News Roundup › Housing

Density isn’t a magic elixir. Density simply facilitates interaction. Interactions translate into wealth when a population is educated and local institutions support private enterprise and entrepreneurship.

Source: The New York Times | Archived Copy

The planned district is described by Sandra Stokes, executive vice chair of the Foundation for Historical Louisiana in Baton Rouge, as “suburban sprawl in the most culturally significant urban environment in the US.”

Source: The Christian Science Monitor | Archived Copy

“The difference (on the VA side) is that the decision-makers over there are people who care about New Orleans,” Davis said. “On this side, it’s the state and (Louisiana State University) who have shown nothing but contempt for the quality of life in New Orleans.”

Source: The Times-Picayune | Archived Copy

Thurman’s home and those of his neighbors may be doomed if government officials carry out their plan, so Thurman decided to do his best to slow them down.

Source: The Times-Picayune | Archived Copy

Chalmette native Matt Faust’s heart-wrenching 6-minute short film has made it on to New Yew York Magazine’s list of Top 5 Favorite Short Films showing at Tribeca this year. Listen to Matt tell why he made the film when he presented it last October as part of the New Orleans Speaks Conference, co-sponsored by The Urban Conservancy.
— Editor

When he started it, Matt Faust envisioned his short film “Home” as little more than an exercise in self-prescribed, post-Katrina therapy.

With no formal background in filmmaking — and armed with just a collection of old photos, home videos and some computer expertise he picked up while earning degrees in Landscape Architecture at LSU — the Hannan High School graduate simply wanted to make a video that might help his family remember what was lost when their home on tiny Derbigny Street in Chalmette was destroyed by the storm.

“I felt like it was something I just had to do, for myself and my family, ” Faust said last week.

What he couldn’t have envisioned was that his wordless six-minute film would find its way to the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, one of the nation’s premiere film fests, where it will screen this week in competition in the documentary-short category. “Read more.”:

Source: The Times-Picayune | Archived Copy

“If you have great loyalty to a brand, you will put up with its little anomalies,” Ragas said. “For residents who have chosen to move back to New Orleans, it is important to their view of themselves.”

Source: The Times-Picayune | Archived Copy

Mike Rawlings, Dallas’ homeless czar, told the council that providing permanent homes to people on the streets not only helps them but is cheaper for taxpayers in the long run.

Source: The Dallas Morning News | Archived Copy

It was an odd juxtaposition: As volunteers and work crews renovated century-old homes ruined by Hurricane Katrina in the lower Mid-City neighborhood, another crew was walking the same streets alerting property owners that their time in the neighborhood is running out.

Source: The Times-Picayune | Archived Copy

The National Trust for Historic Preservation strongly urged the VA to work with the incoming Obama Administration to explore the alternative sites that would restore needed health care facilities faster and at less cost, while preserving much more of the historic Mid-City neighborhood. At the same time, the National Trust for Historic Preservation noted that the VA’s decision is based on the desire to co-locate with an LSU medical facility - whose projected $1.2 billion funding is far from assured.

Source: New Orleans City Business | Archived Copy

Preservation groups also have raised concerns that demolition could proceed before LSU pulls together funding for its new hospital, which is projected to cost $1.2 billion. The university is expected to make a down payment on the hospital with the money it collected from the federal government for the damage Katrina wreaked on Charity. LSU had banked on $500 million; FEMA has not budged above $23 million.

Source: The Times-Picayune | Archived Copy

Neighbors and preservationists invariably express support for improved health care. But they worry about adverse effects from what LSU calls ‘the largest post-storm urban renewal project in New Orleans.”

Source: Gambit Weekly | Archived Copy

Dr. Fred Cerise, LSU’s vice chancellor of health affairs and medical education, echoed Gray’s concerns that increased delays that call into question the state and city’s commitment to the LSU hospital will threaten the VA project as well.

Source: bnet | Archived Copy

Homeless-services agencies that work in New Orleans are rightly worried. In a city where rents have skyrocketed and housing is in short supply, they fear that developers who were required to set aside units for the most vulnerable citizens may shy away from tenants with histories of mental illness or homelessness.

Source: The New York Times | Archived Copy

“Ambitious projects will be put on hold, but I don’t think they’ll throw away the blueprints,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “A lot of inner cities are going through a bit of a renaissance for broader demographic reasons that will remain in place for a while. Aging baby boomers are becoming empty nesters and they’re thinking of moving back to the urban core.”

Source: Business Week | Archived Copy

Long before the recent spike in the price of energy, environmentalists decried suburban sprawl a waste of land, energy and tax dollars. Governments from Virginia to California have in recent decades lavished resources on building roads and schools for new subdivisions in the outer rings of development while skimping on maintaining facilities closer in. Many governments now focus on reviving their downtowns.

Source: The New York Times | Archived Copy

Devastated by the subprime mortgage crisis, hundreds of homes have been foreclosed and thousands of residents have been forced to move, leaving in their wake a not-so-pleasant path of empty houses, unkempt lawns, vacant strip malls, graffiti-sprayed desolate sidewalks and even increased crime.

Source: CNN | Archived Copy

So what are intelligent responses to our predicament? First, we’ll have to dramatically reorganize the everyday activities of American life. We’ll have to grow our food closer to home, in a manner that will require more human attention. In fact, agriculture needs to return to the center of economic life. We’ll have to restore local economic networks — the very networks that the big-box stores systematically destroyed — made of fine-grained layers of wholesalers, middlemen and retailers.

Source: Washington Post | Archived Copy

Construction will begin within 60 days on the live-and-work loft apartment development at 400 St. Joseph Street near Constance Street, said developer Jay Trevor of J& T Development, who is pairing with Idea Village on the project, the St. Joe Lofts.

Source: City Business | Archived Copy

After protesters clashed violently with the police inside and outside the New Orleans City Council chambers on Thursday, the Council voted unanimously to allow the federal government to demolish 4,500 apartments in the four biggest public housing projects here.

Source: New York Times | Archived Copy

The new construction is occurring largely in or near the city’s historic center, which suffered less extensive damage than eastern neighborhoods. And it is being heavily subsidized, mostly through federal low-income-housing tax credits and additional incentives. These complexes will have a mixture of low-income and market-rate tenants; such a mix of income levels is largely untested in this city.

Source: New York Times | Archived Copy

Source: Times-Picayune | Archived Copy

Source: City Business | Archived Copy

Mayor C. Ray Nagin and the city have given NORA another 1,500 to 1,800 properties, but NORA can’t do anything until titles are cleared on those sites, Couhig said.

Source: City Business | Archived Copy

On July 4, residents of the St. Bernard Public Housing Project planned to storm the barbed-wire fences and reoccupy their condemned homes. But the powers that be are finally willing to negotiate. Truthout correspondents Chris Hume and L. Wild Horse were at St. Bernard’s for the first Independence Day since Hurricane Katrina.

Source: truthout.org | Archived Copy

Due to damage to the existing housing inventory and the increase in demand for the remaining units, HUD increased the Fair Market Rents for the eight-parish New Orleans MSA by approximately 35% post-Katrina.

http://www.gnocdc.org/reports/fair_market_rents.html

Source: GNOCDC | Archived Copy

A team of developers has acquired land that was the subject of a bitter battle over a proposed Central City grocery and plans to build a condominium complex instead.

Source: Times-Picayune | Archived Copy

So, Barbara Bush was right after all when she said, “So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them.” And Rep. Richard Baker, a 10-term Republican from Baton Rouge, was right when he was overheard telling lobbyists: “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” The publication of both statements elicited public condemnation and was followed by a flurry of hairsplitting denials. But it is now clear that their only transgression was to say in unvarnished language what many pundits, politicians, and policy wonks were thinking.

Source: The Black Commentator | Archived Copy

What about public housing in New Orleans? Will the sprawling complexes ever reopen? And who gets to return? The questions are of acute concern to civic leaders trying to revive an economy dependent on low-wage workers at risk of being priced out of the private housing market. The questions also worry law enforcement personnel and others who saw the city’s public housing developments as breeding grounds for crime and social pathology.

Source: Times-Picayune | Archived Copy

On November 16, 2005, the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action
Center (GNOFHAC) filed a housing discrimination complaint against the Housing
Authority of New Orleans (HANO). The complaint, filed with the United States
Department of Housing and Urban Development, accuses HANO of violating a
2003 enforcement agreement entered into between former St. Thomas Housing
Development residents, the City of New Orleans, HANO, and the U.S. Department
of Housing and Urban Development during the HOPE VI redevelopment of St.
Thomas, now known as River Garden.

Source: Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center (GNOFHAC) | Archived Copy

“Welcome to the Third World!” More than one person said this to me when I moved to New Orleans in 2001. Living there, I learned to tell direction, not by north or south, but by upriver or downriver. I learned a new vocabulary of pirogues, po’ boys, second-lining and making groceries. I learned what Mardi Gras was really all about. And I learned something about what it meant to live in one of the poorest cities, in one of the poorest metropolitan areas, in one of the poorest regions of the country.

Source: National Housing Institute | Archived Copy

Officials and community advocates are quietly planting the seeds for an enterprising program that could give the government temporary control over thousands of privately owned homes decimated by Hurricane Katrina.

An increasing number of Louisiana housing authorities believe the proposal, which is based on an arcane legal concept called ”usufruct,” could be a key to determining whether New Orleans will once again be a seminal American city or will stagnate with a population, like it has now, equal to that of Duluth, Minn., and Fort Smith, Ark.

Source: Boston Globe | Archived Copy

“Shifting housing demographics are stoking interest around the USA in development near transit, according to a study for the Federal Transit Administration released last month. City living draws singles, aging baby boomers, minorities and young couples more than suburban families with kids. And those groups are growing faster than suburbanites.”

Source: USA Today | Archived Copy

“Approving what could be the most aggressive affordable-housing policy in the nation, the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors gave a major leg up to the county’s growing poor population Wednesday.”

“Developers will have to set aside 15 percent of all construction in unincorporated areas - tract homes in the suburbs and infill apartments alike - for low-income residents.”

Source: Sacramento Bee | Archived Copy

“In most metro areas, “people holding three of the important community infrastructure jobs — police officers, teachers, nurses — can afford homes in less than one-half the census tracts.”

“Retail clerks, whose pay is even lower, are priced out of 97 percent of the tracts.”

Source: Washington Post | Archived Copy

“Struggling cities have placed their urban renewal hopes in the hands of developers like Anderson, who in turn rely on governments to assemble the parcels for their projects.”

“According to the Institute for Justice (IJ), a public-interest law firm, this is a growing trend. The institute analyzed eminent domain cases between 1998 and 2002 and found more than 10,000 instances where local governments had attempted to use a power once reserved for indisputably public projects like highways and railroads to obtain properties for private development projects such as box stores and golf courses.”

(Thanks, Lisa)

Source: Mother Jones | Archived Copy

“In metro Atlanta…better schools, lower property taxes and less crime have long propelled suburban growth. And lately most affordable homes are in faraway suburbs. As housing prices intown continue to climb, more people are willing to commute even longer distances for the house they want — even if it means paying more for transportation. For the Wolfords, it’s about $1,230 a month vs. their $1,100 mortgage.”

Source: Access Atlanta | Archived Copy

Yet, in contrast with such confident forecasts, the local HBA played it close to the vest in its recently concluded home show, the Parade of Homes. Just 29 homes were shown, all in the $200,000 to $900,000 range. That compares feebly with the 60-plus homes shown by the Acadiana Home Builders Association in an area with roughly 30% of the New Orleans population.

This last group [Gen-X professionals] holds tremendous hope, for three reasons: 1) They’re young, and still have the stomach for major renovation projects. 2) They’re in their prime child-bearing years, and thus likely to inject a healthy dose of middle class kids into urban neighborhoods. 3) Many of them are from out of town, escaping the barren vapidity of Anywhere, U.S.A., in search of an originality only New Orleans can offer; these newcomers help counteract the brain drain.

Source: City Business | Archived Copy