New Orleans' Leading Affordable-Housing Developer Explains Its Lack of Affordable Housing

In an August 27 piece, ”Why Louisiana Fought Low-Income Housing in New Orleans After Katrina,” CityLab explored the city’s challenges with reproducing adequate housing for very low-income families during the recovery. One of the figures at the center of that still-unfolding saga is Pres Kabacoff, CEO of HRI Properties, the real-estate development company responsible for building most of the large-scale apartment complexes around New Orleans. HRI has about 26 of these, containing 2,862 apartment units in New Orleans, about half of which they consider affordable, according to a portfolio the company shared with CityLab.

It’s for this reason that you can’t really discuss affordable housing in post-Katrina New Orleans without talking about Kabacoff: He’s the city’s primary supplier of the stock. In fact, Kabacoff fundamentally changed how “affordable housing” gets talked about in New Orleans. Before Katrina, it meant living in one of the public housing complexes designed for the very lowest-wage workers. Or, for those who made a little more money, it meant renting half of a shotgun house from a private landlord—who most likely lived on the other side of the shotgun.