Columbia Parc at the Bayou District
Hurricane Katrina took a toll on
the already distressed St. Bernard public housing development. Almost a year
after the storm, HUD announced that New Orleans’ notorious “Big Four” public
housing projects, including St. Bernard, would be redeveloped as mixed-income
developments.
The Bayou District Foundation and Atlanta-based Columbia Residential partnered with the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) to transform the 52-acre site in the Gentilly neighborhood.
Between 2010 and 2013, 685 mixed-income units for families and seniors, including 229 for public housing residents, came online in the four-phase, $156 million residential component.
“I think it’s been a massive success on the housing side,” says J.T. Hannan, director of public and governmental affairs for the Bayou District Foundation. “Every unit has been leased with a waiting list since we opened.”
There’s also a focus on education. “We are trying to build a cradle to college education pipeline within and adjacent to Columbia Parc,” says Hannan.
The first component of that is Educare New Orleans, an early education facility that prepares children for kindergarten that opened in October 2013.
To create the Educare facility, which sits in the heart of the neighborhood, the development team preserved three of the 1940s public housing buildings and constructed three new buildings.
“The Educare is the most remarkable piece of the whole site,” says Jim Grauley, principal at Columbia Residential. “It makes the neighborhood so much more vibrant. Literally a child can grow up there and have a top-notch education a few sidewalks distance from their home.”
The development team is in negotiations to build a K-8 school, and a new high school is opening across the street from the development this fall.
New city streets, three playgrounds, a pool, three business centers, two movie theaters, and a community garden also have been installed, but more development is in the works, such as a permanent health clinic and additional recreational facilities.
“It’s 10 years past Katrina, and we’re within
a few years of the completion of our vision of a comprehensive mixed-use,
mixed-income community,” says Grauley.