Covington City Council Candidates Agree On A New Community Center

Peter Lewis and Keitisha Young might be running against each other to become the next City Council member but they agree on one thing. If elected both candidates would make building a community center a priority in District A. District A is located in northern Covington which is mainly an African-American lower income neighborhood.

Peter Lewis, 41, was born in Covington and graduated from Covington High School. He holds bachelor’s degrees in general management and human resources/business management from

Southeastern Louisiana University and owns an insurance agency in Covington.

Lewis, who is endorsed by the St. Tammany Parish Democratic Committee, has been a mentor to local children and has worked with them for years. He wants to change the anger and violence he sees in the community. Just last month two shootings took place in District A by a 19-year-old resident. Bringing a new community center to the area will help with this situation. Youth in District A will have a place to go after school where they can be mentored.

Along with the new community center, Lewis wants to create more classroom space in the overcrowded schools, rennovate housing in the area, add sidewalks and street lamps and improve roadways.

“I see the other areas of Covington making changes, but District A doesn’t because no one is speaking up,” he said.


Keitisha Young was born in Covington and also graduated from Covington High. She studied business at Howard University in Washington, D.C.; working toward a degree at Southern New Hampshire University. She is endorsed by the West St. Tammany Chamber of Commerce’s Political Action Committee and the Alliance for Good Government.

Young agrees with Lewis and says District A needs a new community center for the kids. Right now

kids only have the Boys & Girls Club on Columbia Street which charges a fee. They need a free place to go that is a healthy environment.

“You need after-school recreation, studying, tutoring,” she said. “Kids emulate what they see, and the only thing they see is the courthouse and the jailhouse right down the street.”  Slum lords are also an issue Young wants to address.

“We have people paying $500, $600 for rent and they’re living in a house with holes in the floor and it’s infested by rodents. It’s a big problem, and it’s throughout the district. … We need homeownership education in our area. People have to know what their rights are and not be afraid to speak up about the housing they’re living in.”

Landlords need to be held accountable, Young believes there should be stronger home inspections. Residence who pay rent should have a home that is in livable condition.

“Things are getting cleaned up by the city, but it’s not getting done here in our district … The new mayor and council … have a responsibility to one another. We need to talk about all of it and see what we can do.”

The elections will be held on March 30, 2019 and early voting is currently daily through March 23, 2019.



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Spring Uptick For Housing Market

Spring always brings warm weather, sunshine and an upbeat attitude. The home market started off slow for the beginning of 2019, but analyst believe there will be a rise in home sales Spring 2019.

The beginning of the year wasn’t what the National Association of Realtors hoped for. Pending home sales did jump 4.6% this January, however sales were 2.3% lower than a year ago. January marked the 13th straight month of year-over-year declines.

The pending home-sales index (the NAR’s tracking system that records home contract signings) did go up in January to 103.2.  Analysts believe the reopening of the partial government shutdown caused

the boost from the nearly five-year low it saw in December of 2018. In the Northeast pending sales increased 1.6%, in the Midwest 2.8%, only 0.3% in the West and 8.9% in the South. The market should see the home sales from these pending contracts right around Springtime. Contracts usually stay pending on average for about 45 days until they close.

“February existing home sales should now rebound handily and with new home sales likely to head higher too, given the rising trend in mortgage demand, the gloomy housing narrative in markets and the media is set to change quite dramatically over the next few months. The market is not rolling over, and it is not a harbinger of recession in the broader economy,” said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist for Pantheon Macro.


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Homeownership is The Way To Go

Rent is rising fast and many are turning back to owning vs. renting. According to the Unites States Census Bureau, in 2016 the decline in homeownership suddenly changed and started to rise. The Housing Vacancies and Homeownership survey reflects that homeownership rates rose from 63% in 2016 to 64.6% in 2018. Here are some of the reasons why this reversal has come to fruition.

Millennials had enough with living with mom and dad. In 2017, 22% of adults between the ages of 25 to 34 were living with their parents compared to the 11.6 % of adults between the ages of 25 to 34 that were living with their parents in 2005. This increase was due to the housing crisis, slow earnings

growth, soft labor market and steep student loan debts. As of 2016, Millennials started to be in the position to financially own a home. The homeownership rate for those under 45 began to recover very quickly. This is an important statistic for the housing market because Millennials (those born after 1981) will outnumber baby boomers in the near future.

“Millennials have been on a buying spree the last few years,” Zillow Research economist Aaron Terrazas said.

The groundwork for the turning point hit in 2015 when rental rates rose nationally more than 6% from the previous year. This marked one of the rare times that rent rose faster than home prices.

“Rent appreciation was so high during that period that it essentially put fire under people’s feet to get up and buy,” Terrazas said. “People who may have been sitting on the fence would be incentivized to jump into homeownership,” according to Terrazas.

Rising house prices also led to a quick reaction as Milleanials feared they would be priced out of the market. Terrazas commented that, “driven to homeownership by fears that with homes appreciating so quickly that they would be locked out of buying a home in their desired area.”
Another fear was that interest rates could go up so those who wanted to own a home needed to lock in immediately.

“Maybe people thought ‘interest rates could go up, I should lock in now,’ ” Urban institute housing expert Laurie Goodman said.

Those that were affected by foreclosures during the 2008 recession are ready to buy again. Those that went into foreclosure are now able to obtain a mortgage( it takes seven years for your credit to be cleared of a foreclosure). Buyers who were burned during the housing bubble are no longer gun shy, they are beginning to reenter the housing market.

Overall the unemployment rate is in better shape than it was a decade ago and there are more people out there ready to invest their money.

“When there’s very low unemployment, when there’s been slow but steady wage growth, that tends to make households confident in their ability to make what will probably be their largest investment of their life,” said Ralph McLaughlin an economist at CoreLogic.


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Local Mandeville Artist Exhibits Artwork at Diboll Gallery

Diboll Gallery, located at Loyola University in New Orleans, is currently housing an exhibit that features a local Mandeville Artist. Luba Zygarewicz, a Mandeville resident, is part of the HIVE MIND exhibit which continues until March 17, 2019.

Luba was born in Chile, and came to the United States, San Francisco, when she was 15 years old. She began her formal study of art at Loyola University and earned a Bachelor of Art in Sculpture.San Francisco Art Institute.

She then went on to obtain a Master of Fine Art from

Motherhood took over for awhile, but she still was able to create and discover her talent while rearing and schooling 4 children. Many of her pieces reflect her stages in life and the story of her family. Her mediums include used tea bags from her cups of tea, discarded twigs, lint from her dryer and even clusters of hair.

“Finding myself doing piles of laundry,” she said in the show’s statement. “I often thought of fellow artists I knew…they were probably in their studios making ‘art,’ while I was doing yet another load of laundry. This is where my time is going! ‘Petrified Time: 13 years of my life folded and neatly stacked’ grew out of this inner struggle between domestic obligations and my creative practice.”

“For a while motherhood defined a lot of my work and the process. I think that’s why I worked in little things because they would accumulate into big things,” she said, adding that her long-running

project – collecting her fallen hair for over 25 years– was important because “it was a reminder that I am an artist.”

“My work investigates implied presence in light of absence. I collect moments that together create an experience as a way of holding memories. Memories often drift into the present and are woven into my practice.” she said in a proposal for The Wild: Artist in Residence on Italy’s Amalfi Coast. She was one of five international artists awarded a spot in the November 2018 residency, entitled “Wonder Up a World.”


“The whole point was being more aware of how I move through the world, in a sense of just being present,” Zygarewicz said of LED-lit shoes she created as a representation of a mindful walking practice for an interactive performance during the seven-day residency abroad.

Her installations and sculptures have been exhibited locally, nationally and internationally including Agora Gallery in New York City, Acadiana Center for the Arts in Lafayette, Sonoma Valley Museum of Art in Sonoma, California, Ogden Museum Of Southern Art and the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, among others.

Luba Zygarewicz’s work can be viewed at HIVE MIND continues until March 17 at Loyola University’s Collins C. Diboll Art Gallery, 4th Floor of the Monroe Library, 6363 St. Charles Avenue, New Orleans at the HIVE MIND from now until March 17, 2019.

Follow Luba’s process on Instagram at @lubazygarewicz



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