City ignoring solution to blight?

NEW ORLEANS -- Danger and decay intertwine to create a sort of no man's land, all across New Orleans. It’s destruction too recent to be considered artifacts, but too repulsive to be considered much else.

"Well it's disgusting, it's very disgusting. Because you can go into some of the areas of the city and it's all alive, but this area's dead. Why is it that way?” asks resident Phillip Bodden.

He lives in a neighborhood where houses are still overcome by weeds and despair, and the outdoors are now growing in.

"The city needs to come out here and just tear up these houses and start building something, do something with the neighborhood," he said.

The reality is there are already a number of city and state programs targeting blight and boasting success. But when your neighborhood looks like Bodden’s, progress elsewhere is little consolation.

"We're sitting and talking, doing paperwork, while people are dying with houses falling on top of them," complains Cynthia Willard-Lewis, District E councilwoman.

Willard-Lewis said her efforts two years ago helped create the Lot Next Door program, giving residents who live alongside blighted property first dibs on buying it up.

"That's an easy way of making sure that neighborhoods are safe and neighborhoods are stable, because you're going to continually take care of that property because it's next to yours," she said.

But progress, she said, is too slow - bordering on failure in fact. She gives a grade of "D."

The New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, or NORA, heads the program and was created by the state more than 40 years ago to eradicate blight in the city. Currently NORA has about 950 properties in the pipeline to be sold to third parties. But only 150 have officially sold.

City estimates put the total number of abandoned properties at as much as 50,000. The disparity, according to NORA, has everything to do with state law. A 2006 amendment to the Louisiana constitution aims to protect property owners from government land grabs, so much so that it now makes it nearly impossible for NORA to sell blighted property once it takes ownership of it.

The only exceptions are lots and houses sold to the state through the Road Home program, but those only total about 5,000 in a sea of nearly 50,000 decrepit properties.

"The legislature did not intend for blighted code invested properties to languish without a solution like this,” said Richard Monteilh, NORA executive director.

The agency now hopes the Louisiana Supreme Court will weigh in on the issue and demand a change in the law, but even in the midst of the courtroom limbo, NORA does legally have the right to seize neglected property when the owners fail to pay outstanding liens and fines.

"We can do that, we just can't get rid of it," Monteilh said. “It puts us in the grass-cutting business, which is not a business we can afford to be in because we don't have a budget for that sort of stuff."

It’s a legal tying of hands that some lawmakers saw coming.

"A lot of people really focused on NORA as the panacea as all of our blight problems,” said District B Councilwoman Stacy Head. “I knew that wasn't going to work.”

Head went to Baton Rouge to lobby for her own legislation, allowing the city to take ownership of blighted properties and then get them back into commerce through a different process, auctioning them off through a weekly civil sheriff's sale.

There's no need for a lawsuit because the judgment lodged against a negligent property owner is a financial one, eliminating the need for a trial.

"Under a money judgment anything can be seized that the debtor owns, including the real estate,” said Peter Rizzo, chief deputy for Orleans Civil Sheriff Paul Valteau.

The proceeds would go towards any outstanding city fines against the home and the leftover cash would then be saved for the original owner.

With a seemingly endless supply of eligible properties, the potential windfall for a budget- strapped city like New Orleans is major.

"Easily in the $10 million range," said Head. "Not only would we recover that money immediately upon the sheriff's sale, but we also get the properties into the hands of a third party who because they just paid for the property have an incentive to fix it."

The process works, she said, but is time consuming, labor intensive and, for now, without funding or mainstream support.

The Nagin administration has yet to hire the staff to take on the program, and so for now Head's council office is bearing the burden.

"It's like with a lot of systems that are dysfunctional in the city of New Orleans,” she said.  “There are a lot of good people trying to make it work better."

The councilwoman's assigned security detail officer is also in charge of documenting new problem spots.

"We go out, identify that property, then turn it over to code enforcement and then code enforcement goes and maybe cites the property," said Gregory Malveaux, in Head’s office.

A college intern back in the office then updates the database.

"It's really just a centralized way of having a wealth of information that anyone in this office or any constituent when we talk to constituents we can refer back to that," said Nicole Williams, Tulane University political science student and council office intern.

It is a grass roots effort aimed at tackling a massive endeavor. But after two years of work, the results leave much to be desired.

"Well we've only had three successful sales," explains Head.

It is only a trio of lots seized by the city and then sold to third parties, in a sea of neglected and shattered homes.

Cuncilwoman Head said it's still the city's best option, because at this point it's the only one.

"Those properties will remain blighted because there is absolutely no legal mechanism to get those properties into the hands of third parties," she said.

She said progress could be sped up significantly if the Mayor's Office hired just two attorneys to oversee the process and guide it through the court system. That is the one area NORA says it can help.

"We have roughly 18 contract attorneys right now who would like to do more work,” Monteilh said. “We'd have to have some way of paying them but we'd be happy to do it."

But when asked whether anyone from the city has contacted NORA about the possibility, Monteilh replied, “Not yet, not on that issue."

Even if they did, with a $68 million deficit looming, the city's budget committee chairman said don't expect the council to shell out anything.

"I really don't think we're going to have it, so we've got to work, be very creative and I think trying to get state legislation that gives a little more leeway to NORA to move this adjudicated property,” said Cynthia Hedge-Morrell, District D councilwoman.

Head said she was told by the Mayor's Office early last month that the Nagin administration would be hiring two attorneys to take on the new kind of blight sale, but that's yet to happen.

As for NORA’s legal problems, the state Speaker of the House, Rep. Jim Tucker, R-Terrytown, and Senate president Joel Chaisson, D-Destrehan, both said they were unaware that state laws were tying up the agency's efforts. They say legislators could choose to take up the issue sometime next year.