Rents Up In NOLA While $846M Sits Unclaimed
Almost nothing, I mean nothing surprises my anymore related to Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans.
In New Orleans shotgun houses are located all throughout the city and account for a large percentage of housing for lower income folks. These type of homes usually are no more than 12 feet (3.5 m) wide, with doors at each end, and consist of three to five rooms in a row with no hallways. They add a charm to New Orleans that is hard to express.
So in the aftermath of Katrina a fund was set-up to help the owners repair them and get renters back into them. Pretty smart and simple idea isn’t it. Well the execution seems to be harder than you might think.
According the numbers gathered by The Road Home, of the money allocated to help repair/rebuild these homes, more than three years after Katrina only .027% has been distributed to owners.
The four-unit shotgun house that Sandra Marshall bought after decades of double shifts has sat untouched since the flooding of Hurricane Katrina, while nearly $850 million in federal aid for her and thousands of other mom-and-pop landlords sits on a bureaucratic shelf.
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She has applied for a repair loan from the nearly forgotten Louisiana Small Rental Property Program, created in the aftermath of Katrina to provide financial help to as many as 13,000 live-in owners of the shotgun and cottage conversions that kept rents cheap here for generations.
So far, it has put money in the hands of only 352 landlords. The hurdles have been its flawed implementation, limited financial resources among applicants, and lately, the national credit crunch. Now, the state is seeking to overhaul the program and divert the funds.
Let me say that again, more than three years after Katrina only .027% has been distributed to home owners. Maybe we ought to get some of the TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program) folks down there. They can give away hundreds of billions in a couple weeks.
