LRA accepts home buyout plan

BATON ROUGE -- The Louisiana Recovery Authority on Tuesday approved Orleans and Jefferson parishes' plans to deal with thousands of storm-damaged properties being sold to the state through the Road Home program.

So far, 2,000 homeowners have sold their properties to the state -- rather than renovate or rebuild -- but officials expect about 15,000 will take the buyout option by the time the homeowner grant program is done.

Ultimately, those properties will be transferred to local governments which will decide what to do with them, such as renovate or redevelop, or convert them into parks or green space. The LRA must approve each parish's plan for the buyout properties it receives.

Of the two plans approved, the largest came from New Orleans, which expects its New Orleans Redevelopment Authority to receive 7,000 Road Home properties in the next year. The city's plan calls for the properties to be sold to developers or cleared for parks and community gardens in the next 10 years.

A goal of the city plan is to avoid putting too many of the properties on the market too quickly, out of concern that supply will outpace demand and lead to blight in some neighborhoods, NORA Executive Director Joe Williams said.

Williams said that even before any Road Home properties are passed on to NORA, a process that will start next year, there already are about 2,400 properties on the market in New Orleans, a year's worth of housing supply. Ommeed Sathe, a land policy expert for NORA, said healthy real estate markets should have six to nine months of inventory.

NORA also is concerned about how it will cover costs to keep the properties maintained and secure, a bill that could reach $12.5 million a year. LRA Housing Chairman Walter Leger said the board would look at ways to help the parishes pay such costs, and Sathe said it would be important to hold the LRA to that.

Jefferson Parish's plan, which is slated for approval by the Jefferson Parish Council today, is far smaller and doesn't have such complicated strategic issues. It is based on fewer than 200 properties and seeks to sell all of them at auction within a year.

St. Bernard Parish, which expects to get nearly as many buyout properties as Orleans, was the first parish to offer a redevelopment plan, but the LRA said it must be reworked to adhere to federal requirements before it can be approved.

Each parish plan also must set aside 25 percent of the properties for low- to moderate-income housing. In its plan, Jefferson Parish said it might not be able to adhere to that requirement because of the high cost of development.

A faith-based organization, the Jeremiah Group, may have found a way to make that requirement easier. It asked the LRA to dedicate $75 million in the affected parishes to so-called "soft-second mortgages," subsidized no-interest second mortgages that are typically forgiven if the buyer stays in the house for 10 years.

The LRA voted Tuesday to redirect $35 million to the subsidies. The LRA previously had put that into a tax-credit program for large rental property developers, but the Jeremiah Group, which had long fought to protect the rental money, said Monday it would support stripping the money because it would help many renters become homeowners.

Leger said his LRA housing task force would meet in a week to try to come up with another $40 million, possibly from the LRA's $869 million Road Home small rental program.

Donald Vallee, head of the New Orleans Landlords Association, said drawing down from the small rental program would be a mistake. He said that program needs more money, not less.

"Many housing loan programs are available in the industry that provide this service to homeowners," Vallee said of soft-second mortgages. "None, if any, are available to restore or build rental housing for our work force and displaced residents."

All told, it was a good day at the LRA for the hurricane-affected parishes, with the biggest news being the board's preliminary approval of $500 million to help 23 parishes with their long-term recovery efforts.

Sathe said the infrastructure financing, the redevelopment strategy and the extra help for homebuyers will work together to drive an efficient redevelopment effort.

"It's three legs of a stool, and all will help revitalize our city's neighborhoods," Sathe said.

This Footage Is From When?

I'm not a big fan of surveys or polls. People who want to prove how dumb the public is--usually people in New York or LA--can always cite a survey showing that a significant slice of the populace can't locate China on a map. Or can't locate a map.

Nonetheless, Monday's release of a survey by the University of New Orleans on Americans' attitudes towards the Crescent City contains a notable semi-bombshell:

Roughly one-fourth believed parts of New Orleans remain under water; one-third believed the tourist-oriented French Quarter was one of the hardest-hit areas when, in fact, the Quarter was largely unharmed. The floodwaters, too, are long gone.

"It's amazing," (UNO Survey Research Center director Bob) Sims said of those responses. "But it just goes to show how little people really know."

Of course, one reason people know so little is that television news has abandoned one of its few honorable journalistic rules: disclosing to viewers when the footage being shown is archive or file footage. "B-roll", or wallpaper, as it's come to be called now, is footage that runs on a loop to illustrate a talking-heads segment lest you get bored with the heads. Such footage is undated, its vintage undisclosed. It runs so continuously through a segment that a casual viewer could be excused from thinking it's real-time and live. If it's footage of Britney Spears at a press conference or getting out of a limo, as it so often is, no harm, just a very little foul. But when it's footage of the floods from thirty months ago, floods that never reached the heart of New Orleans (at least from an historic and touristic point of view), then the news channels, far from combating ignorance, are contributing to it.

PS: After thirty months, that water's getting pretty foul.

Follow Up: HANO hits roadblock to demolitions

The Housing Conservation District Review Committee on Monday refused to approve demolition of one of the four public housing developments scheduled to be torn down this weekend by a vote of 3-3.

The committee reviews planned demolitions in historic neighborhoods not under the jurisdiction of the Historic District Landmarks Commission.

The decision, which came after a raucous three-hour meeting filled with anti-demolition protesters, means that developers and the Housing Authority of New Orleans must appeal to the City Council before sending wrecking crews to the Lafitte development, located near Treme.

HANO and its team of developers did win approval, however, to begin demolishing the C.J. Peete and B.W. Cooper developments, the first step toward what the agency says will transform the city's aging brick buildings into "mixed income" modern-day housing.

About 100 people crowded into an 8th floor conference room at City Hall in an effort to halt the demolitions, calling them an attack on the working poor. In the end, they were only partly successful.

"Open up your hearts," said Sharon Sears Jasper, who was a resident of the St. Bernard complex until she forced out by the storm in 2005. "You're taking away our families, our homes. Look at the diamonds on your hands for taking all them bribes. We work, we go to church, we have families. We live in public housing. We want our homes back."

In response, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development released a two-page statement saying HANO is merely removing "thousands of run-down public housing units" in favor of "safe, vibrant, economically sustainable" communities. "It's a decades-old strategy that has enjoyed success in cities like Atlanta, Chicago and elsewhere in New Orleans," the HUD statement said.

HUD, which has run HANO since 2002, announced in June that it would raze the city's four largest developments: C.J. Peete, St. Bernard, B.W. Cooper and Lafitte.

On Saturday, wrecking crews may begin tearing down scores of buildings at B.W. Cooper and C.J. Peete, but not the 76 buildings at Lafitte that developers want to remove and replace with new housing.

The St. Bernard development in the 7th Ward will also proceed. Developers did not need the committee's permission to begin work because the complex is not within the conservation district.

Of the four developments slated for demolition, only Cooper has been re-opened since Hurricane Katrina. About 267 families presently live there.

Tensions rise over public housing

As tensions rise over the planned demolition of public housing units in New Orleans, some anti-demolition advocates are threatening more direct action. This poster is appearing in the CBD.

How does this message make you feel? Are you more or less likely to support the anti-demolition position, or those making this threat? What should the government response be? Share your thoughts.

East bank, West Bank levee boards a study in contrasts

The West Bank levee board, born out of conflicting movements to retain a degree of local control amid the fervor of consolidating flood protection into a single authority, got a slow start compared with its counterpart across the Mississippi River.

Now the month-long gap between the seating of the regional levee board east of the river and the appointment of members to the West Bank board appears to have widened. As the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-West finishes its 10th month, it's just taking on major operational tasks that the east authority has already accomplished.

The West Bank board has no staff or regional director, remains locked in a dispute over its New Orleans employees and hasn't had a single meeting in Algiers, while its counterpart recently named a director and rotates meetings through its district.

Still, board members say they have cleared other major hurdles and remain confident that maintenance of the levees and floodwalls in the authority's boundaries hasn't suffered during the challenging transition.

Treasurer Susan Maclay of Harvey said the to-do list includes the basics: an office, a secretary, even a phone number.

"The public has to be able to get ahold of us," she said. "We don't even have a Web site."

Disputes denied

At least one of those basics will be in place later this month, when the authority's lease begins on an Algiers office. Members approved a three-year contract for space in the Timbers Office Building on Gen. DeGaulle Drive, but not without some consternation.

Citing the expense, three members scuttled a consultant's recommendation to rent a larger space in the MacArthur Professional Building, also on Gen. DeGaulle Drive, for $3,400 a month. The three members who supported the deal reasoned it cost 25 cents more per square foot than the $2,100-per-month alternative, would have given the authority staff an additional 1,000 square feet of room to grow and had an interior bathroom, unlike the other facility, which shares a rest room with neighboring offices.

Michael Merritt of Baton Rouge, one of those who pushed for the larger space, said the dispute highlights a growing rift between two groups on the board: engineers and those with experience in government administration.

"It's very natural for engineers to look at a lease and say, 'We could save a nickel,'¤" he said, adding that the other faction saw more potential in the first option, despite the cost.

Chairman David Bindewald of Harvey, a retired engineer, and Mark Morgan of Baton Rouge, a practicing civil engineer, meanwhile, brushed off any suggestion of tension among board members. Both said they voted against the larger space because of its price.

The board expects to conduct its first meeting in Algiers this month, bringing it into compliance with legislation that requires both consolidated levee boards to rotate their meetings among the levee districts in their jurisdictions. The west board oversees the West Jefferson Levee District and the West Bank portion of the former Orleans Levee District, which became the Algiers Levee District in July.

Since February, the West Bank board has met in Marrero, around the same dais where the West Jefferson Levee Board once presided.

"Act 1 was pretty clear, and the voters were pretty clear in their desire for regionalism," Maclay said. "We haven't had one meeting in Algiers. . . . We're long overdue."

Employees' status unclear

Jefferson Parish politicians blustered during the 2006 legislative debates that they wouldn't allow a regional West Bank board to meet in the West Jefferson Levee District building to discuss Algiers matters, arguing that such an arrangement would violate the law's mandate to keep taxes and other resources for each district separate.

The threat didn't come to pass.

To the contrary, West Jefferson employees now cut grass and perform all other routine maintenance to Algiers levees on a contractual basis, while the board sorts out a dispute over former Orleans Levee District employees assigned to the West Bank.

Jerry Spohrer, director of the West Jefferson district, said his staff took on the work without adding employees. The district uses accounting software to ensure that Algiers taxes pay for work performed there.

"West Jeff doesn't make money going into Algiers, but it doesn't lose money," he said. "It's seamless. Nobody can tell the difference."

At the advice of West Jefferson Levee District attorney Owen Bordelon, the regional board assumed the New Orleans workers did not stay under the West Bank board's authority. They were temporarily transferred to duties across the Mississippi while both levee boards consulted state civil service lawyers, who said last month that they remain employees of the West Bank board.

Yet the employees are still working for the east authority, awaiting clarification about their pay, benefits and seniority.

Robert Boland, general counsel for the Department of State Civil Service, offered to broker a meeting with both levee boards and the employees to break the impasse. The meeting is expected to happen this week.

That will leave selecting a regional director as the next major organizational hurdle.

The east authority hired Bob Turner, director of the Lake Borne Levee District, on Nov. 8.

Members of the West Bank board said the search for their regional director could take months.

While Spohrer has supervised levee maintenance and construction across the jurisdiction for decades, he said he doesn't think the board will consider him for the post.

The levee board consolidation law requires the regional director to have a bachelor's degree in business, engineering, geology, hydrology, natural sciences, environmental sciences or renewable resources. It also requires 10 years of executive experience in those fields or in the management of flood protection systems, surveying, mapping or disaster response.

The candidate also must live in the board's jurisdiction or agree to move there within 90 days of the hiring.

Spohrer said he doesn't have a bachelor's degree.

"He knows more about the West Bank than all of us put together, but at the same time, we have to follow the legislation," said Morgan, who hopes to have a candidate in place by March.