District E Councilman Jon Johnson, his brother, and associates of theirs directed a non-profit called Ninth Ward Housing Development Corp. which owns several blighted properties in the Ninth Ward.
The buildings are owned by the Ninth Ward Housing Development Corp., a non-profit social service agency. Johnson was president of the organization’s board in the 1980s and early 1990s, then known as the Lower Ninth Ward Housing Development Corp. He remains connected to the agency through personal relations, including his brother and former business partner, James Johnson, who serves as the group’s secretary; the council member’s longtime professional colleague Terri Guerin is listed on Secretary of State documents as the nonprofit board’s president. In his capacity as council member, Jon Johnson recently appointed Guerin to the board of the New Orleans Regional Business Park, and he has worked with her on neighborhood issues in Eastover, the gated eastern New Orleans community where they both live.
According to Ariella Cohen's story, the buildings and indeed the non-profit responsible for them, have fallen into neglect disrepair since the flood.
Guerin said the organization had not rehired staff since Katrina, and she referred all questions about the group to James Johnson and Roy Lewis, who met earlier this month to discuss how to move forward on renovations of the nonprofit’s properties, she said.
Both men were signatories on documents filed with the Secretary of State on Sept. 15 to reinstate the nonprofit. The state filings list Lewis as a director of the nonprofit.
When reached by phone recently, both denied involvement with the group.
“I am not on the board and I have not been affiliated for over a year,” Lewis said Wednesday.
James Johnson hung up on a reporter when asked why he signed the state filings in September if he has nothing to do with the group.
One obvious problem the Lens article points to is the difficulty of enforcing penalties for neglect upon an apparently now headless ownership entity. There is even some suggestion that the whole non-profit property management model is misguided but that's not necessarily true. Properties fall into neglect all over town under various modes of ownership. Non-profits like this one tend to be vehicles for political patronage and that makes them a sexy story and certainly in this case indicates a kind of hypocrisy on Johnson's part but the model isn't the reason we have a blight problem in New Orleans.
What I'd like to read more about are the obstacles to putting these properties back into use. At one point in time, Johnson's non-profit operated and maintained them successfully. No one associated with the group seems interested in taking responsibility for them now but is there a reason it couldn't work if they were differently inclined? What is it going to take to spur investment in affordable housing in New Orleans?
In the CBD, the approach seems to be to attach so-called affordable units to high-rise vacation home developments in order to qualify for "mixed-income" financing. That doesn't seem like a realistic strategy to me. Sure some people want to live in downtown apartments but not most people who live in actual neighborhoods now. Maybe if Landrieu succeeds at bulldozing those neighborhoods they'll start to change their minds but I rather doubt it.
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