Based in Birmingham, Al., Eric Velasco has been a freelancer since 2012, writing about judicial politics and other matters. He was a daily newspaper reporter for nearly 30 years, covering Alabama courts and judicial politics from 2005-2012. He is co-author of “The New Politics of Judicial Elections 2011-12,” a biennial study of judicial campaign financing and influence published by Justice at Stake, the Brennan Center for Justice and the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

Mitch Landrieu looked around New Orleans when he became mayor in 2010, and got angry. The thousands of houses still abandoned and rotting in the city, five years after Hurricane Katrina? The thousands more empty lots where 10-foot-tall weeds had taken over?

That, Landrieu says, was “basically property owners walking away from their responsibility and leaving it to the rest of the public to clean up their mess.”


It’s not that the city had done nothing since the mammoth storm washed ashore in August 2005. Many home and business owners had rebuilt. The public and private sectors had helped other displaced residents come back. The government bought and razed properties from absentee landlords and owners who had no intention of returning. Despite these efforts, New Orleans remained No. 1 in blight when Landrieu took the reins, in far worse shape than Detroit, Flint, Cleveland or Baltimore.

It was past time, the mayor decided, for delinquent property owners to step up—or step aside.

“I told my team we have to go everywhere in America where they’re solving difficult problems,” Landrieu says. “We have to figure out not only what they’re doing but how they’re doing it. And then we have to bring best practices here.”

The city adopted or adapted ideas from places like Boston and Philadelphia—from special phone hotlines for reporting blight to market studies that helped planners understand where best to focus efforts. Then New Orleans added new tools, one by one: Creating a state-of-the-art database to track the status of every blighted property; passing laws that allow the city to enforce blight codes with lightning speed (at least bureaucratic lightning speed); and targeting specific neighborhoods that, while not exactly jewels before Katrina, were teetering on the brink of collapse because added blight brought more crime and instability.

Landrieu’s administration reached its first-term goal to demolish, rehabilitate or clear 10,000 of the city’s 44,000 blighted residential properties when the eradication program was launched in fall 2010. Roughly a year into his second term, the count is up to 13,000 properties, officials say.

“Hurricane Katrina was an awful event,” says Ryan Berni, a senior aide to Landrieu. “But it presented the opportunity for New Orleans to become this country’s laboratory and hub for innovation and change.”

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, above, has cleared up to 13,000 properties during his tenure. | Mark Peterson/Redux

The blight fight has aided a recent resurgence. New Orleans has recovered some 85 percent of its pre-Katrina population. The food-mad city now has 1,400 restaurants—far more than before Katrina. New high-tech companies are helping diversify the economy. Tourism, a top employer, is all but back; some 9.5 million visitors spent a record $6.8 billion in 2014, drawn by Mardi Gras, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, the Sugar Bowl college football game, conventions, cruise ships and myriad parties the city and its neighborhoods throw on any given week.

Yet for all its progress, New Orleans still has roughly the same number of blighted properties as before Katrina, proving that while blight is easy to spot, it is deceptively difficult to attack.

Where recovery has taken hold, affordable housing is scarce; some poor and moderate-income people are being priced out of the market. And progress has been painfully slow in many neighborhoods with concentrated, long-term decay and poverty like the Lower Ninth Ward—the community that provided iconic images during Katrina of its residents frantically waving down rescue helicopters from the roofs of submerged homes.

The Lower Ninth once boasted the highest rate of homeownership among African-Americans in New Orleans. About 18,000 people lived in its 5,400 houses and apartments when Katrina made landfall. A mere 1,800 residences received mail in mid-2014—an indication of how many people have restarted elsewhere and how little the neighborhood has recovered in the last decade.

New Window OPTICS: A Walk Down Flood Street: Life amid blight in the Lower Ninth Ward. (Click to view gallery.) | Mark Peterson/Redux

Yes, Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation has built 100 colorful and futuristic houses in the Lower Ninth and plans to build 50 more. The city has spent tens of millions to build a new community center and fire station.

But 10 years after the storm, only three-dozen private residences are occupied in 11 blocks of Flood Street near Harry Simms’ rebuilt home in the Lower Ninth Ward. “We had houses all along this street,” he says. “Look at all the slabs. There was a house here, a house over there and three over there before Katrina.”

He points to a dilapidated property around the corner.

“See that house?” he says. “They ain’t torn it down yet.”

He singles out another structure on Flood Street, vacant and crumbling.

The owners?

“They’re in Ohio.”

***

New Orleans was buried in blight long before Katrina.

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. City population plummeted; 105,000 homes suffered major-to-severe damage or were destroyed.

Several co-authors of the earlier blight report helped develop the Landrieu strategy. The ends were simple: “Preserve houses that needed to be preserved, demolish houses that needed to go and maintain vacant lots,” says Jeff Hebert, who joined the administration in the summer of 2010 and heads the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority.

Lower Ninth Ward, just off of Flood Street. | Mark Peterson/Redux for Politico Magazine

The means, Hebert says, were complex: “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.”

The Center for Community Progress, established in January 2010 with initial funding by the Charles Stewart Mott and Ford foundations, worked with New Orleans officials to visit and study practices in cities such as Cleveland, Boston and New York.

The first order of business: how to effectively count blighted properties and track enforcement. The task is harder than it sounds. Compiling information from the 12 city departments involved in fighting blight was painstaking because they were not linked. None knew what the others were doing.

“For 18 months we were hacking at a system that wasn’t built to do what we were trying to do,” says Oliver Wise, who heads the administration’s Office of Performance and Accountability.

They needed one-touch summaries on each lot that showed violations, citations, hearing dates and construction permits issued. “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,” says Hebert, who also serves as the city’s chief resilience officer with funding under the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative.

New Orleans officials found inspiration in tracking software viewed on fact-finding trips to Baltimore and Philadelphia. Once home, they began to craft specifications for their own lot-by-lot system that would provide the data needed to track each step of the blight fight and aid creation of performance standards to measure its efficiency. The city put all that data and its progress reports online, recognizing the need to engage the community and mend tattered public trust.

Residents can monitor enforcement efforts via BlightStatus, an online public portal built by Code for America contractors who later formed a company, Civic Insight, to maintain the site. It’s like those trackers for online pizza orders that tell the customer whether the pie is baking or when it’s due for delivery.

“What the citizen is looking at is exactly the same information the decision-makers see in management meetings,” Oliver says. “Few other places do that.”

New Orleans also borrowed ideas from Boston’s 311 system—a non-emergency alternative to 911—to allow residents to report blight and ensure their complaints are routed correctly through the City Hall labyrinth. The monthly management meetings, called BlightSTAT, provide a forum for public feedback and are attended by officials from every relevant city department.

The city hired additional code-enforcement officers to step up the caseload. Through 2014 they made more than 67,000 inspections and hauled 15,000 owners to court, city data shows. By then, data-driven tweaks to the enforcement process had cut in half, to 80 days, the time from citation to a hearing. “We wouldn’t have been able to do any of this if we had not focused on the technology solution,” Hebert says.

Data played a key role in helping New Orleans officials determine where to focus city recovery efforts. Taking a cue from Baltimore, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, the city commissioned a detailed analysis of each neighborhood.

The study, which was completed in 2013 and is due to be updated, documents neighborhood demographics, socio-economic conditions, population density, crime statistics, progress in rebuilding, how long real estate took to sell and sales prices. The numbers helped identify where crime and ongoing blight puts a neighborhood in danger of tipping past the point of return. Those became targets for concentrated enforcement and priorities for financial incentives to rehabilitate property or build affordable housing.

“It helped us think about how we invest in the city, to make smarter decisions,” says Oliver, the accountability czar.

The Central City neighborhood—a majority black community, mostly renters with a poverty rate hovering near 50 percent—was deemed a priority under this approach. Blighted and crime-ridden already, both conditions worsened after Katrina’s flooding.

After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, 105,000 homes suffered major-to-severe damage or were destroyed. | Mark Peterson/Redux for Politico Magazine

Rebuilding efforts first focused on areas that anchor residential neighborhoods, including commercial corridors like Central City’s Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard. In compact Central City, more than seven dozen houses have been demolished since 2011 and more than 100 lots mown since September, data shows. Now, the community is back at 95 percent of its pre-Katrina level of residences.

***

Snapshot: Freret

· Population: 1,774

· Median income: $36,215

· Median age: 33 years

On April 4, some 20,000 locals and tourists attended the Freret Street Festival, which celebrates rebirth in the mixed-race, moderate-income neighborhood east of Jefferson Avenue in the Uptown community.

Before Katrina, it had an iffy reputation among students from nearby Loyola University, west of Jefferson Avenue. “I used to tell students, ‘Don’t cross Jefferson; there’s nothing for you there but crack,’” says Kellie Grengs, an art teacher.

An affordable building in Freret led Grengs to cross Jefferson in 2005 to live and operate a studio there with her husband, also an artist. Katrina hit eight months later, flooding its homes and practically shuttering the commercial district.

At left, Leslie and Bruce Johnson in their home in the Freret neighborhood talking to Yasin Southalle. At right, owner Michael Casey at his Liberty Cheese Steaks shop in Freret. | Mark Peterson/Redux for Politico Magazine

While temporarily selling art on Freret Street from a federally-supplied trailer she dubbed a “FEMA studio,” Grengs helped organize what became the “ New Freret” business and homeowner association. Back in her home/studio since 2010, she continues to co-chair the group.

Bruce Johnson’s family helped integrate Freret a half-century ago. During Katrina, he and his mother retreated upstairs as the lower floor flooded. The Johnsons had good insurance and federal assistance but did not complete house renovations until 2009. “It was four years before this neighborhood started coming back,” he said.

The neighborhood is anchored by an eight-block commercial district on Freret Street boasting 15 restaurants, two music venues and 26 other businesses, most opened after 2011. “Renewal touches much more than streets and houses,” says Michael Casey, a 2006 Tulane University grad who opened Liberty Cheese Steaks on Freret Street in 2013 and also is co-chair of the business and homeowner association. “It forces you to be flexible and inventive. I think that is why entrepreneurship rocks in this city.”

Returning owners fixed many of the houses in Freret; investors fixed and flipped more, some purchased through the city’s blight program.

The cloud in this silver lining?

“We’re seeing more flipping of homes now than families buying homes,” says Leslie Johnson, Bruce’s wife. “Prices are going up. How do you maintain affordable property to get people back in the neighborhood who were here before?”

***

Roughly 4,000 houses have been demolished under Landrieu’s program, with several hundred more slated to come down. But the city also has partnered with community groups to fix more than 500 homes occupied by owners who could not afford repairs.

“It’s not just about going around tearing down houses,” says Berni, the senior advisor. “You must have a lot of tools.”

One of the most potent is the city’s aggressive lien-foreclosure system.

Here’s how it works: Code enforcement cites a blighted home or property. If the owner is fined, does not appeal and fails to start fixing within 30 days, the city imposes a lien. If the lien is not paid within 30 days, the city seeks foreclosure for a sheriff’s auction that transfers title to a third party for rehabilitation.

“We filed more writs for seizure than any other city,” says First Deputy Mayor Andy Kopplin, who helped develop the blight-eradication program. “That got people’s attention. They started to fix them up or sell them to someone who will.”

The city foreclosed on just eight properties in the five years after Katrina under Mayor Ray Nagin. Under Landrieu’s blight program, though, the numbers have skyrocketed: About 2,000 parcels, mostly former rental property, have sold or await sale. Prices for auctioned properties doubled in the last year, to roughly $80 per square foot.

Owners hauled to court brought 3,500 properties into compliance. “That is one of the positive byproducts of getting tough on enforcement,” says Ava Rogers, city code enforcement manager. “We don’t want to take people’s homes. We certainly don’t want to demolish them. We want them fixed.”

Tourism in New Orleans drew in a record $6.8 billion in 2014. | Mark Peterson/Redux for Politico Magazine

The city collected nearly $4 million from sales and liens of blighted property from January 2011 through March 2015. It collected more than $1.8 million in blight fines in 2014, more than double the city’s collections in 2009, before Landrieu took office.

The City Council passed a law last year allowing overgrown lots to be mowed within 30 days; the process used to take months because it required the city to take the owners to court. Now, a code officer only needs to post a notice saying the city intends to clear the lot if the owner does not comply.

Nearly 660 lots were mowed within six months after the program started in September, city data shows. Nearly 20 percent of cited owners took care of the problem themselves. The city contracts with Covenant House, which works with homeless youths, to pay its clients to cut and maintain the rest.

“We wanted some fast-track options,” Rogers says. “We’re not taking a person’s house, so we don’t have to go through lengthy due-process issues.”

***

Snapshot: Lakeview

· Population: 6,593

· Median income: $73,936

· Median age: 33 years

There’s a saying in New Orleans: Floods don’t discriminate between rich and poor. The Lakeview community was proof.

The upscale, predominantly white neighborhood is on a peninsula bordered by Lake Pontchartrain and two canals. Scores of residents died in Katrina; out of nearly 13,000 homes, some 7,200 were severely damaged or destroyed. Lakeview ranked second, behind the Lower Ninth Ward, in after-storm government home buyouts.

Lakeview’s recovery has been fueled by homeowners, but also by house-flippers with a boost from the city’s blight-eradication program. Roughly six-dozen houses were demolished for redevelopment under the program, city data shows. Dozens more were fixed after owners were cited for violations.

Jesse Dean, an Oregon ex-pat who bought his house in January 2012, is among the many newcomers in Lakeview. “There have been blight-eradication efforts in Lakeview since we’ve been here,” Dean says. “It has been beneficial. This area has seen significant construction in the last three to five years.”

Jesse Dean near his Lakeview home. | Mark Peterson/Redux for Politico Magazine

But Lakeview’s revival shows that fixing up the houses along a given street is only part of the problem facing New Orleans—the streets themselves are abysmal. Aging infrastructure and lingering floodwater—some parts of New Orleans took weeks to drain—left roads buckled across the city. Hundreds of miles have been repaired, mostly along commercial corridors and main roads, but many residential streets remain in poor condition.

In Lakeview, where houses sell for $400,000 and up, gouge marks on its rutted streets show where even the most careful drivers bottom out. Red yard signs blare: “Fix my streets. I pay my taxes.”

***

New Orleans lives in the moment, but it banks its future on honoring its past.

That is the foundation for a tourism industry built around the French Quarter and its 18 th Century buildings, which escaped Katrina mostly unscathed.

Deciding how past, present and future should intersect has been central to debates over what historic houses should be restored or torn down, how neighborhoods should develop and where rebuilding may not be such a great idea.

New Orleans also embraces the 21 st century in its quest for renewal. Modern performance measurement—counting, dissecting, setting goals, measuring results, adjusting based on data—now is a template throughout city government, from budgeting and contracting to policing and helping the homeless.

The get-the-job-done ethos also demands duct-tape and bale-wire solutions. Blight officials, for example, want photo images of every lot, updated periodically to track how conditions improve or decline. Without money to contract out the work, they strapped cameras to fire trucks, creating a lower-cost alternative akin to Google Street View.

“We’re applying this new way of governing,” Landrieu says. “It’s everybody sitting at the table, putting in their part, cooperating and not being ideologically bent. You’ve got to find answers. There is no ideological way to fill a pothole.”

Dense public housing projects have given way to privately managed mixed-income communities. City schools have morphed into a charter-based system. The new University Medical Center now under construction will include a hub for bio-research.

“It’s a different vibe,” Landrieu says. “We haven’t lost our sense of self. We’ve just added to what we were.”

The racial and ethnic mix is changing in New Orleans, with an estimated population of 380,000 in 2013. Blacks comprised 59 percent of residents, versus 67 percent in 2000. Whites were 31 percent, up from 27 percent. The Asian population rate had grown slightly to 3 percent. Hispanic residents far exceeded their 2000 Census count.

Landrieu’s blight program is a component of the change in the Crescent City. It has provided momentum and become a symbol of progress.

New Orleans has a target date for its biggest performance measurement yet—its tri-centennial on May 7, 2018. The city is speeding up efforts to clean and build before the celebration.

“Hopefully in our 300 th anniversary year we can demonstrate to the people of America, ‘thanks for all the investments you’ve made and here’s a return on that investment,’” says the mayor, who is barred by law from seeking another term. “We’ve set the standard and have created a model for America to find her strength again and find a way to get things done.”

***

Snapshot: Lower Ninth Ward

· Population: 3,007

· Median income: $43,233

· Median age: 38 years

Flood Street bisects the Lower Ninth Ward, running north-south to higher ground near the Mississippi River. It is representative of the entire community, with desolation the worst and lingering longest in the north and the most progress taking place to the south.

Scenes from the Lower Ninth Ward, where patchwork redevelopment is still too scattered to attract robust commercial or residential infill. | Mark Peterson/Redux for Politico Magazine

The city demolished roughly two-dozen houses along Flood Street under the blight program, among more than 400 taken down across the Lower Ninth Ward. But abandoned houses abound, some still displaying the X-shaped “Katrina marks” from search-and-rescue teams—date checked on top, hazards to the right, rescue-unit ID to the left, death count on the bottom.

Many displaced homeowners who long ago paid off their mortgages lacked sufficient insurance to rebuild in the Lower Ninth. Some family-owned properties are in limbo during prolonged efforts to untangle ownership among heirs.

Patchwork redevelopment among returning residents in many parts of the Lower Ninth Ward left homes too scattered to attract commercial or residential infill. The city has been land-banking properties to aid redevelopment, including the sites where Make It Right has built. But success depends on leveraging the land the city controls to build affordable neighborhoods compact enough to attract commercial development and residential infill, officials say.

Construction permits and for-sale signs are sprouting around the south end of the Lower Ninth. Infrastructure work is ongoing. A CVS pharmacy is scheduled to open soon.

New housing on Tennessee St. in the Lower Ninth Ward. | Mark Peterson/Redux for Politico Magazine

Like others who have rebuilt in the Lower Ninth Ward, Harry Simms maintains his lot on Flood Street. He also mows adjoining land he owns and the lawn next to that at Battle Ground Missionary Baptist Church, where he worships. He teaches kids how to box in an outdoor ring he built between his house and church.

On the north end, Simms glimpses his own omens of hope, long-delayed: A house is under construction nearby on Flood Street. During the day, people cruise around on bicycles, logging addresses of properties ripe for redevelopment. A snow cone shop just opened—the first new business near his house since Katrina.

“It’s a new beginning, bro.”