NEW ORLEANS — More than 3,000 lots flooded by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and bought with federal money in an emergency bailout sit idle across this city — a multimillion-dollar drain on federal, state and city coffers with no easy solution.
An Associated Press examination of the properties sold to the government by homeowners abandoning New Orleans after the catastrophic 2005 flood has found that about $86 million has been spent on 5,100 abandoned parcels. And there’s no end in sight to maintenance costs for perhaps most of the 3,100 properties that remain unsold.
This portfolio of urban wasteland and blight represents part of the storm’s difficult legacy that persists nearly seven years later.
With federal funding for maintenance running out, there is concern the lots could fall into deeper neglect, and that they could contribute to New Orleans’s staggering blight. At last count the city found an estimated 43,000 blighted properties, according to a city-sponsored analysis of U.S. Postal Service data.
“Right now nobody on those 3,000-plus properties is contributing. It’s costing the city and state government to maintain them,” said Errol Williams, tax assessor in New Orleans. “Police got to go out there, run kids out of there, drug-users. That’s a cost to the city.”
Until now, the properties have been managed by the Louisiana Land Trust, an agency set up using federal funds. Every month, LLT spends about $88 to cut the grass at each location. Other expenses range from insurance to pest control.
Jeffrey J. Thomas, a land-use lawyer on former Mayor Ray Nagin’s rebuilding team, said the city needs to be creative. “Maybe they should make them into ponds to store water,” he said. “Make them into parks or community gardens.”
Donald Vallee, a longtime New Orleans developer, advocated selling the lots at auction. Sitting on the properties, he said, was a “pure waste of money.”
The New Orleans Redevelopment Authority has said it’s sitting on many properties at the request of neighborhood groups to avoid flooding the market and hurting home prices.
