Miracle In New Orleans

By S.C. Gwynne/New Orleans

Public housing in America is almost universally acknowledged as a policy failure of mammoth proportions. But in a nation of neglected, rat-infested and crime-ridden housing projects, New Orleans has always rated special notoriety. Its government-subsidized apartments were consistently rated among the country's worst. One of its biggest projects, an 1,800-unit catastrophe called Desire, was long reputed to be the very worst. The Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO), a political hornet's nest of patronage and chronic mismanagement, was so inept at making repairs that tenants routinely waited years for simple services. Hundreds of tenements were literally falling down.

Things got so bad that two years ago the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development found itself with two choices: place the housing authority under jurisdiction of a federal judge or find an outside institution free of HANO's own dubious 58-year history to run it. Federal officials decided to hand the housing authority over to Tulane University--a highly selective, overwhelmingly white, old-line Southern school situated in a picturesque neighborhood in uptown New Orleans. It seemed an unlikely choice: What could Tulane know about fixing a bureaucracy that was rotting away as much as the buildings in its care? A lot, it turns out. According to the Federal Government's rating system, Tulane has pulled off one of the most dramatic turnarounds in the history of public housing. Says Tulane President Eamon Kelly: "The university is the last institution you would pick to run public housing, until you look at the alternatives."

Tulane first came to the attention of HUD with a proposal it submitted offering to use the resources of the university to help one housing project. What the university got instead, in a deal cut by then HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros and New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial, was full authority over the housing of 55,000 people--10% of the city's population--in 10 projects. The agreement allowed Tulane senior vice president Ron Mason, the new de facto head of HANO, to undertake a complete reorganization of the agency.

Wisely, Mason and Tulane first tackled nuts and bolts. They evicted criminals and drug users, reduced the backlog of work orders by 9,000 and improved response times for such things as plumbing repairs from months to days or hours. Just as important, they enlisted the support of citywide tenant groups who had once fought HANO bitterly.

At a 1,400-unit project called C.J. Peete, residents have been recruited to do maintenance and help with security and job placement. "It used to be nobody paid attention to what we were saying," says Augusta Kerry, head of C.J. Peete's resident council. "Now they listen, and we do things together."

That's one prong of the Tulane approach. The other is a series of ingenious ways Mason has found to put the brains and resources of the university to work in the city's poorest neighborhoods (average annual household income: $5,300). By recruiting large numbers of students and faculty to work in projects and by opening Tulane's campus to residents of public housing, Tulane has gone far beyond simple management of real estate. Some 150 faculty and 500 students from Tulane and nearby Xavier University now venture forth regularly to C.J. Peete, where they do everything from private tutoring to teaching courses on health, parenting, job training, teen pregnancy and high school equivalency. They help residents find jobs, and provide seed capital from the program's budget, as well as know-how, to help them start small businesses. So far, the program has helped 1,000 families.

In other Tulane-run tenant programs, 354 jobs have been found for residents, 600 youths have been placed in basketball and other sports programs, and 10 summer camps have been started.

Fully half of the city's 13,500 housing units will be torn down in the next five years. In their place will rise $750 million of new housing, planned by Tulane and HANO and financed by the Federal Government. In once forbidding places like Desire, new single-family units and community centers are already on the drawing board. "The stuff we are doing is cutting edge," says HANO executive director Michael Kelly, an architect. "We're going to be reshaping neighborhoods."

After only two years it may seem premature to call Tulane's stewardship an unqualified success. "They have a long way to go," says Kevin Marchman, HUD's Assistant Secretary for Public and Indian Housing. "But they have made more progress in the last two years than we have seen in the last 25. What is going on in New Orleans is a local miracle." That, at the least, ought to keep the money flowing.