Housingnola

HousingNOLA’s mission is to provide a road map to maximize the effectiveness of scarce government resources, increasing non-traditional resources, and assisting private sector investors in making strategic choices. HousingNOLA is a 10-year partnership between the community leaders, and dozens of public, private, and nonprofit organizations working to solve New Orleans’ affordable housing crisis. HousingNOLA partners with the Greater New Orleans Housing Alliance (GNOHA), a collaborative of home builders and community development organization advocating for the preservation and production of affordable housing. In 2014, the Foundation for Louisiana’s TOGETHER Initiative convened a group of New Orleans residents and non-profits to develop strategies for improving housing policies and increasing equity in the city. What emerged from this initiative was a desire to draw upon the community’s widespread engagement with housing policy issues in the post-Katrina years, and finish the transition from “recovery mode” toward planning for a strong future for New Orleans. HousingNOLA’s mission is to offer a road map to maximize the effectiveness of scarce government resources, increasing non-traditional resources, and assisting private sector investors in making strategic choices. It also offers a data framework to inform future housing policy, as well as shared leadership and engagement towards more thoughtful and scalable housing developments that are affordable for all income levels. The HousingNOLA 10-year Strategy and Implementation Plan, released on December 10, 2015, indicates the need for 33,600 additional affordable units in the city by 2025. Further, the data clearly shows that wages have not come close to mirroring the dramatic rise in housing costs. Since 2000, New Orleans home values and rents have both more than doubled. The city ranks second in the nation for the percentage of renters paying more than half of their income on housing (37%).