New Orleans Real Estate Information
The most widely reported aspect of Katrina’s mass havoc has been an alleged caste-based rampage, leaving many low-income areas in shambles. There has been much dispute on how to rebuild and whether to rebuild certain areas at all. Currently there is a huge demand for urban public housing as residents have been crammed into temporary ghettos and rental housing is in crisis.
New Orleans has been designated a “GO Zone” by the federal government, a beneficial designation that give tax cuts to areas struck by natural disasters to facilitate the revitalization process. GO Zone policies provide a means for private business owners to borrow capital at a favorable tax-exempt rate to rebuild commercial property, public utility property, and rental residential real estate. This legislation allows Louisiana to use $7.9 billion in tax-exempt bonds to finance the rebuilding and rehabilitation of real estate that fits into the aforementioned categories. New Orleans builders are allocating the majority of their GO Zone tax credits to finance rental housing for families of mixed incomes.
Determined not only to rebuild but to reinvigorate the city, New Orleans builders are pursuing a utopian urban layout that integrates people of varied incomes into shared communities. Proposed neighborhoods and apartment complexes are set to be a homogenization of New Orleans residents to create a well-functioning neighborhood that is a strict departure from the communities populated entirely by people subsisting on government allocations in uniform housing projects. The non-profit watchdog Louisiana Recovery Authority condemned such segregated conditions as a concentration of poverty and all the social evils associated with it.
The mixed-income communities are to include several market rate properties along with a number of subsidized units. The Louisiana Housing Finance Agency has already set aside $30 million in tax credits for these mixed-income projects while $20.7 million has been allotted strictly to pursuing public housing developments. Due to its sustaining of 63% of the damage to rental housing, New Orleans will receive a substantial amount of this figure. In addition, the state has received $667 million in Community Development Block Grants to fund mixed-income developments.
In order to rebuild the city and necessary jobs for its residents, the Louisiana Department of Economic Development is aiming to turn the state into a mecca for the cutting edge of construction technology. Rebuilding the 200,000 homes devastated by Katrina necessitates a new approach to construction—one that is more cost-efficient and more importantly, faster. Satisfying both categories is modular home building. Homes that are built in factories and shipped in segments, modular homes provide a much quicker construction process that does not have to adjust to the local weather conditions. Modular homes are also stronger than traditional homes built on site. Since they often must cross state lines to reach their destinations and each step of construction is overseen by third-party engineers, these homes are built to the most stringent housing codes.
The modular home industry is no longer an assembly line for the traditional mobile home, but is now taking projects to build homes worth $2 to $5 million. The high demand for quick housing and Louisiana’s interest in modular homes does not mean that New Orleans will be recreated as a citywide trailer park. Modular homes are simply a quick way to achieve the same quality home without the meteorological factors of which New Orleans residents have grown understandably weary. Meetings are underway to bring several of these modular home factories to Louisiana.
While the real estate housing market is desperately scrambling to build more homes for displaced residents, non-local speculators are in a frenzy to buy damaged property for cheap to restore and sell for profit. People have lost their homes, their lives’ work, the mementos of their lives, and rubbernecking speculators rush to buy the remains as fixer-upper opportunities to sell for profit. And, as the former owners struggle to reclaim their lives, these ruthless exploiters are seeing such great profit value that New Orleans is flooded with malevolence once again. Only this time it is in the form of wealth-seeking humans, purchasing in storm-damaged areas where housing is already scarce.
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