ACORN Housing Wins Place in New Orleans Rebuilding Plan

A speaker discussed the future of her New Orleans neighborhood at the ACORN Community Forum on Rebuilding New Orleans, last November.

On July 21st, the New Orleans Community Support Foundation (NOCSF) announced that ACORN Housing was officially chosen to be a planning team for the rebuilding of New Orleans’ neighborhoods. ACORN Housing's team was one of only 16 planning teams who received the nomination out of 65 groups across the nation that submitted their qualifications for consideration by an independent panel of nationally recognized experts.

ACORN Housing developed its proposal, involving extensive community input, in association with ACORN and urban planners, architects, student interns and other experts from Cornell University, Pratt Institute, Louisiana State University, New Jersey Institute of Technology, and the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

ACORN Housing and its partners have been recommended as a  district-wide planning team to the City of New Orleans.  Five teams were selected as district planners, because the panel felt that we had  "exceptional capacity" for planning, and could assist districts that choose to plan as a single group rather than individual neighborhoods. Ten additional teams were designated as neighborhood planners.

On August 1st, a meeting will be held with neighborhood representatives, who will listen to presentations by each of the planning teams and vote on who they want to work with. The final decisions about which planners and neighborhoods will work together will be made around mid-August. The city-wide planning process will be funded through private donations, including initial grants from the Greater New Orleans Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.

A central goal of the planning process is to provide detailed information and resources and provide a real voice in rebuilding for all citizens of New Orleans.

Lean more about Louisiana ACORN.

Learn more about ACORN Housing.