As we wrap up 2024, we are left thinking about things that just… aren’t wrapped up. We are thinking about families living in hazardous conditions and the 6,000 New Orleanians who will have had evictions filed against them by year’s end, and the overlap between those groups. Below, we discuss difficulties faced by tenants living at the city’s most hazardous complexes and what traps them there.
Black mold, roaches, bats, sewage, and leaks. These issues have plagued The Willows Apartments in New Orleans East for a long time—an online review from eight years ago mentions a bat infestation. “This property is unacceptable and should be closed down. There are unresolved bat and cockroach infestations that have gone on for months, the common areas are poorly kept, and trying to reach the manager is a weeks long process. These people are all too happy to take rents from residents, but refuse to perform repairs and maintenance that keeps everyone safe.”
In the intervening years, the story is unchanged. The property is now partially vacant, with many units boarded up, though many New Orleanians, including many children, still call The Willows home. Let’s discuss why.
Weakened and Underfunded Healthy Homes
The November 2022 passage of the Healthy Homes Ordinance seemed to present a pathway to improvements. So, why do hazardous conditions persist? Practically speaking, the Healthy Homes Program (implemented January 1 this year) has three parts, with each at different phases 11 months in:
- Establish citywide Minimum Rental Standards;
- Develop a registry of all city rental properties; and
- Directly mitigate health hazards by responding to tenant complaints, inspecting conditions, and then citing and fining properties for any failures to meet minimum rental standards, and, in doing so, moving properties toward compliance.
While the program has been effective in codifying rental standards, its progress otherwise is incomplete. Limited progress toward creating a citywide rental registry is understandable, given the program’s newness: Smaller properties do not face registration deadlines until early 2025. However, searching large properties from which our hotline receives complaints indicates several, including The Willows, have not yet had certificates issued because of missing or incomplete registrations, despite facing registration deadlines this past February.
Similarly, regarding the program’s effort to mitigate health hazards by responding to complaints and appropriately inspecting/citing/fining properties thereafter: the conditions that persist at The Willows and elsewhere indicate this is not being accomplished in full. Some complaints our own staff have submitted have remained unassigned to inspectors for months. The City’s proposed 2025 budget allocates 34 new staff members to Healthy Homes, so capacity to follow up on unregistered properties and complaints should increase.
Whatever improvements are brought by increased staffing will be incomplete, however, due to two structural shortcomings within Healthy Homes: (a) the program was significantly modified from advocates’ original visions when it was passed without requiring periodic inspection of rental properties; and (b) the program’s anti-displacement fund, which would serve to cover relocation costs for tenants needing to vacate uninhabitable properties, has been allocated zero dollars.
The lack of required periodic inspections means inspections only happen in response to complaints. At the most hazardous properties, tenants experience crime and violence, uninhabitability, mold, pests, and illness. Discovering, using, and following up with an unadvertised complaints system is not first priority. Signs our staff posts at complexes about such resources are usually removed by management immediately.
Similarly, the lack of a single dollar being allocated to the program’s anti-displacement fund means that, even if the program could cite and fine every noncompliant property, tenants living in the worst conditions cannot be assisted to temporarily (during repairs) or permanently (pending demolition) move elsewhere.
This greatly limits the program’s efficacy, especially considering that the most hazardous conditions did not spring up overnight; The Willows’ eight-year-old online review included above indicates conditions have festered for years. Existing avenues of citations and fines have not been curative. New tools are needed; it is hard to imagine creating a program designed to keep New Orleanians’ homes healthy and then give no relocation resources to that program to intervene in the worst cases. While we are hopeful the new staff budgeted for Healthy Homes will increase capacity, as of yet, no funds have been allocated to anti-displacement—increased staffing cannot substitute for tenants’ moving expenses.
Cyclical Eviction Traps
Tenants living at The Willows and at Rue Parc Fontaine on the West Bank (which are both neglected by the same out-of-state owner and plagued by health hazards) face another challenge: constant eviction filings. These two complexes are both semi-vacant due to their deplorable conditions, and yet, together, they are the source of 10% of all eviction filings in Orleans Parish since January 2023—yes, the two city buildings with the worst conditions together account for 1 in every 10 city eviction filings.
Some tenants have evictions filed against them repeatedly because they are always a few days late in paying, due to their payroll schedules. When complexes immediately file evictions against tenants who are late on rent but who intend to (and regularly) pay in full, tenants then must pay their overdue rent, a late fee, and over $200 in eviction court costs to maintain their housing—even when their housing harms them. When complexes use eviction filings as a frontline mechanism to enforce rent, owners profit from late fees while tenants are stuck catching up.
No Withholding Rent
Withholding rent due to unlivable conditions is not legal in Louisiana, so tenants’ only option to address hazardous living conditions is to “repair and deduct,” which requires tenants pay out-of-pocket for neglected repairs and then deduct those repair costs from their rent. However, this requires considerable capacity up-front from tenants, and costly repairs like mitigating widespread mold can be impossible for tenants to take on.
Tenant Fights and Futures
Where are tenants left? Trapped by systems but fighting hard. Tenants have held meetings, written demands, and called the media. Given almost all Willows tenants are people of color, we ask: Would other tenants see such hazardous living conditions unaddressed for eight years despite significant self-advocacy?
Councilmembers—and mayoral hopefuls among them—have renewed calls to shut down The Willows or criminally charge its owners. Such strategies are shortsighted and hollow if equal attention isn’t paid to tenants’ fates. Indeed, many former tenants of a previously shuttered hazardous building, the Oakmont, now live in equally troubling conditions at Rue Parc Fontaine.
In the end, families live at The Willows because they need affordable housing and they are New Orleanians—what do we say about their right to be here when we don’t change the systems that force them to fight tooth and nail to survive and stay in their city?
For brighter times, please join us at our End-of-Year Celebration on Friday, December 6 from 6 to 9 p.m. at 12 Mile Limit (500 S. Telemachus St. in Mid-City). No cover, free food, live DJ, prize raffles, and strengthening our bonds to keep fighting for justice. For more info, go to jpnsi.org.
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.
