New Orleans: Housing Stock Down 13%

5 years post-Katrina, and several months after the BP oil spill, the city of New Orleans is still in recovery, but still has other problems. One of them is housing.

According to the reports the New Orleans metropolitan area has suffered a 13% decrease in available housing since the hurricane five years ago. The survey results were released on Monday by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which also found that cost of housing in the Crescent City had increased by roughly 33%, from $662/month in 2004 to $882/month last year.

According to HUD, the 2009 survey is the most comprehensive such analysis of the area’s housing stock in the last five years.

The results also showed that eight of the parishes in the greater New Orleans area have lost about 75,000 housing units since Hurricane Katrina, and that there are about 72,500 housing units currently vacant.