Blight Fight In The Crescent City

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/nw-orleans-what-works-117656.html?hp=b3.VUk0NpVikq

Rubble in the Lower Ninth Ward
New Orleans, Louisiana
David Metraux
davidmetraux.com

Hello Everyone:

Today we are moving from urban planning and police violence to battling blight in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans.  Since the devastating storm in August 2005, New Orleans seemed to be stuck in some sort of inertia.  Thousands of homes were abandoned. left to rot; overtaken by weeds.  Eric Velasco's article for Politico, titled, "The Battle for New Orleans,"  examines Mayor Mitch Landrieu's initiative to get rid of the blight and return the "Crescent City" to its glory.

When Mayor Landrieu took office in 2010, five years after the hurricane, he took a good look around the city and got furious.  Mayor Landrieu told Mr. Velasco, basically property owners walking away from their responsibility and leaving for the rest of the public to clean up their mess.  It was not like the city had done nothing toward cleaning up the rubble and aiding the displaced residents rebuild.  Mr. Velasco writes, "Many of home and business owners had rebuilt.  The public and private sector had helped other displaced residents comeback."  The government purchased and demolished abandoned properties from absentee landlords and owners.  Regardless, New Orleans was still first in blight, when Mayor Landrieu took office, beating out Detroit, Flint, Cleveland, and Baltimore.

New Orleans, Louisiana montage
en.wikipedia.org

The Mayor decided it was far past time for errant property owners to take responsibility or step aside.  Quoting Mayor Landrieu, Mr. Velasco writes,

I told my team we have have to go everywhere in America where they're solving difficult problems...we have to figure not only what they're doing but how they're doing it.  And then we have to bring best practices here.

City officials did go everywhere in America where they were solving difficult problems. The city implemented ideas from cities such as Boston and Philadelphia-everything from dedicated "...telephone hotlines for reporting blight to market studies that helped planners understand where best to focus efforts."  New Orleans added new tools to combat blight: it created a state-of-the-art database to follow the status of each blighted property; passing laws that strengthened the city's ability to quickly enforce blight codes; targeting specific neighborhoods that were on the brink of collapse because of the additional blight induced crime and instability.

Jackson Square, French Quarter
New Orleans, Louisian
bugbog.com

By the end of Mayor Landrieu's first term, 10,000 of the city's 44,000 blight residential properties were either demolished, rehabilitated or cleared when the program launched in 2010.  At present, a year into the mayor's second term, the tally is up to 13,000. Ryan Berni, a senior aide to the mayor, told Eric Velasco, Hurricane Katerina was an awful event...But it presented the opportunity for New Orleans to become this country's laboratory and hub for innovation and change.

The blight battle has been aided by a resurgence in the city's pre-Katrina population. The foodie-heaven city now boasts 1,400 restaurants.  Technology companies moving into New Orleans have helped diversify the economy.  Tourism, New Orleans's top employer, has all but returned-"...9.5 million visitors spent a $6.8 billion in 2014, drawn by Mardi Gras, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, the Sugar Bowl college football game, convention, cruise ships and myriad parties the city and its neighborhoods throw on any given week."

Buildings and Structures in New Orleans
Amusement Parks
snipview.com

Nevertheless, for all its progress, New Orleans still has about the same number of pre-Katrina blighted properties.  Thus, proving that blight maybe easy to spot but notoriously difficult to remedy.  Despite the good news about the recovery efforts, affordable house remains scarce.  It is the same sad story as other cities with scarce affordable house: low-income and moderate income residents are being priced out of the market. More acutely, progress in the recovery process is achingly slow in many communities with "...concentrated, long-term decay and poverty like the Lower Ninth Ward..."

Once upon a time, the Lower Ninth boasted the highest rate of African-American homeownership in New Orleans.  When the hurricane made landfall, 18,000 people lived in 5,400 houses and apartment in the community.  In 2014, a paltry 1,800 residences received mail-an indicator of just how many people have not returned to the community, resuming their lives elsewhere, and just how little the neighborhood has recovered.  In a Hollywood shout out, Eric Velasco mention's actor Brad Pitt's organization Make It Right (http://www.makeitright.org) has built 100 homes in the Lower Ninth and have plans to build 50 additional units.  New Orleans has spent millions to build new community centers and fire stations.

Garden District
New Orleans, Louisiana
neworleanscondotrends.com

Eric Velasco cites Henry Simms's experiences following Katrina as an example of the difficulty in dealing with blight.  Mr. Simms lives in the Lower Ninth, near Flood Street. Spread out over eleven blocks of Flood Street only three dozen residences are occupied. Pointing to the blank slabs Mr. Simms tells Mr. Velasco, We had houses along this street...Look at all the slabs.  There was a house here, a house over there and three over there before Katrina.

Next, he points to the dilapidated property around the corner.

See that house...They ain't torn it down yet

He points to another building on Flood Street, abandoned and falling apart.

The owners?...They're in Ohio

Solar powered homes in the Lower Ninth Ward
news-archive.solarenergy-usa.com

New Orleans was buried in blight long before Katrina

Sad but true.  In what seems like some foreshadowing, Mr. Velasco notes, "A national nonprofit prepared a study on how to address the problem, its report due on September 1, 2005.  Katrina hit New Orleans two days earlier, creating even more blight in even more places."  The population dramatically dropped and 105,000 suffered near-to-catastrophic damage or were just destroyed.  Several co-authors of the pre-Hurricane blight study were enlisted to develop Mayor Mitch Landrieu's strategy.  The goals were simple according to Jeff Hebert head of the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, Preserve houses that needed to be preserved, demolish houses that needed to go and maintain vacant lots.

Homes in the Lower Ninth Ward
nytimes.com

How these goals were to be achieved were more complex.  Mr. Hebert continues, We needed to understand the real estate market and have a strategy for infill development to push the comeback.  And that all had to be tracked.  To help this endeavor, the Center for Community Progress established in January 2010 with initial funding from the Charles Stewart Mott and Ford Foundations, joined New Orleans civic officials in their study tour of places such as Cleveland, Boston, and New York.

First on the agenda was creating a method for efficiently counting the number of blighted properties and tracking code enforcement. This task is easier in theory than practice.  The chief obstacle in quantifying the data was compiling information from twelve city departments who are involved in the bight flight was excruciatingly difficulty because they were not linked.

Jungleland?
americaswire.org

For 18 months we were hacking at a system that wasn't built to do what we were trying to do, Oliver Wise, the head of the Office of Performance and Accountability, told Mr. Velasco.  What those charged with the task of fighting endemic blight is some sort of one-touch summery for each lot (an app if you will) that presented information on hearing dates and permits pulled.  Mr. Hebert picks up the conversation, We had to find a solution innovative enough so we could draw a line around part of the city and have data pop up for every property inside that line.

The inspiration for this type of tracking software was found on a fact-finding trip to Baltimore and Philadelphia.  Back in New Orleans, civic officials began to craft software specific to their own lot-by-lot system that would provide the necessary information needed to combat blight and assist in the creation of efficiency performance standards.  All the data is available online at:
https://data.nola.gov/browse?tags=blight and blightstatus.noa.gov/.  The availability of this information is part of ongoing efforts to engage the citizens of New Orleans in the recovery process and mend broken public trust.