Nicole Barnes
Executive Director
Jericho Road Episcopal Housing Initiative
Jericho Road Episcopal Housing Initiative is a nonprofit homebuilder that provides healthy and energy-efficient affordable housing opportunities. Founded in 2006, Jericho Road aimed to assist the residents of the Central City community in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
In 2017, Jericho Road acquired Project Homecoming, another affordable housing nonprofit serving the Gentilly neighborhood. Since that time, the organization has exponentially expanded its impact by increasing its geographic footprint to serve the multi-parish Southeast Louisiana region. In addition to homebuilding, the company has expanded into programmatic areas of workforce development, community engagement, financial capability and land stewardship.
What are you most excited about in the coming year? We are in the midst of constructing the second phase of the New Isle de Jean Charles (NIDJC) Resettlement project in Terrebonne Parish. The NIDJC project is a massive effort to assist residents relocating from an area suffering from subsidence and coastal erosion.
The traumatic disruption to the support systems and community that Isle de Jean Charles residents have experienced is something that they should never happen again. For this reason, the project is being built on land at the highest elevations with the homes constructed to Fortified Gold status to ensure their resiliency to hurricanes and other natural disasters.
The first phase of homes for 37 families has been completed by the state of Louisiana. The continuation of this project, led by Jericho Road, will be the development of an additional 27 single-family homes.
What is the biggest challenge facing your industry? The insurance crisis is challenging our very existence in the state of Louisiana, and it will not be solved by deregulation.
The lack of affordable insurance options is an issue for us all, not just homeowners and landlords, but schools, houses of worship, businesses…cutting across all economic strata. Solving this issue requires a collective effort that is multi-pronged with the cornerstone of these efforts being an investment in resilient building for new construction and retrofitting existing structures. We must strengthen building standards to ensure properties can withstand the “100-year storms” that occur annually.
In turn, our regulators must ensure that the correlating savings are afforded to properties with these risk-reducing investments. It will require intervention and policies by our government and leaders who prioritize the people of Louisiana.
