"That's too much money!" Provensal said. "They don't care. They know if they sell the property they won't have a job."
And so, the boarded-up house sits, paint peeling.
In the Lower 9th Ward, 739 homeowners sold to the state. About 570 of those properties remain unsold and entire blocks sit undeveloped.
"The city ain't done a thing," a frustrated Carolyn J. Claiborne said on a recent day, scanning empty lots on her Lower 9th Ward street. She complained of snakes and vermin.
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.
The agency says it's drafting plans to dispose of the properties and that it has about 750 prospective buyers. It plans to hold onto many of the other properties for the foreseeable future, NORA said.
Nicole Heyman, a New Orleans-based expert on vacant and blighted property with the nonprofit Center for Community Progress, said holding onto the property is the right choice. She is advising the city on its plans.
When a city sells cheaply they end up "just putting properties in the hands of investors who drive the properties' values down," she said. Buyers often sit on vacant properties hoping for a market turnaround, and when that doesn't happen the properties end back up in the hands of a city, she said.
This summer the city has begun taking ownership of the 3,100 properties as federal funding runs out. Soon the city is expected to be in charge of cutting the grass and maintaining them.
Stacy Head, a City Council member-at-large, said the city doesn't have the resources.
"The LLT has actually done a good job of maintaining most of these properties," Head said. "So, when they're turned over to the city, our blight problems that we have not been able to manage are going to get that much worse."
Jeff Hebert, the head of NORA, said on Monday that the city will spend less on grass cutting, comparing LLT's efforts to maintaining a golf course.
"You're not going to get 18-feet-high grass on these LLT properties but it's not going to look like a putting green. We have budget realities we have to deal with," he said.
Hebert said NORA expects to pay contractors about $20 per house on grass cutting and to spend about $3 million a year overall to maintain the properties.
Head, who oversees housing issues for the City Council, expected about 1,500 to go unsold because of a lack of demand.
Many, including Head, want to see vacant lots turned into urban green spaces. NORA said it was open to working with neighborhoods, schools and the city's recreation department to turn empty lots into something useful - maybe tree nurseries, dog parks, urban farms or outdoor laboratories for biologists.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_KATRINA_BLIGHTED_LOTS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2012-07-16-15-37-15Interesting for me is Japan is so far ahead in rebuilding from that Tsunami, than Katrina ever will be.
