News Roundup › Housing

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Times-Picayune

Source: City Business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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