NOLA: Thousands of years-vacant apts sit empty on dry land, while FEMA buys

[AirAmFan]

thousands of mobile homes, 200,000 evacuees are scattered hundreds of miles away, and Dubya plans an "urban homesteading" fantasy that might help hundreds at most.

Why doesn't FEMA just allow people whose NOLA homes have been destroyed to relocate to the vacant apartments?

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From http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051010/klein :

"Purging the Poor

October 10, 2005 issue (posted September 22, 2005)

... New Orleans is already displaying signs of a demographic shift so dramatic that some evacuees describe it as "ethnic cleansing." Before Mayor Ray Nagin called for a second evacuation, the people streaming back into dry areas were mostly white, while those with no homes to return to are overwhelmingly black. ... it's simple geography--a reflection of the fact that wealth in New Orleans buys altitude. That means that the driest areas are the whitest (the French Quarter is 90 percent white; the Garden District, 89 percent; Audubon, 86 percent; neighboring Jefferson Parish, where people were also allowed to return, 65 percent). ... in all the billions for reconstruction, there is no budget for transportation back from the far-flung shelters where those residents ended up. So even when resettlement is permitted, many may not be able to return.

... Drennen ... says the city now has an opportunity for "twenty-first-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 homeowners, without a single new structure being built. ... With landlords preferring to board up apartments rather than lower rents, 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 damage and are on the mayor's repopulation 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. ... After passing an ordinance, cities could issue Section 8 certificates, covering rent until evacuees find jobs. ... Democratic Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, whose Houston district includes some 150,000 Katrina evacuees, ... plans to introduce legislation....

Malcolm Suber, a longtime New Orleans community activist, was shocked to learn that thousands of livable homes were sitting empty. "If there are empty houses in the city," he says, "then working-class and poor people should be able to live in them." According to Suber, taking over vacant units would do more than provide much-needed immediate shelter: It would move the poor back into the city, preventing the key decisions about its future--like whether to turn the Ninth Ward into marshland or how to rebuild Charity Hospital--from being made exclusively by those who can afford land on high ground. "We have the right to fully participate in the reconstruction of our city," Suber says. "And that can only happen if we are back inside." But he concedes that it will be a fight: The old-line families in Audubon and the Garden District may pay lip service to "mixed income" housing, "but the Bourbons uptown would have a conniption if a Section 8 tenant moved in next door" ... So far, the only plan for homeless residents to move back to New Orleans is Bush's bizarre Urban Homesteading Act. ... it barely touches the need: The Administration estimates that in New Orleans there is land for only 1,000 'homesteaders.'"

[whistle]

1. FEMA is implementing the secret PNAC program of the Final Solution

...for poor people in the American 21st Century.

[jmowreader]

2. This "mixed income housing" thing is a load of shit

Rich people do not live next to poor people. Simple fact of life.

Go into the areas where rich people generally live. You will almost invariably find minimum lot size and minimum structure size rules that eliminate the possibility of poor people living in these neighborhoods. House density of 0.5 or 0.33 houses per acre (that means each lot must be two or three acres), minimum house size of 3500 sf...tell me a person with less than a $300,000 income can afford to live in a place such as this.

The "mixed income housing" plan is going to work as well as paying for wars by cutting taxes.

[dcfirefighter]

6. minimum lot sizes DO keep the riffraff out

and I abhor them.

It is possible, but difficult, to mix incomes in urban housing: it requires a variety of unit sizes, locations, materials, etc., as well as, usually, a subsidy for low-income families. It just sucks to be a family who's income is just above 'low'.

In the District of Columbia, there are two 'affordable housing' conversations: one is about the welfare poor - public housing, and another is about the middle/working class: the cops, the firefighters, the teachers, and nurses.

[AirAmFan]

8. Normal market forces no longer apply to NOLA. In a couple of years, after

government subsidies for Katrina rebuilding dry up, you might be right. But for now, subsidizing former 9th Ward families to live in vacant or "warehoused" apartments makes a lot more sense than buying 125,000 mobile homes, with little dry ground to put them on.

In a couple of years, if rebuilding job and training opportunities are distributed fairly, many formerly poverty-stricken 9th Ward families may be able to afford living in much more expensive housing than they could before Katrina.

[pitohui]

3. sez them

i usu. like the nation but i'll retain my skepticism that landlords are allowing all sorts of homes & apts stand empty, i don't know any landlords who can afford to do so

this story has the whiff of bogus to me

[AirAmFan]

7. Where's your proof? Census.gov is the definitive source of DATA on vacancy

rates, but the site is now DOWN for the first time ever in my experience. Go to http://www.census.gov when it's back up, and search for statistics on "vacancy rate" using their prepared alphabetic site index.

In the meantime, googling got me a recent Washington Post article mentioning a 16 percent OFFICE vacancy rate for NOLA, with the last new office building having been constructed in 1989. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/09/AR2005090902448_pf.html

I suspect that landlords are "warehousing" thousands of high-ground apartments for possible conversion to condos when and if the "housing bubble" finally hits NOLA.

[pitohui]

10. where's YOUR proof?

how many houses do you own in new orleans?

how many do you let stand empty?

how many of your friends own houses in new orleans?

how many of them stand empty?

my personal experience is good enough for me, property tax for landlords is much too high for any landlord i know to leave properties sitting empty

i'm not interested in "google" when i have actual knowledge of an area

i have learned that one of my old landlords was killed in katrina, his duplex where i once lived was under 20 feet of water, so don't make me laugh about the "higher ground" argument


it's easy to be all-knowing based on a few googles, not so easy when you have actual experience, the picture is much more complex than you imagine based on google

P.S. yes, we have a high office vacancy rate, since new orleans lost its professional class to houston in the reagan years, what does that have to do w. the price of rice, do you want ppl to live in the unsafe mold-infested plaza towers, that would be another desire projects complete w. asthma-to-order for all the little ones

[AirAmFan]

11. My link in the OP is PROOF ENOUGH for most people, but here's a second

source, from http://neworleansonline.com/pr/pdfs/pr_facts.pdf :

"Housing
€ Total housing units: 215,091
€ Occupied housing units: 188,251
€ Vacant housing units: 26,840
€ For seasonal, recreational use: 2,406
€ Homeowner vacancy rate: 2.2 percent
€ Rental vacancy rate: 7.9 percent
€ Average household size of owner occupied units: 2.6
€ Average household size of renter occupied units: 2.37"

This convention-bureau factsheet appears to be from late 2003 or early 2004. Citywide, more than twelve percent of housing stock was vacant. The housing base for the much lower citywide RENTAL vacancy rate is units AVAILABLE for rent, excluding those being held off the market.

It makes sense that, during a national "housing bubble" that has yet to hit NOLA, many owners of prime tourist-area properties that might someday be marketed as condos would hold them off the market, intending to convert them if the bubble should hit. This is a phenomenon New Yorkers were quite familiar with during the early 90s.

I'm sorry, but your position seems insufferably anti-intellectual. You have offered NO PROOF whatsoever, just your "hunch". http://www.census.gov would allow any researcher (such as Naomi Klein's research assistant for the article in The Nation) to blast you out of the water. But unfortunately, the census site is DOWN right now.

[dcfirefighter]

4. "With landlords preferring to board up apartments rather than lower rents"

Hah. Proof that the tax against land is too low, it's better to hold out for a better selling price than to actually rent your land (and the buildings above it).

If the tax were a bit steeper, the investor would be more likely to generate cash with his holdings - either by putting it to use, or selling it to someone who will.

Taxing land values has no ill effects - taxing property values in general and building values in specific has horrible effects. Split the rate: Land value = 5%, building value = 0%. It'd be a great way to pay for levee maintenance as well.

[Atman]

5. FEMA's only goal now is to help BushCo drain all the remaining cash

from the treasury. The bathtub is full. It's time to hold Uncle Sam's head under the water. This is all working out very well for BushCo.

[AirAmFan]

9. Hundreds of millions of $$ ALREADY committed for Katrina trailers!

Manufactured housing lobbyists ALREADY have been promised hundreds of millions of dollars. I wonder how many millions they had to promise to kick back to Rethug politicians.

From http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/12697087.htm :

"FEMA OKs mobile homes for Katrina evacuees

Associated Press Posted on Tue, Sep. 20, 2005

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. - The Federal Emergency Management Agency ordered tens of thousands of mobile homes and travel trailers on Tuesday to accommodate Katrina evacuees, approving manufacturer bids totaling at least hundreds of millions of dollars, an agency spokesman said.... The nation's largest mobile home manufacturer, Clayton Homes Inc. of Maryville, received a government order Tuesday to build 2,000 single-wide models, company spokesman Chris Nicely said, with delivery requested by Dec. 1. "That won't be a problem," Nicely said.... Nicely declined to provide his company's price information but said the single-wide units typically range in cost from $25,000 to $35,000. He said the mobile homes would likely be built at Clayton plants "closest to the Gulf," including some in Texas, Georgia and Tennessee. ...

Riverside, Calif.-based Fleetwood Enterprises Inc. received orders for 7,500 travel trailers and 3,000 single-section mobile homes, Elden L. Smith, the company's president and chief executive, said in a statement Tuesday. Smith said the "total value of the order to our company is upwards of $170 million."

FEMA spokeswoman Nicol Andrews said Monday that at least 30,000 travel trailers would be ready in Louisiana by Oct. 18, with another 170,000 to be installed soon after. State officials were working to identify plots of land where the trailers could be placed and outfitted with plumbing and electricity, Andrews said. FEMA estimates Katrina displaced 200,000 households, far more than the 15,000 households that needed shelter last year after the Florida hurricanes last year.

ON THE NET
Manufactured Housing Institute: http://www.manufacturedhousing.org
Federal Emergency Management Agency: http://www.fema.gov "

[Fire Walk With Me]

12. Re-districting in favor of Republicans? Naaaahhh.

[AirAmFan]

14. Excellent point. Many of those 200,000 trailers are slated to be hitched

in new trailer parks far away from NOLA. How many of those locations will be in marginally Republican Congressional districts? IMO, not many.

[BiggJawn]

13. When they make NOLA a "Gated Community"....

Just exactly WHERE do they expect the Untouchables who have to do the shitty Scut Work for the Gentry to come from? And then go, when they've earned their $40 a day?

They going to bus them in by shifts? Fast food workers have to be out by 1AM, Nightsoil crewws have until 7AM?

What about the "cleaning Help"?

I think they ought to let the post-modern Yuppies cleanout their OWN damn toilets...

[AirAmFan]

15. DEFINITIVE PROOF of sky-high vacancy rates for French Qtr housing

I googled '"census tracts" "new orleans" "ninth ward" french quarter"' and got 16 hits. One of them led me to the MOTHER LODE of recent neighborhood data for New Orleans and surrounding suburbs.

The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center brilliantly linked thousands of 2000 Census statistics to maps of New Orleans neighborhoods, and put everything online. A user-friendly front-end to this treasure trove of data is at http://www.gnocdc.org/orleans/index.html .

Click on the "French Quarter" section of the map and you'll get to a neighborhood map, at http://www.gnocdc.org/orleans/1/48/index.html . Clicking on the "housing and housing costs" link below the familiar map of the French Quarter gets you to a page of 2000 Census Statistics, at http://www.gnocdc.org/orleans/1/48/housing.html .

There you will see that 37.4 percent of housing units in the Quarter were vacant in April 2000, just as Naomi Klein and her research assistant reported in The Nation.

This vacancy rate is 200 percent higher than the citywide average, and 300 percent higher than the national average!

This is DEFINITIVE PROOF of FEMA's waste and stupidity in ignoring this obvious source of temporary housing. Instead, they are squandering hundreds of millions of dollars on trailer parks, many hundreds of miles away from evacuees' ruined homes.