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Monday, March 09, 2009

The New Orleans Demolition List and “Accidental” Demolitions: Grand Conspiracy or Hard-Charging Can-Do Incompetence?

Before and after photographs of a historic home on live oak lined Bienville Avenue in Mid-City, New Orleans, Louisiana by Karen Gadbois.
Please click onto the COMMENTS for the story.

5 Comments:

Blogger Bob said...

Nancy O. requested this story.

It is hard to describe the situation to people outside of the City of New Orleans. If you have not lived under the current absentee mayoral administration, you might think that this is an age old issue of preservation versus development, the old making way for the new.

A City With a Housing Crisis Is Clear-Cutting Houses, Go Occam
You would be mistaken. It’s not a reasoned debate. It is not activists on one side and developers on another. The situation is out of control.

The situation is the product a Kafkaesque bureaucracy that is clear-cutting New Orleans neighborhoods with such vigor that they have demolished homes in the midst of renovation out from under the families that owned them.

I’m never one for conspiracy theories. I always apply Hanlon’s Razor; “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

Here is how I explain in the inexplicable to myself, so that I can continue to work toward the recovery of New Orleans neighborhoods with some understanding of the obstacles I face.


Turns Out Investors Who Don’t Want A Return Are Hard to Find
The administration has failed miserably in any of its efforts to attract investment in to a city that has had the nations attention. He made much to do about his trips to Wall Street to ask for investment and support, yet managed only to insult New York and the nation by calling the World Trade Center a “hole in ground”.

We pay for these outrageous gaffs dearly. While we’ve received the generous support of individuals, nonprofit and religious organizations, and the patronage of tourists and conventioneers, the City of New Orleans is unable to accept any serious investment, primarily because our city administration is incapable of providing the support for such investment.

The federal government through FEMA has made $11.1 million available to pay for local contractors to demolish homes in New Orleans. Finally, an investment in the city that is guaranteed, one that does not require a return.

Demolition and Debris as a Growth Industry
And so, the administration put forward the bare minimum necessary on its part to get that money spent. They made a list. They made an arbitrary an unpublished list of structures within the cities boundaries so they could get into the demolition business and knock some houses down.

It is a remarkable attitude that the city takes. An attitude of “can-do” incompetence. A hard-charging push to demolish an arbitrary selection of structures on an unpublished list, with an inexplicable confidence that churning out these vacant lots is progress in the recovery. This is an enterprise for the city administration, one where “mistakes will be made”, but one that must grind forward.

The lack of housing is evident in the still inflated rents, the high cost of labor and materials, and the encampment of 250 homeless under the I-10 overpass that runs above Claiborne Avenue. The lack of housing is epidemic.

Beware of the Leopard
What is galling for those of us who opposed the city’s lack of method, is that we do not argue the need for demolitions. There are huge areas of the city with post-war slab-on-grade houses that did not survive the flood, that need to be demolished so a new raised home can be built. These houses are not on the list. Neighborhood organizations in historic neighborhoods have compiled lists of truly unsalvageable houses. These houses are not on the list.

It is impossible to determine how a house gets on the list, of course, because it is impossible to get the city to produce this list.

It’s the city’s inability to at the very least, maintain and publish a spreadsheet that has made this a nightmare for the citizens of New Orleans, who now on top of every other challenge of rebuilding, have to live in fear that a capricious administration, in a fit of demolition, will take from them the very little that they have left.

9:10 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I thought they were talking about the future of St. Paul.

9:51 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

They must be DFL down there. They took away people's guns and even after the Supreme Court told the city to return the guns, they still won't do it.

9:57 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Wake up every one.
Politicians are just legal gangsters, what do you think St.Paul is?
You and your home are not safe, police and crooks have guns and you don't
Are you awake yet?

9:23 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The picture and the headlines looks more like St.Paul's finest at work. Don't we have a "Can-Do- As-We-Please-Policy" here in St.Paul with our city council?

6:21 PM  

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