Housing Choices for Poor Families Were Bad Before Katrina, and Still Are

Approximately 70 percent of homes in New Orleans were damaged in the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina, including half of the city’s rental housing stock. Much of that pre-Katrina landscape belonged to low-income residents who had little opportunity to live in neighborhoods that weren’t saturated with poverty. The few neighborhoods characterized by families living above poverty actively worked to keep low-income families away. Ten years after Katrina, not much has changed.

A new report from Tulane University researchers Stacy Seicshnaydre and Ryan C. Albright reveals that the bulk of low-income families in New Orleans continue to live in neighborhoods mired in poverty and racial segregation, despite the new housing stock that has emerged in the post-Katrina recovery. Before the storm, the main living option for low-wage earners was public housing, in projects that hosted nearly 5,000 units across the city. Almost all of those have been demolished (per pre-Katrina U.S. Housing and Urban Development dictum), and replaced with mixed-income developments.