Thursday, June 15, 2006

 

New Orleans To Get 5,000 Garden Apartments


That was quick. Federal housing officials announced yesterday that more than 5,000 public housing apartments in New Orleans will be bulldozed to make way for those nicer “garden” developments for people with a wider range of incomes. You remember the arithmetic from yesterday’s post. Pre-Katrina there were about 8,000 public housing apartments, although an unknown number were uninhabitable. About 1,000 units have been reopened, and the officials promise to release another 1,000 in the next 60 days. So the housing stock in the city will only decrease by 1,000, less what was already uninhabitable. You might argue that you should also reduce availability by the number of units shifted to higher income people, but remember, those people have to be living somewhere now, perhaps in those FEMA trailers. It was not clear how many, if any, of the new garden units will be set aside for the previous residents of the projects, but the trailers have already attracted a nicer mix of incomes and races, so it will all work out.

Previous posts have noted that the FEMA trailers roll over in the wind, but this should not be a problem if they are packed together in the density preferred by the previous project residents.

Federal officials recognize that there is a severe housing shortage now, which has caused rents to increase, but they are meeting that with a 35% increase in the value of the rent vouchers for people who want to rent apartments at market rates. As a side note, you can see how this is a lot smarter than the practice in New York City, where rent controls keep rents well below market, “market” being the rate at which supply will equal demand. In New Orleans, where landlords are in effect renting to the federal government, the supply will come when it can be built, presumably after those 5,000 new garden units are finished.

Advocates for the poor are predictably refusing to take the long view, arguing that people need some place to stay now. It does make you wonder what happened to all those 100,000 FEMA trailers, not to mention the additional ones on order. There haven’t been any high winds yet, so we don’t have to look in Kansas, Dorothy.

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