The Lower Garden District

Research and publication, IIPM-Knowledge Centre

As for the hundreds of thousands of residents whose low-lying homes and housing projects were destroyed by the flood, Drennen says the city now has an opportunity for “21st-century thinking”. Rather than rebuild ghettos, New Orleans should be resettled with “mixed income” housing, with rich and poor, black and white living side by side. What Drennen doesn’t say is that this kind of urban integration could happen tomorrow, on a massive scale. Roughly 70,000 of New Orleans’ poorest homeless evacuees could move back to the city, alongside returning white home-owners, without a single new structure being built. Take the Lower Garden District, where Drennen himself lives. It has a surprisingly high vacancy rate – 17.4 percent, according to the 2000 census. At that time 702 housing units stood vacant, and since the market hasn’t improved and the district was barely flooded, many are presumably still there and still vacant. It’s much the same in the other dry areas: The French Quarter has been half-empty for years, with a vacancy rate of 37 percent. The citywide numbers are staggering. In the areas that sustained only minor damages and are on the mayor’s re-population list, there are at least 11,600 empty apartments and houses. If Jefferson Parish is included, that number soars to 23,270. With three people in each unit, that means homes could be found for roughly 70,000 evacuees. With the number of permanently homeless city residents estimated at 200,000, that’s a significant dent in the housing crisis. And it’s doable…

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Source: IIPM Editorial-2006