The Gulf Coast struggles to find solid ground three years after Hurricane Katrina.
By Margot Carmichael Lester
Last month marked the three-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s catastrophic blow. Fortunately,
New Orleans’ population has slowly bounced back to 320,000 residents, about 72 percent of the pre-storm total. But more housing is still desperately needed. While residential projects championed by celebrities such as Brad Pitt keep the city in the national spotlight, the rush to rebuild has slowed in the past year. The number of blighted properties continues to grow, the inventory of workforce affordable housing remains low, and infrastructure and city services are stretched to the limit.
Yet response to the city’s rebuilding efforts is mixed. “Clearly there has been progress and some exceptional achievements,” says Robert Thompson, owner of the Fair Grinds coffeehouse near the large local landmark City Park, north of the central business district. “Yet the developers’ innovation and community concepts aren’t necessarily translating to the other rebuilding, which feels scattered and ineffective.”
The development community agrees. “Results have been a bit harder to achieve,” says Eddie Boettner, co-chairman of the board of local developer HRI Properties. “Only 50 percent of the projected multifamily projects awarded affordable tax credits have started construction. The remaining half is struggling with rising costs.”
Adding to the problem: The potential loss of the GO Zone federal tax incentives scheduled to end in December. Designed to encourage economic development, cleanup, and low-income housing development, these incentives provide the state with bond authority to finance private building. The Louisiana congressional delegation is lobbying for its colleagues to extend the incentives through 2010.
HRI, a 26-year old multi-state developer, is lucky to have the scale and resources to get its projects off the ground. Three are underway, including Nine27, a mixed-income apartment complex in the Warehouse district. The $25 million, 76-unit project will open in 2009 and helps meet the city’s continuing demand for affordable and workforce housing.
A number of programs are in place to help other developers get projects started. Project Home Again (PHA), launched in February, aims to rebuild homes in the Gentilly neighborhood, which was badly damaged by canal breeches. The program, the brainchild of Barnes and Noble chairman Leonard Riggio, will help construct single-family homes for residents who lived in the neighborhood at the time of the storm and lost their homes.
Participants in the program—funded by a $20 million grant from Riggio’s family foundation—swap their home or lot for a new house with a forgivable, five-year mortgage. PHA assembles the old lots for future phases. The 20-home phase one will be finished next summer.
Our intention is to help families who three years later find themselves unable to get money to rebuild their homes,” says Carey Shea, PHA’s project manager. The Greater New Orleans Data Center estimates that as many as 71,657 residences in New Orleans are currently vacant or blighted. “They own the houses outright and are stuck. This is designed to unstick them and remedy blight in neighborhoods.”
Projects such as these are intended to restore the Crescent City’s economic and cultural diversity. “New Orleans’ environment [was] … built with an eye for beauty—tree-lined avenues and beautiful civic structures,” Thompson says. “We should ask our planners, developers, and builders to design for our future to be a brighter one, sensitive to our uniqueness but also sustainable and humane.”
