Tackling Affordable Housing at Multiple Scales

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

• How New Orleans is tackling the challenge of affordable housing and what actors across various sectors are doing to address the crisis
• How the integration of work from nonprofit, private, and academic groups, in conjunction with community engagement, can result in advocacy, direct action, and accountability
• How to combine community engagement with planning and professional research to address the affordable-housing crisis

MORE SESSION DETAILS

New Orleans is in the midst of an affordable-housing crisis. When considering wages as compared with housing costs, the city ranks as the second most cost-burdened city in the nation, and data indicates the need for 33,600 additional affordable units in the city by 2025. The HousingNOLA initiative, led by the Greater New Orleans Housing Alliance (GNOHA), is a process and a plan for New Orleans to achieve affordability in housing at all levels, and will continue to engage residents and key stakeholder groups in a community-led process over the next 10 years. This session will present three dynamic approaches from GNOHA and its partners, demonstrating the need to integrate multidisciplinary, inclusive efforts to solve New Orleans’s affordable-housing crisis. Hear from Asakura Robinson — a planning, urban design, and landscape architecture firm working closely with GNOHA to conduct research, explore potential housing policy changes, and effectively convey housing research for political advocacy — and the Small Center for Collaborative Design, an organization that has worked with the Greater Tremé Consortium to conduct neighborhood-specific research and help residents of Tremé interact with the challenge of affordable housing and suggest solutions that fit the context of New Orleans’s historic context.