When hurricanes Laura and Delta ravaged southwest Louisiana in 2020, they damaged approximately 50,000 housing units. More than two years after the storms, the search for housing, especially the affordable kind, remains difficult for those hoping to return after years of displacement.

Like Rose Celestine, a former public housing resident who, after months of looking for a place to live in Lake Charles, moved to Beaumont, Texas, but is eager to return to her hometown.

“I’m by myself over here,” the 61-year-old, whose five children all live in Lake Charles, said of the senior housing complex she lives in now, after her public housing unit was declared uninhabitable due to storm damage. “My health has gone down — I guess I miss being home.”

Celestine is one of 475 residents of the sprawling Lloyd Oaks public housing complex who were displaced.

The neighborhood now sits mostly empty and living conditions for the remaining residents are difficult. Even units that didn’t have enough damage to be considered uninhabitable feature water-damaged ceilings, tarped roofs and visqueen sheets where walls should be.

But the city and its housing authority have big plans for Lloyd Oaks.

With the help of a federal grant, the housing authority is hoping to dramatically transform the neighborhood, adding hundreds of new units of mixed-income housing and providing services aimed at improving residents’ health, employment opportunities and overall quality of life.

To fund it, the city and housing authority have applied for a $40 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The application has recently been shortlisted by the department, a promising sign that their big dreams may actually come to fruition.

Build back better or build back quickly?

The Choice Neighborhood Initiative grant would provide the seed funding for the creation of 240 units for very low-income renters earning less than 30% of the area median income, as well as 208 low-income and 114 market rate units.

The feds’ cash, the project group hopes, will attract even more funding.

So far, the group — consisting of local government agencies, developers and consultants — says it has leveraged the promise of federal funds into $182 million in additional commitments from public and private partners to provide things like job training, home renovations and home buying assistance, and health services.

The group’s goals are ambitious: achieve 100% health insurance coverage among residents of the “target area” — the footprint of the current public housing complex – secure wage employment for a majority of working-age residents, and lower local crime rates, to name a few.

But there’s a catch. If rubber stamped, the Lake Charles project would take years to develop, leaving current and former residents to wonder what will happen to them in the meantime.

“They’re gonna have to move all of us,” said Sherry Vincent, 75, one of the few remaining residents of the Lloyd Oaks public housing complex. “That’s going to be a nightmare.”

Vincent said she’s skeptical of the viability of the project and whether people would be willing to pay market rate rents to live in the area, especially if their neighbors received housing subsidies, like Section 8 vouchers.

Instead, two and a half years after the storms, Vincent said she wishes the old units had just been repaired. “Just fix it and move on,” she said.

The Bienville Basin Apartments in New Orleans provides a glimpse into the possible future of the project.

Funded by the first round of Choice Neighborhood grants in 2011 and built by the same developer, most of the 821 units of the former public housing complex have been replaced with public and subsidized housing, with 76 still to go. This is in addition to over 600 units with income-based or market-rate rents. Occupancy rates for subsidized and market-rate housing are at 92% and 94%, respectively.

And residents say they’re happy at Bienville.

“I wanted to come back to the area where I come from,” said Deanna Robertson, 59, who grew up in the former Lafitte public housing complex nearby and said she likes living in a racially and economically diverse area. “I’m very comfortable.”

But the tension around the replacement of Lloyd Oaks illustrates a central question in Lake Charles’s housing recovery process: Should the city build back quickly or build back better, even if it takes more time?

‘Duct tape’

Nicole Miller, Calcasieu Parish’s program director for disaster housing recovery and chair of the Lake Charles Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, admits that the city’s affordable housing stock remains in tough shape.

“We are very slow to come back with units that are truly affordable,” Miller said. “Even a school teacher is going to have a hard time finding a unit that’s affordable.”

But, she said, storm recovery is an opportunity to create well-built and well-managed affordable housing that will work long-term. Additional subsidies, like tax credits set aside for the region because of the disasters it suffered, have also drawn in savvy developers that usually focus on bigger markets.

Last year, the Louisiana Housing Corporation awarded $6 million in Low Income Housing Tax Credits for projects in Calcasieu Parish, which developers plan to use to create 247 new housing units. Last month, LHC awarded another $133.3 million in disaster relief grants which, along with the accompanying housing tax credits, will be invested into 11 projects in Calcasieu Parish, to rehab or build a total of 1,305 units.

“I felt that we had to think bigger than getting people into housing tomorrow — and I know that’s a really hard position to take,” Miller said. “We just can’t keep putting duct tape on the same solutions and expecting them to work.”

One of the new developers attracted to Lake Charles is HRI Communities, slated to redevelop Lloyd Oaks, among other projects.

In initial market studies, it became clear that both residents of the public housing complex and those in need of affordable housing in the city overall needed better options, said HRI President Josh Collen.

“A lot of the stuff that’s there is pretty old and pretty dated,” Collen said. “There really isn’t a good multi-family, mixed-income affordable housing stock.”

Comprehensive data on the post-disaster housing stock is hard to come by.

According to HUD data on low-income housing tax credits projects, which come with affordability requirements, there are at least 2,805 such units in Lake Charles. But how many of those units suffered storm damages and how many have been repaired is unclear. Property managers at several locations listed told The Advocate that repairs are still underway or have recently been completed.

As for the general state of the rental housing stock in Lake Charles, the data is no clearer. Many apartment buildings remain fenced off and boarded up. Others have been partially restored.

But Lake Charles Mayor Nic Hunter is optimistic about the future of affordable housing, despite delays caused by lagging federal aid and drawn-out fights with insurance companies.

“Our affordable housing situation is imperfect, but it’s so much better than it was,” Hunter said.

He feels particularly hopeful about the development that will be facilitated by low-income housing tax credits set aside for disaster-hit areas. “With those projects coming online, affordable housing will be in a much better state than it has been in the past.”

The return will have to be gradual, Hunter said, and the city is doing its best to accommodate those eager to come back, without taking on large government-funded projects, like the public housing complexes of old.

“There’s no secret recipe for this, there’s no bible or blueprint that says: This is how you do it,” Hunter said. “I think that we should be empowering and incentivizing development when appropriate and allowing private industry to make those investments.”