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MIKE MILLER, 31 SHAMUS ROHN, 29 Founders, UNITY of Greater New Orleans’ Abandoned Building Outreach Team PHOTO BY GARY LOVERDE
Mike Miller and Shamus Rohn spend nights searching through dark, abandoned buildings that often are crumbling or mold-infested. They look for what they call “signs of life,” but what — or who — they find is often barely living. They discover homeless people with debilitating mental and physical diseases, anything from tuberculosis to syphilis so advanced it has attacked their brain, and “an entire range of physical things that you would expect that once you’ve been diagnosed with it, the hospital finds a place for you to go and takes care of you,” Rohn says. “But they’re turning up in buildings.” Miller and Rohn head UNITY of Greater New Orleans’ Abandoned Building Outreach team, which they started in 2008. They search the city’s estimated 55,000 abandoned buildings for homeless inhabitants, and then attempt to connect them with health and housing services. The people they encounter are often the “sickest of the sick,” but Miller and Rohn work to get them into stable housing. Miller is from Chicago, and Rohn is from Michigan; both moved to New Orleans for different reasons and ended up staying. Miller has a master’s degree in social work and Rohn has master’s in political science. Although the men work “weird hours,” as Miller says, often canvassing a neighborhood until 2 a.m., they make time for activities such as playing in a kickball league, hotly debating Gambit’s Top 50 Bars list and enjoying everything else New Orleans offers. “It’s New Orleans, man,” Miller says. “You can’t have just one hobby in New Orleans.” — LaBorde
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NEAL MORRIS, 38
Founder, Redmellon Restoration and Development PHOTO BY CHERYL GERBER
LAVONZELL NICHOLSON, 34 Founder/President, PlayNOLA PHOTO BY CHERYL GERBER
After working for area nonprofits Each One Save One and Louisiana Association of Nonprofit Organizations, Lavonzell Nicholson got an opportunity to start a business of her own. She entered the 2009 Idea Village Entrepreneur Challenge, a national business plan competition, with her proposal for PlayNOLA, a sports and social club in New Orleans. “Having been to a couple of different places and having been an athlete, I noticed that it can be difficult for people to meet each other in the city,” she says. “Sports are a neutralizing factor.” Now, there are 1,000 participants in PlayNOLA events, from kickball leagues to rooftop parties to boot camps. Nicholson started out doing everything for PlayNOLA, but she now has a staff of two league coordinators and 10 referees. “People look at our website or look at us and think we are some major thing that has been around,” she says. “The three of us make it all go.” Nicholson returned to New Orleans from Maryland after Hurricane Katrina to be part of rebuilding the city. She noticed an increase in the popularity of recreational activities in the city and hopes PlayNOLA leads people to new ways to meet others and stay healthy. — Carroll
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Gambit > bestofneworleans.com > NOVEMBER 02 > 2010
Real estate developer Neal Morris uses his expertise to fight blight in New Orleans, turning dilapidated and adjudicated properties into affordable housing for mostly lowto moderate-income and elderly residents. Since founding Redmellon Restoration and Development in 2000, he has renovated or built more than 400 affordable housing units, mostly single- and double-family houses. He believes one way to revive New Orleans is by supplying housing and repopulating the city’s neighborhoods. “I’m an urbanist,” Morris says. “I think density is the key to sustainability. Those who live in the most dense places actually consume the least fossil fuels. The key for us in New Orleans is to fill in the historic density we already have.” Morris moved to New Orleans from Augusta, Ga., in 1991 to attend Tulane University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in history, a master of business administration and a law degree. In 2006, the Louisiana Housing Finance Agency awarded Redmellon the Innovation in Housing Award, and in 2009, Morris was one of only 10 professionals to be named a Loeb Fellow at Harvard, where he taught classes and studied design, public policy and law relating to the low-income housing industry. He currently is renovating 47 housing units and is developing a 50-unit pilot home ownership project in which Redmellon will renovate doubles and place a tenant in one side before selling the buildings to first-time homeowners. Morris says he doesn’t develop only lower-priced housing, but shifted his focus to single- and two-family houses because “I think that’s what is needed in New Orleans now. I like being part of the rehabilitation of the city.” — Graves
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