It was bad enough that the city wasn’t bringing back all of the public housing it demolished after Katrina. But now it was in danger of losing funding for whatever affordable housing was stuck in the pipeline.

And much of this was spurred by BGR, who had been sounding alarms about subsidized housing well before its 2009 “House that Uncle Sam Built” report, as read in its 2007 report “Cementing Imbalance” on the regional distribution of subsidized rental housing. Also, its 2007 “Public Investment, Private Developers” report put the state’s use of GO Zone low-income-housing tax credits under scrutiny. Both urged the state officials to reconsider deploying these subsidies in Orleans Parish, and instead recommended spreading them around neighboring parishes. This, despite the fact that the bulk of the destroyed rental stock was in New Orleans, and that surrounding parishes like St. Bernard were aggressively fighting to keep multifamily housing developments away, even defying federal court orders in the process.

Major and Severe Damage by Parish

Louisiana Housing Finance Agency

Where the damage occurred was irrelevant, though, if the main point was to decrease the number of poor people in New Orleans. BGR was concerned about diversifying the incomes (and therefore the tax base) of the population rebuilding the city, which was not unreasonable. But there were other things BGR could have researched to address these concerns, like adopting a living-wage ordinance, reversing the prevailing anti-union culture, or convincing Governor Bobby Jindal to accept more of the stimulus funding the federal government was offering at the time. But their primary concern was that too much taxpayer money was going toward building housing for people of meager resources.

As it turned out, BGR’s accounting on this issue was flawed. As LHFA president Bailey explained to the state bond commission:

BGR’s report presents a supply-side analysis of affordable housing. It does not, however, include absorption-rate or demand-side analyses for that same housing. As a result, its narrative has created an unfortunate degree of confusion that may have led to the misinterpretation of certain ground-level realities.

And BGR even got the supply side wrong. It’s researchers counted all of the available housing vouchers at the time as a subsidized-housing unit. This despite the fact that not all vouchers were used in tax credit or CDBG-subsidized housing (or even used within New Orleans), and that many of those vouchers were either not used at all or were about to expire. The report also counted thousands of subsidized units that hadn’t been built yet, and that had little guarantee of being completed for the reasons bulleted above.

The VWB Research firm also found many errors in BGR’s accounting, which led to this conclusion in its 2009 report:

It does not appear that the BGR report is an attempt to answer the question of the need for additional subsidized or Tax Credit housing in Orleans Parish. Instead, it is our opinion that the report is simply an attempt to provide an accounting of the existing and potential affordable rental-housing supply of the Parish. Without demographic data (particularly data that focuses on low-income renter households) or reconciliation between supply and demand, it is our opinion that the BGR report should not be a basis for decisions regarding the need for additional affordable housing.

Unmoved, state bond commissioners Kennedy and Tucker stuck with its official moratorium on approving all future subsidized multifamily-housing projects. This ended up later triggering a Fair Housing Act complaint from the U.S. Department of Justice, which read:

In August 2009, the State Bond Commission adopted a Moratorium on approving bond financing under the Piggyback Program for low-income housing projects located in the City (“Bond Commission Moratorium”). The City and Bond Commission were aware that, at the time, the Esplanade and two other affordable-housing projects in New Orleans would be subject to the Bond Commission Moratorium. The Bond Commission stated that its Moratorium was needed to study whether the housing market in the City would support the Esplanade and the other two projects. In March 2011, a final study was completed, which concluded affirmatively that the City’s housing market would support additional affordable housing for very-low-income individuals. Despite this report, the Bond Commission has not lifted the Moratorium on the Esplanade, which remains in effect today.

In 2010, Tucker also led the bond commission to vote for the right to appoint two of their own hand-picked members to the Louisiana Housing Finance Agency’s board of directors, which was seen as a ploy for Tucker to gain more control over the agency’s budget. This was a suspicious move considering that Tucker himself was a real-estate developer, with a number of multifamily dwellings to his name. An ethics complaint had been filed against him in 2008, in fact, alleging a conflict of interest given his private real-estate holdings and his powers as a bond commissioner. The complaint was dismissed. Tucker, meanwhile, maintained that his maneuver was purely about austerity.