Rules to stop homes-to-dorms could further affect affordable housing

By Christopher Tidmore
Contributing Writer

At the end of March, the New Orleans City Council directed the City Planning Commission to kick off a process which could permanently alter residential building rules in a large swath of Uptown – a regulatory change that critics argue would further reduce the dwindling supply of affordable homes in neighborhoods around the university areas, while its defenders maintain the opposite.

The council seeks to make permanent a temporary rule enacted last year intended to stop the conversion of private homes into virtual student dorms. By renting bedrooms individually to Loyola and Tulane students, parking had become strained in many surrounding Uptown neighborhoods, and property values were affected by the pursuit of student rentals over maintenance of single-family homes.

As one local real-estate agent put it to this newspaper, “The Overlay was made to stop developers from adding bedrooms to small houses in order to rent bedrooms to Tulane and Loyola students – so that a four-bedroom double was camel-backed to become an eight-bedroom double but with no parking for the additional cars, so the original residents now had to fight for a parking spot. They couldn’t think of any other way to stop houses from essentially becoming dormitories.”

Throughout the past decade, property development firms have bought up homes in the residential neighborhoods near Tulane and Loyola, converted singles and doubles into multi-bedroom dorm-style properties, and marketed them to college students looking to live off campus.

City Councilmember Joe Giarrusso III, who represents those university area neighborhoods, agreed arguing that the transformation of single-family homes into dorm-style have changed the fabric of residential areas where they have metastasized. “Dorms increase the rental rates, because more people are being pushed into there, and that also decreases affordability,” Giarrusso said. “Those conversions permanently alter the bones of those homes, and prevent certain students, and certainly families, from later occupying those homes.”

However, in an interview with The Louisiana Weekly, local residential architect Andrew Stout maintained that the rules have forced the opposite effect, effectively stopping most future infill development of any new residential homes in the area. That potentiality could drive up prices and affect affordability in ways that proponents of the council’s ordinance have not foreseen.

As Stout explained, “Are people aware that a ‘University Parking’ Overlay Zoning regulation has been instituted over an enormous piece of the city whereby the construction of any historic or traditional styled home has been rendered impossible?.. I don’t think people understand the issues involved in requiring that you have (1) off-street parking PER BEDROOM. Even ONE off-street parking is problematic to any conventional lot where somebody may attempt a new bedroom or new construction. The front yard build line is already a strictly regulated parameter. You can only deviate from your neighbors (so) much. If your neighbors are something like 6’ to 8’ set back from the street, you’re out of luck. You can’t just set the house back a bunch, and the parking space needs to happen beyond the face of the porch. They don’t want a car park[ed] in front of the house; they want it parked alongside the house, according to the [Historic District Landmarks Commission] full committee.”

“So your standard 24’, 25’-wide double shotgun is an impossible form to have now. ANY historically conceived house on a standard lot is impossible, unless you have a very wide lot or want a single-shotgun-sized house. You NEED to have a driveway which pulls up alongside the house, and park beyond the porch. Therefore on a 30’ lot, with 3’ setbacks, with a ~9’ driveway (forget having an access walk you’re gonna be swinging that door right up against that fence), your house, for the required length it takes to Stack X-many cars (depending on how many bedrooms you have), your house’s exterior dimensions would necessarily be 15’ wide total exterior, about 14’ interior.”

“Here’s the quick math version: Want to build a new four-bedroom house? A LOT of the houses here fit that bill. Better find a place to put a ~50’ long driveway…It’s a dumb, ham-fisted way of trying to address a grievance about parking. How about just make a two-hour parking zone, and you can get a pass if your name appears on the assessor record? Pretty Easy Fix there, without having to adjust Zoning Code and Building Ordinance!”

Defenders of the making of the rules permanent simply suggest that exemptions could be entered into the code, essentially grandfathering in allowances to construct single-family homes according to the historical design of properties in the neighborhood. However, Stout is skeptical such allowances would work. “As for the exemption, it’s not in the code. If it doesn’t distinguish if it’s single or double or what, if it’s for any additions or new construction, then you’re going to have some sort of dueling argument about if the applicant will or won’t be intending to rent in the future.”

Under the current proposed ordinance, houses with existing homestead exemptions could be allowed to expand bedrooms without changing the parking spaces, but Stout noted that does nothing to engender future construction of multi-bedroom private homes. Moreover, under the proposal that the council has sent to the City Planning Commission to consider, these parking space rules could be extended beyond the scope of the streets around the universities to include more city neighborhoods, including Hollygrove, Carrollton, Black Pearl, Leonidas and others – traditionally African-American areas where property costs have skyrocketed in recent years. The temporary policy only affected a sliver of neighborhoods in an area surrounded by Broadway Street, South Claiborne Avenue, Carrollton Avenue and St. Charles Avenue.

This article originally published in the April 26, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.