The Advocate: For a brief moment, Alberta Davis’s armor breaks as tears well up in her eyes. “Promise that you’ll come see me?” she tells her friend and former neighbor, Leona Baxter. “It’s been hard.”
Davis and Baxter are former residents of the Lloyd Oaks public housing complex in the heart of Lake Charles. Both were among the last residents to leave the neighborhood earlier this year, so it could be demolished and turned into a massive mixed-income neighborhood, with the assistance of a grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
That development, made possible through HUD’s Choice Neighborhoods program, broke ground this week. The first phase of the project, Mid-City Lofts, a three story building comprising 46 units, is expected to be completed in late 2025.
The full scale of the Choice Neighborhood initiative is designed to create 562 mixed-income housing units, including at least 240 units to replace the public housing that was once Lloyd Oaks at a similar level of affordability. When the next phases of the project will be completed is dependent on future state funding rounds and remains to be determined, according to developers.
When hurricanes Laura and Delta barreled through Lake Charles in 2020, they damaged tens of thousands of homes and businesses in the area, including its two main public housing complexes.
While individual homes on the 38-acre Lloyd Oaks site survived the storms mostly unscathed, many sat in disrepair while the Lake Charles Housing Authority battled its insurance company in court. Some residents, like Davis and Baxter, returned temporarily, but a vast majority remained displaced and still are.
In the meantime, a coalition of local government, developers and non-governmental organizations, such as the Community Foundation of Southwest Louisiana, hatched a plan to build back bigger and better, with the help of a federal program designed to replace severely distressed public and HUD-assisted housing with higher-quality mixed-income housing and supportive resources for residents.
‘A product of your environment’
Davis has been staying in a senior living community on the southside of town since she had to leave the public housing complex to make room for its demolition and the rebuilding to follow. It’s been tough on her. While technically a senior herself at 65, she doesn’t feel like she quite fits in with her elderly neighbors. Being wheelchair bound and without a car, she can’t leave the complex on the edge of town, where the limited public transit doesn’t reach.
“I’m stuck out there,” Davis said.
Despite her current hardships, Davis said she supports the project and thinks it will be a positive development for families like her own, five generations of which have lived in the public housing complex at some point in their lives.
“You’re a product of your environment,” Davis said, echoing a concept at the core of the Choice Neighborhood program, which aims to create more opportunities for low-income residents by allowing them to be part of a mixed-income community with support services, rather than a fenced-in accumulation of people struggling, one way or another, to make ends meet.
“People are going to feel better about themselves, you’re not going to be living next to just another [person] who’s low-income,” she added. “I think it’s going to be wonderful.”
Local officials hope the effects will go beyond the neighborhood and its residents, and help spark economic growth and foster a strong, continued recovery for the city, four years after it was devastated by back-to-back disasters.
“We’re making an impact on the heart of the city, which will have ripple effects throughout the entirety of the city,” Mayor Nick Hunter said.
