Despite protests that at times erupted in violence, the New Orleans City Council voted unanimously Thursday in favor of demolishing some 4,500 federal public housing units.

The vote to permit the federal government to tear down four public housing developments was a critical moment in a protracted fight between the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and residents, activists and preservationists.

Public housing residents wound up on both sides of the debate. Some repeated during the daylong debate that they welcome the plan to replace the decades-old structures with mixed-income housing. Others said they fear the plan will result in a loss of badly needed housing for the city's low-income black residents.

"It's about re-gentrification -- that's what this is all about," an angry Albert "Chui" Clark, a New Orleans activist who grew up in public housing, told council members early in the debate. He said the federal redevelopment plan to replace the four complexes with mixed-income housing was a blatant attempt by whites to displace blacks from their homes and neighborhoods.

Still, the vote crossed racial lines with the three black council members joining four whites. The council also promised to monitor the redevelopment and make sure the poor have places to come back to -- provisos apparently designed to appease critics.

But those assurances did little to assuage opponents.

"The vote was already a done deal," the Rev. Marshall Truehill said. "There were no concessions."

Truehill warned that the loss of public housing, coupled with efforts to move hurricane victims out of Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers, will lead to a dramatic rise in homelessness because of a housing shortage in New Orleans.

Nagin on Thursday brokered compromises with HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson on how the redevelopment plan will be carried out. But critics said the agreement amounted to minor changes unlikely to change the ultimate outcome of shrinking the city's stock of public housing.

Nagin said HUD's promise to allow more local oversight and to redevelop two of the complexes in phases would ensure "that our fundamental principle that every resident has the right to return to better housing will not be empty promises but words in action."

The council meeting was interrupted briefly in the morning when a fight broke out between protesters and police. But most of the trouble happened outside during a 30-minute period when police resorted to chemical spray and stun guns as dozens of protesters tried to push through an iron gate near the packed council chambers.

One woman was sprayed with chemicals and dragged away from the gates that separated the protesters, who were on City Hall grounds, from a breezeway leading into the council chamber. She was taken away on a stretcher by emergency officials. Before that, the woman was seen pouring water from a bottle into her eyes and weeping.

Another woman was stunned by officers, a Taser wire hanging from her shirt.

"I was just standing, trying to get into my City Council meeting," said the dazed woman, Kim Ellis, who was taken away in an ambulance.

"Is this what democracy looks like?" Bill Quigley, a Loyola University law professor who opposes demolition, said as he held a strand of Taser wire he said had been shot into another of the protesters.

Police said 15 people were arrested on charges ranging from battery to disorderly conduct. Police said four people were taken to hospitals, two of them women who has been stunned with Tasers, and five others were injured and treated on the scene. All four people in the hospital were in stable condition, police said.

Supporters of the HUD plan said they believe it will lead to better living conditions.

"It's about being able to walk into a house and say this is a house, not a project," said Donna Johnigan, a black public housing resident who supports redevelopment and who has clashed with residents from other housing complexes. "What we're going to demand is better housing, better schools."

But Walter Gallas, the director of the New Orleans Field Office of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, said the apartment buildings should be prized because they are sturdy and well-built. "I'd like to add a new term to the local dialogue in post-Katrina New Orleans: Planning by demolition," said Gallas, who is white.

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Associated Press writers John Moreno Gonzales and Mike Kunzelman contributed to this story.

(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)