When Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters devoured Denise Matthews’ Pontchartrain Park home, it set her on an odyssey that took her to Texas, then back to New Orleans where she shared her brother’s apartment with 17 other people, to a trailer on her old property.
Last year, Matthews’ fortunes changed with Project Home Again, an innovative program in Gentilly that is the result of a $20 million gift by Barnes & Noble Chairman Len Riggio and his wife, Louise. The program gave Matthews a new, elevated, energy-efficient bungalow on Wickfield Drive, complete with furniture, in exchange for her original property on Dreux Avenue, rejuvenating her stake in the city and putting her back in the world of homeownership.
“I really had to just pinch myself to believe that this was really happening. When they told me I was going to be moving into a new home I really got emotional,” said Matthews, a bakery manager at Winn-Dixie. “For this to have happened to me, I just say, ‘Thank you so much.’ Where would I have been if Project Home Again had not come through for me?”
The Riggios have completed their 101st and final home; their plans called for building an even 100, but they built an extra one when they learned about the New Orleans concept of lagniappe. They will be in New Orleans on Friday to place a wreath on the door of the final home, and throw a party Friday evening -- with their friend, singer Tony Bennett -- for the families who live in the homes.
Their gift, the largest single housing donation since Katrina, not only played an important role in seeding redevelopment in Gentilly, but it created a voluntary way to concentrate development in specific neighborhoods to avoid the jack o’lantern effect. It also used money more efficiently than many other nonprofit builders, potentially creating a rebuilding model for other cities to use after a mass disaster.
“It was able to bring back density in certain neighborhoods,” said Ellen Lee, senior vice president of programs at the Greater New Orleans Foundation. “You can really see a difference in neighborhoods where they’ve chosen to do their work.”
Unlike the Make It Right project in the Lower 9th Ward, in which famous architects submitted designs that aimed to push the boundaries of environmental friendliness and energy efficiency, or Habitat for Humanity, which built scores of homes for musicians using largely volunteer labor, Project Home Again strived for designs that blend into the neighborhood and targeted people of modest incomes who had been homeowners before Katrina.
Although all the homes have been built, not all of them have been given away. To participate, people must earn less than 120 percent of the local median income, or less than $73,320 for a family of four; have a job; pass credit checks; go through homeownership training; and have no liens on their original property. Once accepted into the program, they give their original lot -- with or without an unrepaired house -- to Project Home Again, and Project Home Again gives them a brand new house in return and lets them pick out furniture to go with it.
All new homes are assigned a value of $150,000, and $30,000 of the mortgage is forgiven each year, so the participants own it free and clear after five years. If the lots that people turned in were well located, Project Home Again would build new homes on them for other people; otherwise, the group swapped the properties with the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority for other lots that were closer to each other or other Project Home Again houses to create density.
Riggio, a regular at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and whose wife’s grandparents emigrated from Italy to New Orleans at the turn of the last century, was moved to do something after Katrina by the images of human suffering at the Superdome.
“I’ll never forget the image, the stripping away of the human dignity that this represented," he said. "I thought, how could we take this great American city and have it become like a third world nation and leave our people to our own devices without making a major effort to help them rebuild their lives? This is the kind of event where citizens need to lend a hand to their neighbors. We felt compelled to jump in and be at the side of these good people.”
Riggio settled on Gentilly because it reminded him of the working-class neighborhood where he grew up in New York, where friends and family members were cab drivers, truck drivers, electricians and sanitation workers, and they all owned their own homes. Giving people homes would restore their sense of dignity, bring them back to the city and help repair their financial losses, he believed.
“The major objective was to protect the working class of New Orleans. Very clearly, they represent the culture of this great city,” Riggio said. “In effect, we’re helping these families to get to a point where they have financial stability for years to come, and generational wealth.”
Although Riggio decided in 2005 to step in, he had trouble getting the local help he needed to get Project Home Again off the ground until 2008. He couldn’t find the land he needed for the first batch of homes until he met the Winingder family, who sold him a plot in the Filmore area. And Riggio, who understood the notion of efficiency from his mass retailing work at Barnes & Noble, had a hard time selling the home-swapping concept. Building on new lots close to one another would avoid title questions, avoid the whims of custom home building, and would allow construction to proceed more cost-effectively, the way it would with a new subdivision, so more homes could be built. And having participants turn in their old properties would allow them to avoid the tax implications of a gift.
“As we tried to roll it out, we had nothing but naysayers,” Riggio said. “My attitude was: just watch me.”
By the time executive director Carey Shea came on board in 2008, Project Home Again was loaded down with consultants, and she fired nearly all of them to preserve resources for home-building. She simplified the home designs to make them more builder-friendly while preserving quality, and resisted the temptation for expensive “green bling” like solar panels, opting instead for insulation and energy efficiency to help homeowners manage their bills.
“Our mandate from the Riggios was to build high-quality homes that were beautiful but simple and cost-effective,” Shea said. “Over time, we realized that our strength was in streamlining.”
But when they finished their first 20 homes and started moving on to the lots that had been turned in, they realized that they were going to miss out on the density of building together in a neighborhood, so they started wheeling and dealing with NORA to get groups of lots. “They were just too scattered. It was harder to build on them than when it was clustered, and it didn’t have the impact,” said Shea, who is now on loan from Project Home Again to the city to help run the new soft-second mortgage program.
The group ended up with houses along St. Bernard Avenue, then in St. Anthony, and in the Milneburg/Seabrook area.
And against Shea’s advice, Riggio insisted on allowing each homeowner to pick out furniture, at his expense, so the homes would instantly feel like their own.
New Orleans City Councilwoman Cynthia Hedge-Morrell said Riggio found a way to create density with voluntary moves, and garner additional investment in Gentilly. “Len’s vision helped us to not have that jack o’lantern effect, because his vision was to fill in those pieces of property,” she said.
Mayor Mitch Landrieu said it’s remarkable that the Riggios made such a “spectacular” gift with such little fanfare. “He did it under the radar. He wasn’t looking for a lot of applause,” Landrieu said. “It sets just a tremendous example of philanthropy for the entire country. People give for a lot of different reasons. It’s rare when you find one of those people who gives for the pure joy of giving.”
Riggio, who comes to town frequently to see the families in the homes he built, hit the Fair Grounds or have lunch at Dooky Chase, said he may be finished with 101 homes, but he’s not done with New Orleans.
“The home-building phase has been completed. But we’re going to have a continuing involvement in New Orleans for a long, long time,” Riggio said. “We’ve begun to work with the mayor, so we are looking at other projects we might get involved in.”
Rebecca Mowbray can be reached at rmowbray@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3417.
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