Free Republic

In 2009 and early 2010, Beacon of Hope, a grass-roots recovery support group, surveyed thousands of Orleans Parish properties and found that as many as a third of those with Road Home grants had not begun to rebuild.Grant recipients face may legitimate hardships, but few of their neighbors can stomach their getting Road Home aid only to leave a property blighted. When Beacon of Hope released its survey findings last year, founder Denise Thornton blasted the state for “lackadaisical” enforcement of covenants requiring Road Home grant recipients to rebuild and reoccupy their houses within three years. The state Disaster Recovery...

Rules called unfair to black homeowners Fair-housing advocates and black homeowners in New Orleans filed a federal class-action lawsuit Wednesday against the Louisiana Recovery Authority and U.S. Housing and Urban Development, claiming the Road Home grant calculation formula is discriminatory. The complaint was filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., by the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center and the National Fair Housing Alliance on behalf of five black New Orleans homeowner applicants to the state's recovery grant program. The plaintiffs seek to represent a class of about 20,000 black families in Orleans Parish who decided to rebuild...

While former Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco is making the most of her time out of office delivering speeches and writing a book, there's more trouble brewing for her back in the capital. From today's New Orleans Times-Picayune: In the final weeks of Gov. Kathleen Blanco's administration, state officials quietly increased the size of the Road Home management contract from $756 million to $912 million, rewarding a contractor the Legislature wanted to fire, auditors questioned and thousands of homeowner applicants cursed. The Blanco administration never told the public about the 25 percent compensation increase for ICF International that was added to...

Payments have been too slow, Powell says : Federal Gulf Coast rebuilding coordinator Donald Powell on Wednesday urged the contractor running the Road Home program to speed up payments to victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. "As I expressed by phone, I have serious concerns about the effectiveness and expediency of the program," Powell said in a letter to Sudhakar Kesavan, chief executive of the Virginia-based ICF International. "As I write this letter, only 92 homeowners have received financial assistance out of over 80,000 applicants, or .1 percent of applicants," he wrote. "This rate must dramatically improve." In the one-page...

Only 11 people have received a check so far from the Louisiana Recovery Authority and only about 250 have been told they’ll be receiving money, a pace that brought shocked responses from some officials at a public hearing Friday. The LRA has about $10 billion to distribute to homeowners and they’ve had the funds for about three months. There are nearly 27,000 applicants. “We have over $10 billion at disposal,” said State Senator Derrick Shepherd, D-Marrero. “If we can’t spend it in an effective manner, maybe the president and Congress gave it to the wrong people.” LRA Chairman Dr. Norman...

NEW ORLEANS - Louisiana's plan to dole out billions in community development block grants may violate federal law requiring at least 50 percent of the money to be spent on low- and moderate-income people, according to a complaint sent today to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The complaint was submitted by Loyola University New Orleans on behalf of 13 people and organizations, including the Louisiana chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Low Income Housing Coalition, Partnership for Working Families and Advancement Project. "Louisiana is planning to spend more than $10...