The Times Picayune (New Orleans)

Rebuilding New Orleans represents the housing and urban development challenge of a lifetime. But the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has thus far offered the city little beyond business as usual -- boarding up the public housing projects, dispensing block grant dollars and offering limited mortgage relief to FHA-insured homeowners.

If Congress gives HUD responsibility for housing aid in the next emergency, as U.S. Rep. Richard Baker of Baton Rouge has proposed, all Americans should demand a strategy that ensures evacuees safe and secure shelter, especially for evacuations that last more than a few days. But right now, New Orleans needs more than another emergency response.

In other (less devastating) housing crises -- like the Northridge, Calif., earthquake of 1994 -- HUD showed much greater imagination in crafting new solutions, finding new dollars, and forming new partnerships. No, HUD shouldn't dictate New Orleans' rebuilding, but the city has good reason to expect far more innovation and action than it has yet seen.

So what should Mayor Ray Nagin be asking of HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson?

First, the city needs HUD's help to bring damaged housing back into use as quickly as possible, at the same time the city crafts a longer term strategy for developing new, high-quality affordable housing.

New Orleans' housing authority, currently run by HUD, should bring all salvageable public housing units back on line this year. Some of these projects are obsolete and will have to be rehabbed or replaced before long. But until that happens, New Orleans needs all habitable houses and apartments available for immediate occupancy.

There's been a lot of controversy about who should be allowed to return to public housing. Secretary Jackson's off-hand proposal to reserve public housing for "the best people" didn't help. Instead, HUD should sit down with city officials and tenant advocates to hammer out fair criteria for returning public housing residents -- possibly excluding anyone who engages in criminal activity and giving priority to people who are willing to work (with job training if necessary).

Over the longer term, HUD must help New Orleans replace its unsalvageable public housing with well-designed and well-managed mixed-income communities. Adopting great models from cities across the country -- like Seattle, Atlanta, Louisville, and Charlotte -- could make more affordable homes and apartments available without recreating the dysfunctional projects of the city's past.

But HUD's help need not be limited to today's public housing inventory.

Either the city or the housing authority could start buying houses whose owners don't want to return, rehabbing them and renting them out at affordable levels.

This scattered-site strategy has worked well in Denver, where the publicly owned house is often the best-looking property on the block.

Bringing properties back to life would spur the renewal of devastated neighborhoods while making homes available for families yearning to come back.

Clearly, the city needs a wider array of interim housing solutions. And HUD should be helping to develop and deploy them -- including trailers (in small neighborhood-like clusters), modular housing (including variants of the "Katrina Cottages"), dormitories in vacant schools and shopping malls, and vouchers to help families pay for rental units in the private market.

None of these options is perfect, but all could help bring residents and workers back to New Orleans to resume their lives and join in rebuilding this unique city.

In his September address from Jackson Square, President Bush promised that "we will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes, to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives." If HUD can't muster the ingenuity and leadership to become an active partner in rebuilding, New Orleanians will know that the Jackson Square speech was nothing more than empty rhetoric.

Margery Austin Turner directs the Urban Institute's Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center and is a former deputy assistant secretary for research at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its sponsors.

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