Housing projects destroyed by Hurricane Katrina will be rebuilt as mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhoods, with $1.8 billion planned to begin work in Louisiana and Mississippi, U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson said Wednesday.

"Within the next two weeks, we will begin to see results," he said, without giving details.

The $1.8 billion is part of President Bush's request for $17.1 billion for long-term recovery along the Gulf of Mexico. "It will be the first of many" allocations, Jackson told reporters after meeting with four City Council members whose districts include housing projects.

He said the type of redevelopment was chosen by Mayor Ray Nagin and City Council, not by HUD: "I'm not here to dictate to the mayor and council."

The C.J. Peete development in Central City will be the first development to be redone, once health and safety inspectors deem it safe, he told reporters at the Fischer project, half of which has been torn down for new mixed-use development.

Before Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans had 7,500 public housing apartments, about 5,100 of them occupied. Another 4,700 families used federally subsidized vouchers to rent apartments around the city.

All public housing units are currently locked and boarded; a notice on the Housing Authority of New Orleans' Web site gives phone numbers for tenants who want to collect their belongings. The locks are to be sure nobody steals residents' belongings or moves into a place that isn't safe, Jackson said.

Some buildings were only lightly damaged but don't yet have utilities; mold is also a worry, he said.

Jackson reiterated that the developments would have fewer tenants even if they were being remade as the vast tracts of high- and low-rise apartment buildings erected in the 1940s-60s.

Half of the Fischer project has been torn down, and smaller buildings are going up. One-third will be small apartment buildings to be rented at the market rate, one-third low-income apartment, and one-third single-family houses for sale.

"We will eradicate that type of development," Jackson said, pointing across the street to a building that stretched for blocks. "We don't want to isolate people because they're low-income."

He said he has visited nine shelters, asking public housing tenants at each if they wanted to return and emphasizing that HUD would do all it could to make such returns as easy as possible.

"I've talked to some 500 hundred people. Some 60 to 65 percent say they're not coming back," Jackson said.

(Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press. All Ri