It took an entire UN committee months to reach a conclusion they could have come up with after a couple hours spent with a decent newspaper: blacks and poor people often get left behind by circuitous government bureaucracy in the United States.

A United Nations treaty committee ruled Friday that the United States' response to Hurricane Katrina has had a greater negative impact on displaced black residents and called on the federal government to do more to guarantee that they can return to affordable housing in their hometowns.

The U.N. committee also ruled Friday that the U.S. government must make sure displaced residents have a greater say in plans that affect their return.

New Orleans housing authorities are calling the ruling a victory over the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, which has for years now been attempting to move forward with a dandified plan to destroy four large projects and replace them with prettier, mixed-income buildings with less units. HUD reps argue that, by demolishing the public housing, they'll also be demolishing the "concentrated poverty" plaguing New Orleans. And they say offering less units than before isn't a problem, because surveys show that most displaced NOLA project residents don't want to return, leaving room for plenty of rich white people.

A report from John Fernandez, a professor of architecture from MIT, says leveling the projects would be an unwise decision, as they are "safer, stronger and cheaper to rehabilitate and bring up to code than building new stick-built units." Fernandez hasn't yet commented on the counterpoint, "But they're unsightly!"