The Times-Picayune reports that the Reliance Housing Foundation, a nonprofit affordable-housing developer, recently closed on former La Salle Hotel. The four-story building at 1113 Canal St. shares a roofline and a facade with the Saenger Theater and will be brought back into commerce along with the theater which is supposed to reopen in June, 2013.

Reliance plans to bring 32 affordable rental units and street-level retail space to the site at the corner of Canal and Basin streets, and the company is in talks with renting the ground-floor space that fronts on Canal Street for a ticketing center for the theater.

The Times-Pic quotes Keith Adler, a sales and leasing associate at Corporate Realty who represented the former owners of the La Salle property saying, “This is good news for Canal Street, It’s bringing another blighted structure back into commerce, and that’s a good thing for New Orleans.”