New Orleans City Council agrees to ease zoning rules for Lower 9th Ward housing
BY JESSICA WILLIAMS | This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. MAR 29, 2019 - 3:39 PM
New Orleans City Council member Cyndi Nguyen, whose district includes New Orleans East, listens to public comments before voting on whether Entergy’s $210 million power plant should proceed in New Orleans, La., Thursday, Feb. 21, 2019.
Builders aiming to break ground on new homes in the Lower 9th Ward will have a smoother road ahead under zoning rules the City Council finalized Thursday.
The council unanimously agreed to ease construction rules on 30-foot-wide lots, which are smaller than current construction rules require but abundant in that neighborhood. Before, developers had to get special permits in order to build on those lots.
The council also lifted a requirement that single-family homes have off-street parking, and agreed to cut the number of required off-street parking spaces for two-family homes from two to one.
“As we talk about building affordable houses and restoring neighborhoods, this has been a barrier for developers in the (Lower 9th Ward) that they have to go through,” said City Councilwoman Cyndi Nguyen, who authored the measure.
Thursday's move came four months after the council directed the City Planning Commission to study reducing some of the restrictions on Lower 9th Ward developers.
Officials hope the changes will help spur residential construction in an area where progress has been slow-going after Hurricane Katrina's devastation in 2005.
Because many homeowners in the area received their property through inheritances or had paid off their mortgages before the storm, they weren’t required to keep flood insurance and often didn’t have it.
Although a $13.4 billion Road Home grant program for people without insurance doled out funds that matched what homes were worth before Katrina, that aid only went so far in neighborhoods with depressed property values.
In the end, many residents who wanted to return after the storm could not. The New Orleans Redevelopment Authority assumed control of lots homeowners gave up and has been trying to sell them to interested buyers and homebuilders ever since.
Businesses, meanwhile, have shied away from the area’s reduced population. City officials hope the construction of more homes will help jump-start broader investment in the area.
The regulations would also allow front yards to be set back 10 feet from the city streets, instead of 20 feet, as had been required before.
Nguyen said she hoped the move would help agencies like the redevelopment authority and the developers it works with to get projects off the ground more quickly.
"This is a step to help the L9 to rebuild many of its vacant lots," she said.
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