NEW ORLEANS — Two months after the Rev. Lance Eden arrived as pastor of First Street United Methodist Church, Hurricane Katrina struck. Mr. Eden, newly ordained, quickly picked up skills few in the pulpit typically need. He learned how to restore a church whose roof had been peeled off and whose bell tower had been knocked askew. He played host to hundreds of volunteers who came to gut and rebuild. And most recently — and reluctantly — he took on the role of developer.
“I’d rather be doing something else,” Mr. Eden said. “But when you hear stories like the Good Samaritan or about how Jesus walks into the temple and overturns the tables of the money-changers, it charges us as a church to make sure justice is done for all people.” First Street’s community development corporation owns 28 properties in Central City, a neighborhood of candy-colored bungalows, and Mr. Eden said he would like to acquire 20 more for moderate- to low-income housing.
New Orleans’s patchy recovery has largely bypassed places where the working class and the poor lived, like Central City and the Lower Ninth Ward. Many former residents lack the means to return. Instead, churches and groups with religious affiliations, citing Scripture’s call to help the stranger and the neighbor, have taken on building affordable housing.
Beginning in the first weeks after the storm, religious groups have played a critical role in the recovery: those outside New Orleans sent volunteers to help, and those in the city sometimes housed, supplied and fed workers and returning residents. The emerging projects range from a plan by Providence Community Housing to build 7,000 units of affordable housing, to one by Stronger Hope Baptist Church, which is still rebuilding its own flooded sanctuary, to acquire and restore perhaps a half-dozen properties in Central City.
“The only thing that has worked in the recovery has been the church,” said Joe Givens, consultant for the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, a national ecumenical group of black churches. “Their volunteers did the gutting, and then the salvage work, and the next step in the progression is that churches have to be part of the rebuilding.”
About 105,000 dwellings, 71 percent of the housing stock, were damaged or destroyed in Orleans Parish by Hurricane Katrina, said Gregory C. Rigamer, a New Orleans demographics expert. About 56 percent of the city’s population has returned, Mr. Rigamer said, but resettlement has been erratic. In the Lower Ninth Ward, for instance, just 7 percent of residents have come back.
Many low-income people would return if they could, said Jim Kelly, co-president of Catholic Charities and president of Providence Community Housing. Religious groups want to give low-income people the same choice to return that wealthier people have. Providence, for example, hopes to build affordable housing for 20,000 people by 2012.
It is unclear exactly how much housing religiously affiliated groups and churches have built since last year, when most began their efforts. But interviews with five of the groups — Providence Community Housing, Habitat for Humanity, Volunteers of America, the Episcopal Diocese of New Orleans Jericho Road Project and First Evangelist Baptist Church — showed that since 2006, about 350 housing units have come onto the market, a pace officers at the groups said should accelerate as they acquire more property and line up financing.
On a recent afternoon, Mr. Eden rode through the neighborhood around his church, pointing to houses its community development corporation had acquired and others it was considering. Some were being rebuilt. A few people had moved in. Mr. Eden said he hoped to offer the housing to low-income people under a lease-to-buy program.
Before Hurricane Katrina, churches like First Street United Methodist were the only civic institutions that functioned in poorer neighborho
Source: NYtimes.com