The New Orleans City Council wants to ease zoning rules in the Lower 9th Ward in an effort to spur more home building in a neighborhood that has long suffered from a lack of investment and economic development.
At its meeting Thursday, the council directed the City Planning Commission to consider amending the rules to allow construction of single-family homes and two-family homes on 30-foot-wide lots, which are smaller than current construction rules require but plentiful in the Lower 9th Ward.
The measure also would eliminate a requirement that single-family homes have off-street parking and allow two-family homes to have just one off-street space.
Lower 9th Ward native Kendall Spears thinks the neighborhood where he grew up got shafted after Hurricane Katrina.
"We are helping to remove layers of barriers for developers," said City Councilwoman Cyndi Nguyen, whose district includes the Lower 9th Ward and who authored the measure.
New development is sorely needed in the neighborhood, officials say.
Many Lower 9th Ward homeowners received their property through inheritances or had paid off their mortgages when Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters ravaged the area in 2005. That meant they weren't required to maintain flood insurance, and many didn't have it.
While homeowners were aided by the $13.4 billion Road Home grant program, the government only gave funds equivalent to what the homes were worth before the storm.
That policy in many cases didn't provide enough money to meet rebuilding costs, a problem that hit New Orleans' African-American neighborhoods hard because of depressed market values.
The result was that people who wanted to return home to New Orleans often didn't receive enough aid to do so. It was a particular problem in the Lower 9th Ward.
The New Orleans Redevelopment Authority assumed control of lots homeowners agreed or were forced to give up. Ever since, it has been trying to sell them to interested buyers and homebuilders.
Businesses, wary of the area's diminished population, have been less likely to invest there than elsewhere in the city. A lack of stores and other services, in turn, keeps away many homebuyers โ a chicken-and-egg conundrum city officials hope to fix by subsidizing homes for rent and sale.
Without a policy change, builders will continue to have to jump through hoops to complete projects, said Jamie Neville, of Neville Development, one of the firms with which NORA has partnered.
For his 44-unit Blueberry Hill development, for example, crews have built two-family homes on neighborhood corners whenever possible.
โThere was no way that you could have ever built a double on a 30-foot lot, because there was no way you could get two parking spaces on that lot," Neville said.
The Planning Commission will hold a public hearing on the proposal to create an interim zoning district for the area, which would incorporate the rules Nguyen has proposed.
Nguyen touted the motion earlier this month as one part of a broader plan to infuse new life into District E, which covers the Lower 9th Ward and New Orleans East.
Her plans also include rebranding the Lower 9 as the "L9" and the district as a whole as "The E," in a bid to change public perceptions.
It was the third Saturday in November, and New Orleans City Councilwoman Cyndi Nguyen was sipping coffee in a nondescript meeting room near th…