New Orleans’ Real Estate Market on the Rise
New Orleans’ real estate market is on the rise with home values up 54 percent and rents up 50 percent making the area a thriving market. Although we are seeing a positive impact in the housing market, the median income remains the same at $37,000. New Orleans has one of the higher poverty rates in the country at 28% with 55% of renters spending over a third of their annual income on housing. The HousingNOLA plan will focus on not only creating new housing in the area but will keep the new housing affordable. The goal is to do this by maintaining affordable housing in the area and create new affordable housing in the City of New Orleans. This plan will be executed within the next 10 years. 3,000 affordable new homes will be available for buyers by 2018 and a total of 5,000 affordable
new housing will be completed by 2021.
The focus will be on families that have an annual income of less than $48,000 for a family of four. Reports state that high demand for affordable housing is evident with 33,000 affordable homes needed over the next decade. New Orleans’ families who have a combined annual income of $29,700 to $44,575 are within the most concentrated demand. These statistics encouraged the City Council to change the city’s zoning ordinance, allowing developers to build more multi-family housing on smaller lots, if the developer will dedicate some of the units to affordable housing.
Andreanecia Morris, vice president of Providence Community Housing who heads the Greater New Orleans Housing Alliance, said “HousingNOLA is our chance to make some of those wrongs right.”
HousingNOLA will be funded by arranging local, state and federal dollars, new public policy, private sector developers and nonprofit investment. This will be done by incorporating 75 new affordable houses in upscale neighborhoods such as Uptown, Mid-City, Bywater and Lakeview, obtaining $2.5 million from New Orleans’ Neighborhood Housing Improvement Fund, creating a property tax relief for current homeowners and incentives for developers to build affordable new homes, enforcing fair housing laws by using vouchers, gaining additional funding for the Louisiana Housing Trust Fund, and stimulating sustainable development. In fact, $16 million of New Orleans’ 2016 budget has been dedicated to the affordable housing efforts.
The project will be compromised of 2,000 rentals, 1,500 new houses and 1,500 homes for special needs. Harold Brooks, a 9th Ward resident who served as a community reviewer for the HousingNOLA plan, said everyone agrees that in five years, “this will be a new, New Orleans — it’s going to change.” This will be an exciting huge project but will keep the culture the same.