The New Orleans City Council has passed an executive budget for the 2024 fiscal year, signaling remarkable new commitments from lawmakers to housing justice. The $1.57 billion budget allocates an historic $22 million for an array of housing initiatives, including full funding for the city’s new Healthy Homes program, a citywide effort that will ensure rental housing units are up to standard. The council also allocated funds for the expansion of the city’s existing right to counsel (RTC) program and made funds available for a newly created housing trust fund that will support the construction of more affordable housing.
One of the advocacy groups involved in securing funding for the city’s housing priorities was the Louisiana Fair Housing Action Center (LFHAC). LFHAC, which worked with another New Orleans-based group, Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative, also served as a cohort member of NLIHC’s 2022-2023 End Rental Arrears to Stop Evictions (ERASE) project cohort. As a member of the cohort, LFHAC worked towards the passage of the city’s Healthy Homes program, as well as on the implementation of the city’s RTC program.
Monique Blossom, the director of policy and communications for the Louisiana Fair Housing Action Center, expressed support for the city’s budgetary investments. “The Louisiana Fair Housing Action Center is pleased that our advocacy for fully funded Healthy Homes and Right to Counsel programs, as well as a $17 million investment in the newly created Housing Trust fund, received support of all members of New Orleans City Council, the Mayor, and the City Administration,” she said. “This is a significant commitment to ensure all New Orleanians have safe, healthy, and affordable places to live, and representation in eviction court. We will continue to work to make sure the city follows through on these commitments, and we will keep pushing for policies and funding equal to the scale of our housing crisis.”
Housing has long been a top priority for the city’s residents. For more than a decade, tenant advocates have rallied for protections that would prevent New Orleans’s historic housing stock from falling into substandard condition – but to no avail. Because New Orleans is home to a significant share of older housing units, a portion of homes have fallen victim to issues such as mold and structural impairment. Often, tenants asking for maintenance issues to be rectified by their landlords were met with eviction notices in response – a tactic not historically prohibited by law in Louisiana. As a result, maintenance issues with buildings in the city would typically go unrepaired or not even be investigated.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the passage of such protections became a reality after advocacy efforts increased tenfold due to the ongoing threat of the public health crisis, culminating in a proposed “Healthy Homes” ordinance (“Ordinance No. 33898”). In the original proposed ordinance, advocates set out to secure three key wins for tenants, including anti-retaliation protections, stronger health and safety standards for housing units, and proactive upkeep and enforcement of rental inspections. An amended version of the bill was passed in November 2022 after months of negotiations between local housing justice-based organizations, tenant advocates, landlord groups, and elected officials. In the amended version, which was later gutted by the bill’s opponents through a formal amendment process, rental inspections were not included. However, the Healthy Homes program was created to include anti-retaliation protections for tenants. Anti-retaliation protections went into effect in the city on July 1, 2023. The law also requires landlords to register their properties with the City of New Orleans and take an oath that their housing unit is habitable. This portion of the law goes into effect on January 1, 2024.
To ensure the successful implementation of the Healthy Homes program, the city budget allocated an investment of $2.5 million, the total amount of funding asked for by the city council members. The allocation of funding will go towards hiring staff members who will oversee the program.
Another housing priority funded through the council’s budget is the city’s “right to counsel” program. Lawmakers in New Orleans formally passed RTC protections in 2022 after successfully piloting a “Tenant Eviction Assistance Program and Right to Counsel” program during the COVID-19 pandemic. Under the law, which was passed through “Ordinance No. 33682,” all tenants, regardless of income, will be eligible to receive representation through a court-appointed lawyer who has been contracted out through Southeast Louisiana Legal Services. When the program was first created, it was funded with $2 million through the city’s emergency rental assistance grant (ERAP). In the city’s new budget, the RTC program will receive an additional $2.4 million dollars.
The expansion of the city’s RTC program is a much-needed win for New Orleanians. High eviction rates have impacted renters in the city disproportionately, even prior to the pandemic. On average, the yearly eviction rate included over 5,000 households. Of those, renter households of color, who make up 59% of the city’s population, were most likely to experience the largest impacts. In 2022, court watchers in the city reported that 82.2% of eviction proceedings in the city involved Black tenants. Black women faced the greatest disparities in eviction rates of any population group, representing 56.8% of evictions filings. Of those individuals facing eviction in the city, it has been reported that only 6% of tenants in New Orleans had access to legal representation in court prior to the start of the RTC program, a number that has certainly shifted under the newly expanded program.
Finally, the largest portion of the $22 million in funding passed through the city council’s budget provides $17 million for a newly created affordable housing trust fund. One purpose of the fund is to address the city’s growing housing unaffordability crisis. In 2021, NLIHC’s Gap report found that the city faces a shortage of nearly 48,000 homes available to renters with incomes at or below 50% of area median income (AMI). To address this gap, a renter in New Orleans would need to make $22.73 an hour to afford a two-bedroom housing unit at fair market rent ($1,182). In the State of Louisiana, however, the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.
The passage of funding for affordable housing developments has been seen as a big win for tenant advocates and housing justice-focused organizations that have asked for more long-term solutions to solve the city’s housing crisis – one of Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s top administrative priorities. In June 2023, the City of New Orleans passed $32 million in short-term funding for affordable housing development using pandemic relief funds through the “American Rescue Plan Act.” The funding contributed to the development and upkeep of 14 existing affordable housing projects. The new affordable housing trust fund, however, will focus on sustaining investments made into affordable housing developments. The new housing trust fund has not been allocated permanent funding past the 2024 funding cycle, but lawmakers in New Orleans are working to include an amendment to the ballot in the 2024 election that will make the trust a permanent item funded through the city council.
More information on the New Orleans budget can be found here.
To learn more about the ERASE Project, including the work conducted by LFHAC, please visit: https://nlihc.org/erase-project