AFL-CIO plans New Orleans boom By Anne Rochell Konigsmark, USA TODAY
Tue Jun 13, 7:23 AM ET
In what may be the start of the city's development boom, the AFL-CIO plans to invest $1 billion to develop 10,000 affordable homes and a new downtown hotel.
The investment, confirmed Monday by the AFL-CIO, is the labor coalition's most ambitious funding project ever. It also is one of the largest yet for New Orleans and seeks to bring new housing to a city where Hurricane Katrina destroyed more than 100,000 homes.
The money will come from the AFL-CIO's 40-year-old Housing Investment Trust, which invests worker pensions in affordable housing and requires union labor on the projects.
"So little has been done," AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says, referring to the dearth of new development in the nine months since the storm. "It feels like this is the city that America forgot, and I hope our investment will jump-start other investments."
After months of sluggish recovery, there has been a flurry of development news in recent weeks in New Orleans, including plans for a $700 million jazz district downtown.
There are several affordable housing plans in the works: Enterprise Community Partners wants to build 6,500 affordable units in partnership with the Archdiocese of New Orleans. Habitat for Humanity soon will begin building 10 houses every two weeks with a goal of building 1,500 in the next three to five years.
The AFL-CIO plans to begin by buying 200 blighted or abandoned properties owned by the city in the historic Treme, a working-class, mostly black neighborhood that saw minor damage from Katrina. The plan also calls for construction of a high-rise hotel along the Mississippi River.
Jim Kelly of Catholic Charities, which is working with Enterprise and the AFL-CIO, says the city needs all the affordable housing it can get. "We were a poor city prior to Katrina," he says.
Development activity is picking up for several reasons, not the least of which is that billions in federal dollars to buy people out of their flood-damaged homes is set to begin flowing this summer.
Some developers are worried that because of tax incentives, there will be too much affordable housing and not enough mixed income developments.
"You can overload the city with affordable housing," local developer Pres Kabakoff says. "It's important we don't end up with concentratedly poor neighborhoods." |
