The state-run homeless shelter hastily assembled last month came as a surprise to two key people within City Hall: Nate Fields, director of the city’s office of Homelessness Services and Strategy, and Lesli Harris, the City Councilperson most involved in homelessness issues.
In mid-January, about a month before the Super Bowl, Gov. Jeff Landry had announced the imminent construction of the “Transitional Center,” a 200-bed congregate homeless shelter in an uninsulated warehouse. Within the next few days, the warehouse was hurriedly outfitted with flooring, cots, curtain-style dividers between beds, a mobile kitchen, and laundry equipment.
Both Harris and Fields had first heard about the shelter just a few days prior to the governor’s announcement, they said.
But the shelter was not an entirely spur-of-the-moment decision. At the state level, a special committee convened to create a shelter had prepared a detailed, draft memo for the governor on the matter by Dec. 19, 2024, with planning likely extending back further, according to internal emails received by The Lens in response to a public-records request.
In an undated letter addressed to Michael Hecht from GNO Inc., Workforce Group, the state contractor operating the facility, described the proposed shelter and suggested that its staff could start work as early as the week of Dec. 16 – a full month before key city staff was alerted. Hecht had been chosen by Landry in the summer to coordinate Super Bowl planning.
Though mum with city staff at that point, state leaders were consulting with prominent New Orleans developers— including Rick Farrell, who on Dec. 20 called the eventual shelter site a “brilliant location,” internal emails show.
Some of the businessmen consulted had publicly declared an interest in addressing homelessness. Farrell, the major funder in the recall effort against Mayor LaToya Cantrell, has said that that effort was driven by a botched meeting with the mayor about growing homelessness in the city.
Farrell was later tapped to serve on Landry’s transition team.
In early discussions, the state committee also suggested that the governor consider housing the unhoused New Orleanians on a barge moored in the Industrial Canal, emails show.
The warehouse
State officials eventually settled on the drafty metal warehouse at 5601 France Road.
The state is subleasing that industrial warehouse from Kevin Kelly, a local cargo magnate and industrial real-estate developer. He briefly made headlines on an unrelated issue in 2018, when he offered to house the city’s dismantled Confederate monuments on his property, at the Houmas House plantation in Ascension Parish..
In mid-January, two days after the governor’s advisory, police and municipal workers used heavy equipment to remove tents from encampments near the Super Dome. Buses and vans shuttled unhoused people from the camps to the Transitional Center, located several miles away, along the Industrial Canal.
While the Port of New Orleans owns the land where the warehouse that became the Transitional Center sits, Kelly has held a long-term lease for the property underneath the structure, through a company of his, the French Road Commerce Center, LLC.
The rates paid by the state appear to significantly exceed what Kelly pays to lease the property.
France Road Commerce Center pays the port $300 thousand each year — about $25 thousand a month — for the eight-acre property, along with the neighboring 12-acre tract at 5501 France Road, according to a contract between France Road Commerce and the port.
But Workforce Group, the shelter’s operator, appears to be paying Kelly’s company $75 thousand a month – three times what he pays to the port, according to a proposal Workforce submitted to the state.
It’s unclear exactly how facility planners learned about France Road space.
When reached by phone, Kelly said that he hadn’t been contacted directly by state officials. Instead, a person — whom he declined to name — phoned him, inquiring about buildings that could possibly work as a shelter site, he said.
“I’m an industrial real-estate developer, and I rent buildings to people who need buildings,” Kelly said.
Creating a ‘short list‘
The remote site on the Industrial Canal was chosen because it was close enough to the city, but far enough from residential areas, with enough square footage to accommodate a shelter, Mike Steele, a spokesman for the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness (GOHSEP), told The Lens.
“It was a pretty short list that they narrowed down to this location,” Steele said.
Critics have blasted the location as too isolated and the industrial structure as inappropriate for a housing facility. The site had been used to store metal products. Decades earlier, it had been used to fabricate and distribute steel, according to a 2014 environmental assessment report.
“My overall impression was that the site conditions were not safe or healthy for human habitation,” wrote Alison Poort, Lesli Harris’ chief of staff, in an affidavit describing her visit to the facility a day before it began accepting people. “Had City permitting been pursued, I felt confident that the Safety and Permits department would not be able to provide approval,” she said, in the statement given to lawyers suing the state about the homeless sweeps done in conjunction with the shelter.
Kelly, who first leased the property from the port in 2012, called it an “excellent location” when reached by The Lens.
To people who have worked with homeless people, the site was an odd match of property and owner. For more than a decade, Kelly persistently complained about unhoused people in the area where he lived – the Warehouse District near the century-old Ozanam Inn, a homeless shelter for men that was then located on Camp Street.
Kelly also objected to a Loyola University program that provided meals to the unhoused in Lafayette Square, writing in a letter to the Times-Picayune that the initiative attracted “vagrants and criminals who masquerade as homeless people.”
Others say that Kelly, through his high-profile complaints and pushes for action, also could be seen as a champion. While he was secretary of the Downtown Development District, the DDD hired a homeless-outreach worker and also pushed consistently for a city-run low-barrier shelter like the one eventually created on Gravier Street
“I have been advocating for a permanent, low-barrier shelter for 35 years,” Kelly told The Lens earlier this week. “I have never dealt with a state agency building a homeless shelter, but damn, they got it right.”
For years, Kelly said, he had seen otherwise. “The city in New Orleans, I have dealt with for a long time, trying to find a way to clean up the streets. The state found a way to do it.”
Despite recent local rumors that his temporary arrangement could turn permanent, Kelly said that he’d had no conversations on that topic with state or city officials.
Barge proposed as shelter
Another shelter-location finalist was a 290-bed barge that the state would have apparently transported from Lake Charles and moored in the Industrial Canal, documents show.
A state multi-agency working group tasked with addressing homelessness ahead of the Super Bowl sent Landry a memo on Dec. 22 outlining three options for a short-term shelter, including the France Road location, the barge, and a third option: soft-sided tents that would have required four acres of vacant land, at a location that had not been secured. The tents would have been set up by Workforce and another shelter contractor, Emergency Disaster Services.
Projected costs for the barge included $180 thousand to move the vessel to and from Morgan City, and an additional $19.8 thousand a day in rental fees, emails indicate.
The barge was nixed because of concerns that homeless clients might jump or fall from the vessel and that security and medical personnel would not have swift access, emails indicate.
“Re the barge—I’ve been on the phone with Port NOLA,” wrote James “’J.T.” Hannan, Landry’s director of the Office of Rural Development and the governor’s director of intergovernmental affairs for southeast Louisiana, in a December 19 email.
“There are some real concerns about the mooring site, as one recommendation to place the barge was in the Industrial Canal. Because of how the locks work and under current river conditions it would take over 2 hours for Harbor Police to respond to someone in the water at that location,” Hannan wrote, summarizing Harbor Police concerns. “They also feel the vessel needs to be secured to prevent people from jumping off it into the water. We are still working at it though.”
Rick Farrell involvement
Another prominent New Orleans area businessman also weighed in, in early conversations about the shelter.
Rick Farrell, co-owner of the sports bar chain Walk-Ons and the primary funder of the effort to recall Mayor Cantrell, encouraged state officials to use the France Road space, emails show.
“This is a brilliant location, and a perfect idea for a triage ‘transition’ center to move the homeless,” Farrell wrote in a December 20 email to Brian Gibbs, another developer, and Gina Campo, the executive director of the state’s Office of Community Development. “This is exactly what is needed along with centralized services to ‘transition’ the homeless from our City streets,” Farrell wrote. “I am really excited about this update and direction.”
It was unclear why Farrell was included in conversations about the facility, but part of Farrell’s dissatisfaction with the mayor reportedly stemmed from a meeting he’d had with Cantrell to discuss the city’s growing homeless encampments.
Farrell claims he proposed several initiatives to address the issue, including contributing $1 million to build a resource center, the Times-Picayune reported. But the meeting devolved. Though Cantrell disputes his account of that day, Farrell told the Times-Picayune that the mayor had cursed at him and another person attending the meeting.
Farrell contributed roughly $1 million to the Cantrell-recall efforts, which fell short in March 2023.
When reached by phone last week, Farrell declined to comment for this story.