New Orleans Affordable Housing Assessment: Lessons Learned

This paper focuses on the impact of the storms, efforts to rebuild New Orleans housing stock and the hurdles to creating affordability in housing in general.

The story of rebuilding housing relates to all aspects of societal functions and has been referred to
repeatedly in New Orleans as the ‘chicken and egg’ problem. With so many homes to rebuild, there are too few contractors to complete the work. There are so few contractors because there are no places for their workers to live.

Rebuilding the devastated housing stock of New Orleans is essential for the city’s recovery. Without places to live, people cannot return to work, pay taxes, patronize local businesses, or send their children to school. Fortunately, there is a groundswell of support to avoid old patterns of concentrating assisted housing and poor families in a few isolated communities. But basic infrastructures that can attract and retain residents are still missing.

By January 2007, only about half of the public schools in New Orleans were open, 30 percent of the childcare centers had returned, and less than a half of the city buses were back in operation. Enrollment at the six largest colleges in New Orleans was at just 76 percent of pre-Katrina levels.

With the only point of consensus being that “things could have been done better”, it makes sense to look at the responses to the disaster to see if any lessons can be learned and applied to future events.