Rebuilding Begins In New Orleans

Work finally starts after delays at New Orleans’ ‘Big Four’

By Bendix Anderson

NEW ORLEANS—Since the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina poured into the C.J. Peete public housing complex here, Jocquelyn Marshall and her son have traveled from an emergency shelter in Tunica, Miss., to an apartment in Houston, and then to an apartment in another New Orleans neighborhood.

It’s been a long voyage for Marshall, who still hopes to return to C.J. Peete.

The possibility for that return came a little closer to reality Jan. 6, when workers started to build the first phase of new apartments at C.J. Peete. As president of the residents’ association, Marshall spoke at the groundbreaking along with developers, city and federal officials, and former residents.

“It was a beautiful, sunny day— a day of excitement,” she says.

Hope and delay

After years of protest and delay, work has begun on the first new apartments at C.J. Peete and St. Bernard, two of New Orleans’ “Big Four” public housing sites slated for redevelopment after Hurricane Katrina. The redevelopment of the other two Big Four sites isn’t far behind. As of February, officials expected work to start at the Lafitte and B.W. Cooper projects in 2Q2009.
More than 3,000 mixed-income apartments in the four redevelopments are slated to open by 2011.

That’s well behind the projects’ original time frames outlined in 2006. Lawsuits, local approvals, and the chaos in the nation’s financial markets have delayed the projects.

However, developers and officials have made good use of the extra time by including residents in the process of designing the redeveloped communities and living up to the principles of successful public housing redevelopments undertaken over the last decade under the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) HOPE VI program.
“This investment is going to last for decades. The additional time was important,” says Vince Bennett, executive vice president for McCormack Baron Salazar, the St. Louis-based developer redeveloping C.J. Peete.

A tight time frame

In June 2006, more than nine months after Hurricane Katrina tore through the city, HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson announced his plan to demolish 4,500 units of public housing at four of the largest public housing sites in the city and rebuild the sites as mixed-income housing in just a few years.

The plan includes a mix of homeownership, public housing apartments, housing subsidized with low-income housing tax credits (LIHTCs), and apartments renting at market rates.

Wrapping around a new gym, Railton Place serves young adults aging out of foster care
and chronically homeless adults and veterans.



Increasing Need

The demand for affordable housing continues to grow across
the nation, with no signs of easing.
• In 2006, 39 million households were at least moderately cost
burdened (paying more than 30 percent of income on housing),
and nearly 18 million were severely cost burdened (paying
more than 50 percent). From 2001 to 2006, the number
of severely burdened households alone swelled by almost 4
million.

• The number of households with “worst-case housing” needs
in 2005 was 5.99 million, comprising 13.4 million individuals.
This is an increase of 817,000, or 16 percent, from 5.18 million
in 2003. Households with worst-case needs are defined as
unassisted renters with very low incomes who are either paying
more than half of their incomes for housing or living in
severely substandard housing. The group with the largest
increase in worst-case needs from 2003 to 2005 was families
with children—475,000 households.

• The proportion of American households that had worst-case
needs in 2005 was 5.5 percent, up from 4.9 percent in 2003.
• All regions of the country shared in worst-case needs, and all
regions experienced increases: 208,000 households in the
Northeast; 143,000 in the Midwest; 338,000 in the South;
and 129,000 in the West in 2005.

Sources: Department of Housing and Urban Development and Joint Center for
Housing Studies at Harvard University

Read More HERE