Sarasota city leaders— along with some residents of public housing—traveled to the Big Easy this week—to get ideas for the future of public housing. The tour’s aim was to give local leaders a look at how the Department of Housing and Urban Development is addressing public housing in New Orleans. HUD recently stepped in to assist Sarasota’s housing authority… And the HUD specialist in charge – Carmen Valenti – spent the past 3 years working in New Orleans.
Sarasota Mayor - Mary Anne Servian – says the focus is getting new ideas for replacing the city’s dilapidated Janie Poe complex.

“We certainly don’t want to put back on the site only public housing. We know that that’s a model that fails…concentrating poverty doesn’t work. What we do know is working is these models across the country of public housing where they’ve received grants and they’ve redeveloped the properties into mixed income properties.”

Servian says the mixed-income model has been used effectively in New Orleans. The idea is to seamlessly combine public, low-income and market-rate housing in the same area. The Janie Poe complex is a 128-unit public housing complex built in the early 1970’s.