New Orleans turned 50 acres of blight to homes and opportunity. Can Pensacola do the same?

NEW ORLEANS – Three buildings are all the remains of one of New Orleans' most dangerous public housing projects, and today those buildings are now interconnected with a modern building as the Educare New Orleans early learning school.

The 1940s buildings were "ungodly expensive" to rehabilitate, Bayou District Foundation Executive Director Jacob Peters told a group of more than 15 Pensacola community leaders Friday in the school lobby.

"These buildings were known for bad things and had a stigma, now have amazing things coming out of them," Peters said.

The group was part of a larger assembly of nearly 40 people from Pensacola who traveled to New Orleans at the invitation of Pensacola Mayor D.C. Reeves to tour the 50-acre development known as Columbia Parc at the Bayou District. Many in the group rode on a city-provided charter bus, including a News Journal reporter.

The group included current and former city and county officials, nonprofit leaders, local affordable housing experts, chamber of commerce officials, and community religious leaders.

Reeves wants Columbia Parc and similar developments in other cities to serve as the model for what can be done if Pensacola takes control of the old Baptist Hospital property on the city's westside.

Pensacola is working to put together the $16.4 million needed to demolish the old hospital to make way for a new workforce housing development. On Tuesday, the final 2025 state budget was released that showed $7 million in state funding for the project — up from the $5 million in the original Senate version of the budget.

"It's not city property at this moment, and there's a lot of work left to do," Reeves told the group on the bus before leaving Pensacola City Hall. "I think people look to the city to have a vision for what could be, and on the other hand there's folks that get concerned and anxiety about being left out of a vision for it. The truth is we're really at neither place."

While the city is seeking funds to demolish all buildings on the hospital campus, it's not known yet which buildings can be repurposed. The work to determine if any buildings can be saved will begin in the coming months.

"We're not talking about paint colors and units," Reeves told the group later in the day. "We're talking about what can be saved and what cannot be saved."

Preliminary engineering work could begin as Baptist Health Care and the city work out the final details of the donation agreement, and the city will begin work in earnest after July 1 if the legislative funding survives Gov. Ron DeSantis' veto pen.

Reeves said he invited the group to New Orleans who "understand the (Baptist Hospital) campus, understand the neighborhood, understand the city and housing" so that both they and city officials could begin to envision what an ultimate development would look like.

What is Columbia Parc?

Both Columbia Park and the old Baptist Hospital campus are similar in size at roughly 50 acres.

The New Orleans development arose in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as the Bayou District Foundation raised funds to transform what was known as the St. Bernard housing projects into a mixed-income community built around the education of young children at its center.

Bayou District Foundation Chairman Gerry Barousse said he thought it would be a seven to eight-year project. Now, more than 18 years later, the Bayou District Foundation has built two schools, a 120-unit senior independent living center, a community garden and greenspace, and 565 rental townhomes where more than 2,000 people live, according to Barousse.

Services such as workforce development and job placement are also offered to residents.

The entire project has cost $310 million with a large portion coming from post-Hurricane Katrina federal funding and $25 million from private philanthropic dollars, according to Barousse.

Columbia Parc housing units are divided with a third rented at market rate, a third as low-income affordable housing, and a third as public housing. There is no physical characteristic that differentiates the units.

A resident could move in under a public housing voucher, and if they have success and move up an income level, they can stay in their unit to qualify as an affordable housing or market rate resident without facing the expenses and burden of having to move because they've made more money.

"The idea is to lift all of our residents up," Barousse told the group from Pensacola in the lobby of Columbia Parc as they're gathered around a scale model of the 50-acre community.

The foundation is close to landing a grocery store tenant, which is the last major piece of the group's initial master plan.

When the plan for Columbia Parc was announced, it faced criticism and even protest over the loss of the more than 60-year old public housing development, despite Katrina making it uninhabitable.

"A lot of it was over whether we'd do what we said we'd do," Barousse said.

Barousse said there were 900 families living in the St. Bernard housing projects when Katrina hit New Orleans. The Bayou District Foundation made an effort to contact all of them to offer a spot at the new development and was able to reach 750 with many saying they did not want to return.

What's it like today?

Today, 150 families who lived in the original St. Bernard development now call Columbia Parc home.

"Some of them said, 'No way, I'm not coming back,'" Barousse said. "And then five years later, they came back and were like, 'Wait, we didn't know it was going to be like this. Can we get on the list?'"

Those original residents still have get preference on the Columbia Parc waiting list, as well as at the two schools.

The Educare New Orleans early learning school has 168 students ages 0 to 5 and provides what Barousse describes as "Head Start on steroids." All children in the program leave the school on or above grade level, ready for kindergarten. Most of the students will likely go next door to the KIPP Believe charter school, which serves about 750 children from kindergarten through the eighth grade.

After the Columbia Parc was largely complete, crime in the area dropped by 99%, and life expectancy for the neighborhood went from about 55 years old in 2005 to more than 70 years old in 2015, Barousse said.

During the tour, a second-line funeral paraded down St. Denis Street right through the heart of the development with a jazz band and horse-drawn hearse, showing the unique New Orleans custom was still alive and well in the new community.

Many who came from Pensacola were impressed with what they saw. During the discussion with Barousse, Greater Little Rock Baptist Church Pastor Lonnie Wesley told Barousse he talked with residents while walking the development who were obviously proud of living in the community.

"What you cannot show is the pride they had," Wesley said. "It was immeasurable. It was really impressive."

More than 18 years into its development, Columbia Parc is still not complete, but it's come a long way. If Pensacola is going down a similar path, Reeves said he's aware the city is likely entering a similar time commitment.

Barousse said his advice for Pensacola is any development like Columbia Parc cannot move forward without community support. As they developmed their master plan, Barousse said, they had more than 60 public meetings.

"You've got to be patient," Barousse said. "You've got to be committed. And it's not just the private developer. It's got to be the community that's willing to say, 'We're in.'"

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Baptist Hospital redevelopment: New Orleans Columbia Parc offers model