How Ozanam Inn's "free food," Soup Kitchen program harms its clients.

In the past, Biaggio DiGiovanni, the manager of OZ, explains that Ozanam Inn is in a perfect location. Located in the American Sector with the Contemporary Arts Center, the D- Day Museum, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the numerous art galleries and antique stores on Julia and Camp Streets, OZ gives these social deviates a place to hide out, use and deal drugs, panhandle citizens, threaten citizens, and try to rob and kill us.

Best of all, he explains that OZ is in the center of our new tourist destination, the American Sector, and between the Greyhound bus station, Riverwalk shopping center, Harrah's Cassino, the Convention Center, and the French Quarter. Biaggio DiGiovanni explains that his clients make their living off of panhandling tourists. Our analysis indicates that they sell drugs, prostituting themselves, rob, steal, panhandle, and verbally abuse our citizens, visitors and convention attendees, sometimes murdering them. Oz's Camp Street location allows these deviant clients to suck the blood from our new economic lifeline, conventions and tourism.

The significance of the Camp Street location can not be underestimated. These deviates, with the cooperation of OZ, make their living preying on our tourists. This parasitic relationship that OZ enables must be terminated immediately!

The reason that OZ first located at 843 Camp Street in 1955 was to help care for the skid row residents of the area. (See Monsignor Bezou, Pastor of Saint Patrick's Church in 1955). Now that those people are gone and the area is an upper-middle income neighborhood, OZ's location rational has changed dramatically.

The truth is as follows:

• The homeless go where services and food are available.

• The more food and shelter provided for the homeless in the CBD; the more homeless come to the CBD.

• Each year, the Ozanam Inn closes for almost a week at Mardi Gras time. When they are closed, the homeless are absent from the Camp and Julia Streets area.

• Why? The homeless have no reason to be in this neighborhood. They hang out where the free food, free shelter, and drugs are located.

• It's really simple: when OZ closes, they leave; when OZ opens, they return.

While the official story at Ozanam Inn is that they help the totally innocent poor, homeless, and helpless persons in our city, the truth is vastly different.
First, examine Ozanam Inn's advertisements on the internet. Observe whom they pretend to serve:

Now, look at pictures of their actual clientele below:

Note the absence of the truly homeless or the working poor. Where are the mothers and the hungry little children? Do these people look like they are not getting enough food to eat? No, many appear overweight; they don't look hungry.

In addition, our neighborhood at Camp and Julia Streets is no longer the skid row intersection of New Orleans. Skid Row is gone! Instead, apartment rents in this area begin at $1,200 to $1,500 per month, with condos beginning at $350,000 each.

Look at the buildings below:

The 750 deviates lured into this neighborhood each day by the "free food soup kitchen" program do not live in this neighborhood. Instead, they travel from all over the city to eat Ozanam Inn's free food. They come from miles around for free food, to buy and sell drugs, to hide out, to sit idly in the sun on the benches in Ozanam Inn's side yard, to panhandle citizens and visitors on our sidewalks, to threaten us, and to urinate and defecate on our porches, front steps, and sidewalks, and sometimes commit murder and rape.

The business owners and residents of this neighborhood are working to close the Ozanam Inn. Join us.