Signs of protest held up during New Orleans city council meeting
In the face of strong community opposition and questions about the proposal’s legality, New Orleans City Councilwomen Cynthia Willard-Lewis and Cynthia Hedge-Morrell on Thursday dropped their effort to block construction of any new housing in their council districts except single-family and two-family homes.
The proposed moratorium, introduced at the council’s March 1 meeting, also had been attacked by local fair-housing advocates and community activists.
The People’s Hurricane Relief Fund denounced the proposal several days ago as an attempt to keep working-class black people, particularly those who depend on Section 8 rent subsidy vouchers, out of eastern New Orleans and Gentilly.
Although Willard-Lewis and Hedge-Morrell are both African-American, a news release from the group called their proposal "both racist and class discrimination."
Attorneys for the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center and New Orleans Legal Assistance also criticized the proposal.
But when leaders of the Hurricane Relief Fund appeared before the council Thursday on a related issue — a request that the city enact laws to prevent price-gouging and unfair evictions by landlords — they made almost no references to the proposed moratorium.
Agreement reached
It was clear that the activists had reached an agreement with Willard-Lewis and Hedge-Morrell that in return for the council members’ withdrawing the moratorium, the activists would not continue their attacks on it or the members who proposed it.
Many audience members held up signs with messages such as "We Demand Tenant Rights," "Stop High Rents" and "New Orleans Needs Rent Control." Only a couple of "No Moratorium" signs were visible.
Saying that "greedy developers" want to "gentrify the city" and prevent black working-class and poor residents from returning, Hurricane Relief Fund leader Malcolm Suber said many displaced residents want to return but cannot find affordable apartments. Some speakers said rents have doubled and tripled for many units since Katrina.
Although council President Oliver Thomas said the council will consider the protesters’ demands for laws to protect renters, there probably is little the council can do. The Louisiana Constitution and state laws make it difficult or impossible for local governments to legislate in the area of landlord-tenant relations, some lawyers in the council chamber said.
In 2004, -City Attorney Sherry Landry warned the council that measures blocking construction of multifamily housing might be found illegal in the courts, but the council continued to impose or renew moratoriums on such construction in large parts of the city, especially eastern New Orleans.
Fair Housing Act
Landry told the council then that moratoriums on permits for multifamily housing are most likely to affect poor people, predominantly African-Americans, "who cannot afford to rent or own single-family homes." Under the Fair Housing Act, a law is illegal if its effect is to discriminate against minorities or people with disabilities, Landry said.
Local housing activists also told the council several times in 2004 and 2005 that restrictions on multiple-family housing made it harder for the city’s large population of poor people to find decent, affordable housing.
Lucinda Flowers of the New Orleans Neighborhood Development Collaborative said such moratoriums prevent construction of the only type of housing that a large percentage of the city’s population can afford.
Despite such warnings, Willard-Lewis, who sponsored the earlier moratoriums in District E, and Hedge-Morrell, who assumed the council’s District D seat after the council enacted the earlier measures, this year proposed a new moratorium on construction or expansion of any housing in their districts with three or more residential units. At-large Councilman Arnie Fielkow agreed to co-sponsor the measure.
Quality-of-life issue
As she had with the earlier moratoriums, Willard-Lewis said her real target was what she considered an unfair concentration in her district of large low-income apartment complexes that often became blighted and threatened property values and the quality of life in nearby single-family neighborhoods.
This year, she said, she was particularly upset that the Louisiana Housing Finance Agency has made decisions on which developers should get valuable post-Katrina tax credits for proposed housing complexes in New Orleans without any city review.
"If the LHFA had simply required developers to have local citizen and community input before they awarded the tax credits, the moratorium would not be necessary," she wrote in a column Wednesday in The Times-Picayune.
In place of the abandoned moratorium, Willard-Lewis proposed two alternative measures Thursday.
One, passed 7-0 by the council, urged the LHFA to give the council a chance to provide "significant input" into the state agency’s decisions, with the goal of ensuring "that tax-credit projects are consistent with and complement" residents’ desires on how the city should be rebuilt post-Katrina.
The second measure, which cannot be voted on until the council’s April 5 meeting, says the council won’t support the issuance of low-income housing tax credits for any development with 100 or more units "without public input from the (affected) neighborhood." It does not say what level of public support would be needed to gain a council endorsement of the project.
Statistics on districts
Willard-Lewis and Hedge-Morrell repeated their belief that large low-income housing developments approved for tax breaks by the LHFA have been disproportionately in their districts.
However, figures presented to the council by PolicyLink, a California research firm with an office in New Orleans, showed that of the 67 projects approved for tax credits since Katrina, 22 projects with 3,444 units were in District B and 17 projects with 2,237 units were in District C. By comparison, five projects with 963 units were approved in Hedge-Morrell’s District D, and 12 projects with 1,599 units were approved in Willard-Lewis’ District E. District A had the fewest approvals: six projects with 369 units.
It is likely that not all the projects approved for tax breaks will end up being built. Developers who fail to secure equity financing or who run into other problems are expected to return some of the credits to the LHFA for reallocation.
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