Sucsess Stories

Nearly  228,000  homes  were damaged  or  destroyed  in  New Orleans when the levees broke. In Central City, where Nena Handy grew  up,  half  the  neighborhood went  underwater. Eighty percent of  the  residents  were  renters, many  living  in old shotgun houses like Handy’s,  long  neglected  by truant  landlords.  Before Katrina,  Handy’s  ramshackle  rental  had holes  in  the  floor  and  gaps  in the walls. With no insulation, the house  was  damp  in  the  winter and  sweltering  in  the  summer.

After  Katrina,  “the  critters  took over,”  she  says  of  the  roaches, rats,  and termites  that moved  in as  the  waters  receded.  Handy had had  enough.  She  convinced her husband, Neil Maneaux, they could do better.

Nena handy is trained as a professional chef and makes a mean jambalaya, one of her  husband’s favorite dishes. “I’ll cook anything I can get my hands on,” she says.     From the ktchen window of the house she was renting, handy could see a construction crew next door putting up a brand new modular home.  
Fed up with a “slumlord that neve got around to fixing anything,” she decided to talk   to Chris Ross, a man she’d seen on the building site. “I just told him flat out I wanted it,” she recalls. 

Chris  Ross  is  project  director  of  the  New  Orleans  Neighborhood Development Collaborative, the contractor-developer of the house Handy had her eye on.  NONDC is one of several nonprofit developers in New Orleans building hoses that low-income and working families can actually afford to own.  "We're about making investments in people, not just places," Ross says.  "We're about changing lives. More than 60 percent of the households in Central City get by on less than $20,000 a year.  Economic development is fine, but it needs to take into account the needs of low-to-moderate income families." 

Ross sent Handy to a local bank for financing.  She and her husband never even bothered with a checking account and knew nothing about financing a house.  But her husband had a good job as a manager with a grocery store, and they felt the could swing a mortgage.

"They walked us through the whole process, answered all of my questions,"  Handy remembers, "Our credit checked out perfect. We just needed to save a bit."  Then Katrina hit.

"Once the levees broke, I knew everything was lost," she says about her hometown.  A month after the storm, her husband returned to his job, and Handy began making trips from Baton Rouge, where the family was staying, to complete the loan application for the house.  When the city officially reopened, they moved back into the rental.  Though the house hadn't flooded, the storm had shredded some of the siding and the roof.  Birds flew in through the holes, but at least Handy and her family had a rood over their heads.  Others weren't so lucky.

Lack of affordable housing remains the central dilemma for low income families hoping to make a life in post-Katrina New Orleans.  Forty-eight thousand rental units were damaged or lost in the flood.  Five thousand renter in public housing evacuated with the storm; only a handful has been permitted to return.  Rents are up a whopping 40 to 70 percent in many neighborhoods across the city.  And while distribution of recovery funds for homeowners has been glacially slow, renters have been largely left out in the cold.

 Katrina shattered lives and tore off roofs, but it also blew a hole wide open in the political culture of the region.  Community groups and advocates for the poor have stepped into the breach in an effort to have a say about the region's future on everything from housing to wetlands restoration.  Living Cities, a consortium of major foundations, businesses, and government entities, is working to shape and equitable housing recovery policy and to ensure that a fair share of recovery funds benefit low-income residents, including renters.

"We're looking at a real opportunity," says Chris Ross.  "We have the chance now to invest in Central City and its people, an investment that should have been happening during the last 30 years, but didn't.  How do we create public housing, for instance that includes and exit strategy from poverty for families that have lived, raised their kids, and died there?  How do we fund and develop mixed-income housing for low-to-moderate working families who want to return or stay here?"

Nena Handy, her husband Neil, and their boys, Cornelius and Jason, made do in the rental until there loan application was approved.  "We could've moved somewhere else, but we decided to stay in the city," she says.  "To me it's home and I wanted to get back here by any means necessary."  With a small down payment, they signed the papers and took possession of the house Handy had her heart set on.  It had come through the storm unscathed.

There first night in their new home Nena Handy stood in the front room and asked her husband what he saw.  "A beautiful woman," he said with a grin.   SHE PUT  HER ARMS AROUND HIM AND TOLD HIM,  "I SEE A HOUSE, A HOME - OUR HOME!"  Handy counts their investment as a legacy for her sons.  "This house is not only for us to be proud of, but our kids as well."