn Amar, who currently live in Gordon Plaza. They bought their houses without knowing about the dangerous toxins they might be exposed to on their own properties, and they've been part of leading the fight to receive a fully-funded relocation from the City of New Orleans. You can learn more about residents' advocacy at GordonPlaza.com.

In June, the New Orleans City Council set aside $35 million dollars in bond proceeds to buy out the 67 properties from residents and help them move to new homes. 

The city eventually plans to demolish the homes and develop part of the area into a solar farm. But the residents are still a little ways from a complete resolution. The city has never done anything like this before, and since June, some members of the City Council have had nearly 2 dozen Gordon Plaza Task Force meetings to negotiate details of this process with residents. And because this is taxpayer money, there has been a lot of bureaucratic red tape that residents have had to patiently cut through.

In the fall, the City hired an appraiser to evaluate how much each property was worth. When residents found numerous issues with the first appraiser, they hired another one. Finally, in April, every resident received their appraisals and an offer letter, which means residents can start closing on their homes whenever they choose to. If the city were to buy all of these properties, it would cost about $21 million. 

So that leaves money left over in the Gordon Plaza fund, and residents are arguing that there are more costs involved with moving from one property and to buying another one. Residents have asked the city to provide an additional $25,000 per homeowner for relocation expenses, to help with the cost of moving and packing their belongings, cleaning or replacing potentially toxic furniture, and preparing their new homes for move-in. And while the City says they’ll pay for a moving company, city officials say there are legal barriers to providing up-front cash to residents. 

There are also ongoing negotiations for rental assistance for tenants who live in these homes, and the City is also still working out how to provide a down payment to residents, before they close on their homes, in order for them to buy new homes. Without some of this information, residents say it's hard to even start looking for new homes.

While some issues are still being ironed out, some residents are already starting to move quickly. Last week three Gordon Plaza properties began the closing process. One is a vacant lot, one is a vacant home, and one has a tenant. 

 Editor's Note: We reached out for comment for the City of New Orleans for comment:

The City of New Orleans has issued purchase offer letters to each of the property owners in the Gordon Plaza subdivision which sits atop the former Agriculture Street Landfill. Offer letters asked property owners to respond to the City within 45 days; however, the City is being as flexible as possible on these deadlines. Closing dates are negotiated with each property owner at their convenience.

A Request for Information for development of the solar farm is currently available on the City of New Orleans website. Interested developers should review the RFI at nola.gov/purchasing.

Check out our previous coverage of Gordon Plaza: 

April 2022: Gordon Plaza Residents Fight for Relocation from Toxic Land

July 2022: Gordon Plaza Residents' Fight for Relocation from Toxic Land Is One Step Closer

During the past month, the new Republican majority controlling North Carolina’s state Supreme Court issued reversals of previous rulings on voting rights and overturned a trial court decision.

These moves will have meaningful effects on the ability to cast a vote in the state and will have critical implications for local, state, and national election outcomes. 

We speak with Ari Berman, National Voting Rights Correspondent for Mother Jones. 

The new investigative podcast series “Head Down'' explores labor trafficking happening within the U.S. government sponsored H2A visa program. It is sold as a “mutually beneficial” immigration program that allows migrant workers to come to the U.S. as temporary agricultural workers, but a close look into the program reveals a great disparity between how the program is described and what actually happens. 

A recent investigation by Prism, LatinoUSA, and Futuro Investigates found that this program is rife with exploitation and abuse. The two part podcast follows the journey of Mexican farmworkers who soon after arriving in North Carolina with H-2A visas found themselves in a nightmare they were forced to escape.

We speak with one of the podcast cohosts, editor-at-large of Prism News, Tina Vasquez. And while we’re on the topic of North Carolina, we also speak with Tina about the state’s recent move to ban abortion after 12 weeks.

Listen to "Head Down":

Head Down: Part I; Head Down: Part II

Original Air Date: March 3, 2023

As Americans faced soaring food prices, a proposed $24.6 billion dollar megamerger between Kroger and Albertsons was announced on October 14, 2022.

These are two of the largest grocery chains in the country, accounting for more than 5,000 locations and employing over 700,000 people across its banner. 

The United Food and Commercial Workers and Rocky Mountain Farm Workers Union- two of the nation's largest and oldest unions- are opposed to the merger citing its potentially monopolizing effects on the grocery industry and America's food system. 

Back in 2015, Carol McMillian, a King Soopers groceryworker and a member of UFCW 7, remembers when Albertson’s acquisition of Safeway impacted her personally. Today, she joins us along with Dan Waldvogle, Director of Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, to talk about why they are a part of a broad coalition to ‘stop the merger.’

They spoke with The Takeaway about how this potential megamerger impacts some of America’s most vulnerable workers and consumers.

Editor's Note: We reached out to a Kroger's Spokesperson for comment. If interested, read below.

“Our proposed merger with Albertsons is about growing jobs and careers, and we expect the merger to create meaningful and measurable benefits for our associates. We will invest an additional $1 billion to increase wages and expand our industry-leading benefits starting on Day one following close, and we expect to provide new and exciting career growth opportunities for many associates. This commitment builds on our track record of supporting associates, including the incremental $1.9 billion we have invested in wages and comprehensive benefits since 2018. The Kroger Family of Companies is one of America’s largest unionized workforces and this merger also secures the long-term future of union jobs by establishing a more competitive alternative to large, non-union retailers. Kroger is a customer-focused organization, and our ability to deliver value to customers is rooted in providing lower prices and more choices. This is of critical importance to us, and we have a long track-record of investing in prices to lower costs, including investing more than $5 billion in lowering prices since 2003. As we have in past mergers, we will hold ourselves accountable to our customer commitments. This includes investing $500 million to lower prices starting on day one post close. With Albertsons, we will also offer customers a broader selection of fresh products and expand Our Brands portfolio to deliver more value without compromise.” 

Original Air Date: May 02, 2023

On Monday, another multi-billion dollar banking institution collapsed — First Republic Bank. Wealthy investors had been pulling out billions of dollars in deposits over the past few weeks, in a 21st-century digital run on the bank. Federal regulators seized its assets, covered $13 billion in losses, and sold it off to JPMorgan Chase. This is now the second-largest bank failure in American history, and the third significant bank failure of the past two months after Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.

We discuss how this happened and what it means for the U.S. economy with Aaron Klein, Miriam K. Carliner Chair and senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution.

Jim Kenney was elected to the Philadelphia City Council in 1992 at just 32 years old.  After decades of service, he was elected mayor in 2016 then reelected in 2020.  As a term limited city leader, Mayor Kenney is in his final months of leading Philadelphia.

We hear him reflect on his time as mayor, his efforts to address crime, and hear about some of the reasons why he is a proud Philadelphian.

A new study from the Brookings Institution reveals that Americans in four major cities — Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Seattle — believe that crime is out of control in downtowns. But the data shows that that’s not the whole story. While cities post-pandemic have seen an increase in particularly violent and property crimes, those increases haven’t happened in the downtowns, but in the areas that have been historically disadvantaged and disinvested in. So what accounts for this mismatch between what people are seeing downtown and what’s really happening?

We speak with Hanna Love, Senior Research Associate at the Brookings Institution, to find out. Love is co-author of the study, "The geography of crime in four U.S. cities: Perceptions and reality."

Original Air Date: July 25, 2022

The iconic actor, writer, and singer Billy Porter makes his directorial debut with the new film called, “Anything’s Possible.” The movie is a sweet, queer rom-com that Porter has described as being in the mold of a John Hughes classic, but with a much more representational cast.

We speak with Billy Porter about the film, his career, and living his truth after speaking publicly last year about being HIV positive.

Netflix’s dating reality show The Ultimatum returns on May 24. This time, the show is focusing on queer love. But the version of queer love depicted in the launch trailers appears limiting in its depiction of queerness and its understanding of what it means to be nonbinary even as it creates space for more queer stories to be told.

We speak with Tuck Woodstock, host of Gender Reveal and Co-founder Sylveon Consulting a “trans-led organization that provides trainings and consulting services with an emphasis on trans and queer equity” for media and entertainment companies about The Ultimatum and the place for queer love in reality dating t-v.

In March, the actions of a local church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina received national attention for all the right reasons. The congregation at Trinity Moravian Church partnered with an organization called R-I-P Medical Debt to cancel 3,000 local residents’ medical debt, to the tune of $3.3 million dollars. They bought that debt for just a little over $15,000 dollars. 

Rev. John Jackman, the pastor of Trinity Moravian Church held a symbolic “debt burning” ceremony to mark the occasion, with confetti and hymns. 

In 2016, John Oliver, a comedian and host of the HBO series Last Week Tonight, purchased $15 million dollars in medical debt from 9,000 people, that he bought for “less than half a cent on a dollar.”

And some state officials, like Governor Ned Lamont of Connecticut, are currently proposing using federal pandemic aid to cancel billions of dollars in medical debt.

Yes, these are happy stories of people working together to help their community members, neighbors, and even strangers. 

But this is also a crisis. Millions of Americans carry the burden of outstanding medical debt – An investigation in 2022 by Kaiser Health News and the Kaiser Family Foundation, found that 100 million people across the nation have some type of health care debt. Kaiser estimated that in 2019 –  the total medical debt in the country was around $195 BILLION dollars.

For more on this we spoke with Emily Stewart, Executive Director at Community Catalyst, a national nonprofit focused on health justice.