New Orleans receives a ‘F’ grade for affordable housing
5th October 2020 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
Halfway into its ambitious, 10-year, post-Katrina mission that calls on city and state officials, local developers and community organizations to address the critical lack of affordable housing in New Orleans, HousingNOLA reported that the situation is decidedly not good.
According to the organization’s “HousingNOLA 2020 Annual Report Card,” released last week, the group gave the city a stark “F” grade in terms of enhancing New Orleans’ housing options. This is HousingNOLA’s fifth annual report, and after “D” ratings in both 2018 and 2019, the New Orleans community earned an even lower, flat-out failing grade.
“This is an announcement that has been several years in the making, and unfortunately, it’s bad news,” said HousingNOLA Executive Director Andreanecia Morris during a Zoom press conference last Tuesday.
“It’s egregious and it’s deeply troubling,” Morris added, “and we’re concerned about how we move forward.”
The report found that roughly half of the city’s population faces housing costs that exceed levels of affordability, and that the homeless population continues to increase. In addition, the amount of occupied housing has decreased from 2019 to this year, which corresponds with an increase in total vacancies.
Plus, the city’s extremely low and very low income residents continue to fight against a rising tide of inequitable challenges, such as a dearth of housing they can afford, and having to compete with more well-off residents for housing that is already out of their price range. Another key aspect of the HousingNOLA evaluation is the City’s woeful failure to even come close to fulfilling a five-year mission, launched by the City in 2016, to create 7,500 new affordable housing opportunities by the end of 2020. According to the new report, only 1,557 new additional opportunities have been created with just a few months to go.
Last week, Morris stressed that although earlier this year the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic caused Housing NOLA to pause its research and evaluation of the housing situation and revise its model for housing demand, the current bleak housing picture was not significantly caused by the pandemic’s effects. She said the negative conditions that led to the failing 2020 grade were already in the making before COVID hit. In fact, Morris said that if policymakers had been aware and forward-thinking enough, they could have used the onset of the coronavirus to make significant strides in addressing the housing crisis. In particular, the proper handling of the pandemic crisis could have helped the city improve the way other natural disasters like hurricanes are dealt with.
“This is a grade that frankly COVID could have assisted with,” she said, “particularly if we had listened and recognized that housing is health care, and that housing is essential, and that there is a need to make sure that everyone is stabilized inside of any disaster.”
Instead of taking advantage of this and other positive signs, Morris said the city as an entire community has allowed so many major social, economic and racial disparities to fester and come together and create the negative situation that exists currently.
“These things are very connected,” Morris said. “We can’t create housing in an environment that is inhospitable and inequitable. Unfortunately, that is what we have now.”
The new report outlines the seven goals of HousingNOLA’s 10-year affordable housing project and quantifies the city’s success rate in achieving each goal. They include:
• Retain existing housing and boost the amount of affordable housing overall – 41 percent success rate;
• Employ development efforts, research and further policy review to prevent any future incidents of residents losing their housing – 64 percent success rate;
• Advocate for and adequately enforce fair housing guidelines across the entire city – 50 percent success rate;
• Encourage environmentally and socioeconomically sustainable development planning and infrastructure for all New Orleans neighborhoods – 53 percent success rate;
• Enhance and grow accessibility to housing and other development for all walks of life, including those citizens with special needs – 50 percent success rate;
• Outline comprehensive, thoughtful strategic goals on a local level for a comprehensive housing blueprint – 72 percent success rate;
• Increase the quality of life in all New Orleans neighborhoods by addressing challenges such as blight, amenities, transit and recreation – 56 percent success rate.
City officials, last week, disputed many of the findings in the report. A spokesperson for Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s office issued a statement defending her administration by pointing to programs and advances the city has made recently regarding the housing crisis.
“The grade is unfair and clearly does not reflect the work that the Cantrell administration is continuing to do to provide affordable housing for our residents,” the spokesperson said. “The administration has awarded over $20 million for the new construction, rehabilitation and the redevelopment of property for affordable housing throughout the city. There are currently 525 affordable housing units under construction and approximately 800 housing units in predevelopment scheduled to begin construction within the next six months.
“The City currently has a Notice of Funding Availability on the street making available $7 million for additional housing. In 2020 alone, over $2.5 million ($4.4 million during the Cantrell administration) has been awarded in down payment assistance to help renters build wealth through homeownership, over 200 unsheltered homeless individuals have been placed in permanent housing, and $2.8 million has been made available for rental assistance for those impacted by COVID-19. Affordable housing has been a priority for the Cantrell administration from day one.”
City Councilman Joseph Giarrusso, representing District A, also touted the city’s current efforts toward affordable and sustainable housing solutions, citing a proposed project on land owned by the Housing Authority of New Orleans as evidence that the city is listening to residents’ concerns and working diligently to address them.
“We are dedicated to creating smart affordable housing,” Giarrusso told The Louisiana Weekly. “There is an affordable housing development – located on HANO land – proposed for the Carrollton/Leonidas neighborhood. Neighbors had several concerns about the project’s design, including a lack of back doors. We worked with the neighbors, developers and administration to address these concerns. Thanks to the dedication of the administration and commitment of Community Development dollars, each unit in this project is now designed with back exits.”
Giarrusso added that he has proposed local legislation that aims to facilitate and support the development of quality neighborhoods, including affordable housing.
“There are three ways to kill development: study it, delay it or make it too expensive,” he said. “My office is working to rectify one of these issues by introducing legislation that reduces the cost of conditional use fees for established multi-family residences. We want these properties, which have been owned by families for generations, to come back into commerce. Reducing these fees reduces the cost burden on families looking to bring their properties back to life.”
Along with releasing its report, HousingNOLA reiterated proposals and challenges the organization has repeatedly issued to state officials regarding the frustrating lack of progress on affordable housing, including properly and productively taking advantage of existing programs such as the Justice Reinvestment Initiative, the Main Street Program and the State Housing Trust.
HousingNOLA likewise called on city officials to prioritize several initiatives and objectives, including finally enacting the Smart Housing Mix proposal, ending income discrimination, matching landlords with HANO voucher holders, enacting the health homes ordinance, and finding funding to help housing-vulnerable populations that don’t qualify for COVID-19 programs.
“This is a New Orleans problem,” Morris said, “and New Orleans must solve it.”
This article originally published in the October 5, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
