Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s administration announced last week, with great fanfare, a 10-year plan to address New Orleans’ housing crisis. It’s about time.
Since Cantrell took office in May 2018, New Orleans’ housing crisis has gotten dramatically worse. At a minimum, she could have continued the housing plan that former Mayor Mitch Landrieu put in place — a plan Cantrell supported as a City Council member.
Instead, she scrapped Landrieu’s initiative, replacing it with … nothing.
The city implemented Landrieu’s plan at the urging of HousingNOLA and other nonprofit advocates. Landrieu’s plan included key elements now incorporated into Cantrell’s “new” 10-year plan, most notably city funding of a housing trust fund.
Cantrell’s proposal, drafted by consultants and outlined in an 84-page report, contains 40 recommendations, including a city-subsidized housing trust fund, creating a new city housing department, and zoning and land-use reforms.
The consultants’ report also highlights in stark detail the extent of New Orleans’ housing crisis — skyrocketing insurance costs, market-driven hikes in home prices, insufficient affordable housing, adverse impacts of short-term rentals, and a stagnant local economy.
“This has been a long time coming,” HousingNOLA executive director Andreanecia Morris said of the mayor’s plan. HousingNOLA released its own 10-year plan in 2015, which included several elements of what the mayor now proposes.
“Mayor Landrieu had a plan in place for five years,” Morris told me. “Its procedures were good, and then just OK. When Mayor Cantrell took over, we asked her to update the plan. Unfortunately, things went in the other direction.”
Morris referenced HousingNOLA’s annual “report card,” which has graded City Hall’s responses to the local housing crisis since 2016. The report card is issued every September, in time for the city’s annual budgeting process. It rates the city’s progress (or lack thereof) toward achieving specific goals, expressed in percentages, along with an overall grade.
The 2016 report card gave the city a grade of B. The following year, which was Landrieu’s last full year as mayor, it gave the city a C.
In 2018, the year Cantrell took office, the city’s grade fell to a D, followed by another D in 2019. In 2020, the city got an F — and it has received Fs every year since.
Worse, the city has failed more dramatically in each succeeding year during Cantrell’s tenure. In 2019, her first full year as mayor, the city’s overall percentage rating was 63%. Last year it was 30%.
It’s almost as if the mayor declared war on people struggling with housing challenges.
Thankfully, the City Council has already moved to reverse course. Council members voted unanimously in March to put a proposed City Charter amendment on the Nov. 5 ballot that, if approved by voters, would permanently dedicate 2% of the city’s annual local revenue (roughly $20 million at current levels) to the housing trust fund. It would not increase taxes.
The next step: Creating a separate city Department of Housing and holding the department head accountable — at budget time and throughout the year.
“It needs to be an issue that’s addressed right now, in the short term,” Morris said. “We can’t wait for the next mayor and council to take office in 2026.”
Short-term and long-term, solving New Orleans’ housing crisis will require heavy lifting by everyone — the mayor, the council and citizens.