Political platforms, campaign promises, and candidate yard signs are all around us. Amidst such election hullabaloo, we wanted to provide some clarity on where housing discussions actually happen within our City government so that candidate promises around housing can be contextualized within City decision making. The gaping, patchwork nature of these forums begs a new system for prioritizing and addressing our city’s many urgent housing needs, and it would be within the power of any incoming mayor and City Council to create or advise a more coherent forum that allowed New Orleanians to actually access information about—and influence change around—the housing issues that shape their lives.
How and Where do Housing Conversations Happen Now?
At present, there is no singular forum at which housing concerns can be addressed. Instead, various aspects are taken up—or left behind—at a string of departments, committees, and full council meetings, with the main forums being those listed below.
Community Development
The Office of Community Development (OCD)—referred to as the “Office of Housing Policy and Community Development” on the City’s administrative organizational chart and seemingly nowhere else—would in theory be the home for all housing concerns, and it does manage over $125 million in state and federal housing grants. The City Council’s similarly named Community Development Committee, which typically meets monthly, is also meant to address City housing concerns. Though, as any regular attendees of these meetings will know, rarely, if ever, are the concerns that shape most New Orleanians’ housing struggles discussed there. Notably, a review of all 2025 agendas for these meetings reveals agenda items ranging from the City’s Poet Laureate selection committee and a presentation about the downtown “NOLA Walk of Fame” to the contracting of a City ambulance service and revised timelines on streetlight replacement. No items on any agenda from January 2025 to present included any housing-related concerns, with the committee decidedly skewing toward a version of community development that leaves housing behind.
Quality of Life Committee
Per City Council’s website (council.nola.gov/committees/quality-of-life-committee), the monthly Quality of Life (QoL) Committee includes discussion of items like “blight, dumping, trash, high grass, and others.” Several years ago, the committee became the de facto home for discussions about homelessness, largely because growing encampments were felt to negatively affect the quality of life of housed New Orleanians who live or work near the encampments.
Since then, such conversations are less active, and a review of all 2025 QoL agendas indicates only one meeting at which any items related to homelessness were discussed. At that meeting on June 16, consultants from Clutch Consulting and the City Office of Homeless Services and Strategy gave an update on their work to address homelessness in the city for the first time since the end of 2024. It is questionable whether the needs of unhoused individuals are best addressed in a meeting like QoL at all. However, if QoL is understood as the forum for such items, 2025 itself has already seen many critical events whose impacts on our most vulnerable neighbors would have merited inclusion on QoL agendas, but any discussion of which has been conspicuously absent at QoL or elsewhere. Those events include the state’s forcible warehousing of unsheltered individuals for 10 weeks surrounding the Super Bowl, the historic January freeze event, and the ongoing, months-long lack of any elevator access at the City-administered Low Barrier Shelter that is imperiling the safety of disabled shelter residents and preventing potential disabled shelter residents from being admitted.
Regular Council Meetings
Most often, final votes on larger, broadly impactful ordinances will happen at twice-monthly regular Council meetings. These meetings always include votes on whether or not to approve applications for short-term rental licenses. One such meeting is where the now-infamous vote occurred with all present councilmembers (six of seven, since Councilmember Joe Giarrusso was absent) unanimously approving the conversion of 58 units of rental housing at 1201 Canal Street into commercial short-term rentals (CSTRs) despite a zoning ordinance banning any new CSTRs, which resulted in over 40 long-term residents and families receiving vacate notices at the property a few weeks later. That decision, like most STR application approval decisions, was decided within seconds, and sometimes dozens of these votes will happen in a single regular Council meeting, among hundreds of other, non-housing agenda items. Regular Council meetings are also where larger legislative items, like changing STR permitting and enforcement rules, are discussed and voted upon, as was the case for the latest platform accountability rules that were voted on in the fall of 2024 and finally resulted in hundreds of Airbnb delistings in August.
City Planning Commission Meetings
The City Planning Commission (CPC) is a nine-member citizen board appointed by the mayor and approved by City Council, and it works closely with a similarly appointed seven-member citizen board, the Board of Zoning Adjustments. Together these boards and the City employees who themselves work in paid city planning positions hold multiple monthly meetings where they review zoning and land use decisions. These groups helped advise which STR “exception” applications should be approved or denied, and also issue rulings on whether someone can change the use of their property or a planned development, such as by converting their home into a commercial business. Right now, the CPC has retained a consulting firm to study the effects and uses of transient lodging (hotels, motels, and commercial short-term rentals) on our city, and that firm is (over)due to present its findings back to the CPC at some unknown date later this fall, after initially stating it would make such a presentation in June or July. The study’s presentation will likely greatly affect how councilmembers vote on a ban on new commercial short-term rentals due to expire in November.
Housing Trust Fund Advisory Committee
The Housing Trust Fund Advisory Committee is a seven-member committee whose members were decided by City Council and who will be responsible for allocating the estimated $17 million made available to the housing trust fund via the 2024 approved ballot measure to direct 2% of the City’s annual general fund to housing needs. Notably, a not-insignificant portion of this fund will be retained for rainy-day usage and another portion will be collected by the Finance Authority of New Orleans and the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority for their services to administer the fund, leaving slightly less than $15 million available for the fund’s priority focus of creating and preserving affordable housing.
The advisory committee has no upcoming scheduled meetings listed for the rest of 2025 and has only met a handful of times thus far. It will make its allocation decisions through a yet-unknown process and no public rubric seems to yet exist for how potential projects will be evaluated in their bids to receive monies from the fund. Notably, New Orleanians can currently give some input into the priorities of this committee via an extremely brief online survey (council.nola.gov/committees/housing-trust-fund-advisory-committee), though there is limited information on when surveys must be completed or how the information will be used to advise the fund.
What Else Is Missing
It is likely obvious, but at none of these meetings are the factors most influential to New Orleanians’ housing outcomes regularly discussed: There is no regular check-in on the average cost of rent in the city, on the availability of affordable rentals, on the number of legal and illegal short-term rentals, on the number of unhoused individuals surviving on our streets and in shelters, or the number of low-income homeowners in need of fortified roofs. Factors of affordability, availability, accessibility, and habitability are those that most shape our wellbeing in housing, and yet they are chronically absent from agendas at housing-related forums year-round. This election season, can we imagine holding all potential City leaders accountable to developing and managing a coherent housing forum that is actually accessible and useful to the public and policymakers alike?
This space is provided to Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative as a community service and does not necessarily reflect the opinions or editorial policies of ANTIGRAVITY.
