Home in the Ruins

By BOB HERBERT

New Orleans

As its problems mount, the Big Easy is becoming increasingly unnerved.

Local officials, who will never be mistaken for the brightest lights in the firmament, have been unable to stem a hideous wave of murders. On Tuesday Mayor C. Ray Nagin said, “Enough is enough,” then added, “But we’ve said that before.”

The public school system, one of the worst in the nation, is trying to sell off some of its buildings to help with a desperate cash crunch.

Most depressing, more than 17 months after the horror of Hurricane Katrina, mile after mile after mile of the city that loved to present itself as the epicenter of laughter and good times still lies in ruin.

New Orleans is a place that could use a hopeful sign of any kind, some positive development to signal that perhaps better times are coming.

Enter Ghebre Selassie Mehreteab. Most people call him Gabe, and so will I for the rest of this column. Gabe is a middle-aged bundle of energy who heads the NHP Foundation, a national nonprofit organization that has taken on the difficult mission of providing quality housing at rents that poor and middle-class families can afford. There is no more imperative need in New Orleans than affordable housing.

On Garden Oaks Drive in the Algiers neighborhood Gabe showed me a remarkable sight — a sparkling two-story apartment complex, neatly landscaped, that was owned by NHPF, was badly damaged by the hurricane, and is now being completely renovated at a cost of $20 million.

Nearby are buildings that look like the hurricane hit them yesterday. The NHPF complex, known as Forest Park, will have 284 solid, attractive, energy-efficient units completed this year, with tenants beginning to move in as early as May. The rents will range from $194 to $673 a month.

In New Orleans East, which had been completely submerged in the flood, I stood with Gabe and an architect at what was once the site of a housing complex known as Walnut Square. “New Orleans East was under water for eight days,” said Gabe. “We had to raze it. It’s demolished.”

A quiet wind was blowing across the vast empty space where 18 residential buildings used to be.

The effort to rebuild Walnut Square, at a cost of $37 million, is already under way. There will be 209 apartments, with rents ranging from $130 to $820 a month. There will also be a commercial strip, a community center and day care facilities. (The apartments will be built on raised foundations to guard against future catastrophic floods.)

Eventually Gabe hopes to build 3,000 affordable rental apartments in and around New Orleans at a total cost of $300 million.

How does he do it, when others find the task so daunting?

The key, he said, is to combine the expertise of a successful real estate operation with the talent and vision of an experienced foundation committed to what is essentially a charitable mission. NHPF, which has its Louisiana office in Baton Rouge, gets the funds to build from government grants, tax credits and low-interest loans, as well as conventional financing.

As Gabe dryly noted, “There is not much profit in developing low- income housing.”

No successful rebirth of New Orleans is possible without substantial amounts of new and rebuilt housing — housing that the city’s very large percentage of low-income residents can afford. Most of the people homing in on development opportunities here have either no interest or no expertise in building such housing.

“There are essentially two kinds of organizations here,” said Gabe. “You have out-of-town real estate developers who look at this as a tremendous opportunity and their main concern, quite naturally, has been how much money they can make. On the other hand, you have well-meaning nonprofit entities that unfortunately, in most cases, do not have the capacity to develop on a significant scale.”

Compounding the problem has been the lack of housing expertise in New Orleans. Much of the city’s housing stock pre-Katrina was so poor as to be illegal in most major American cities. The Housing Authority of New Orleans, which administered public housing, was in such bad shape its operations had to be taken over by the federal government.

Half the population of New Orleans has been dispersed across the United States. Many of those still in the city are living in trailers or are doubled up with relatives and friends. There is no way to overstate the desperate need for housing.

Gabe and the NHP Foundation have provided at least one model that works.