Watchdog: Reducing blight is possible, experts say
The splintered steps leading up to 719 Pickett St. slant dangerously to one side. The faded gray door groans open to reveal an interior of broken beams, crumbling walls and pockmarked floorboards littered with debris, lighters, empty beer bottles and broken glass.
A pile of old tires, a broken TV and the rusted hatchback of a vehicle blight the spacious backyard. A red and white notice declares the building unfit for human habitation.
Terrence Green, assistant director of Shreveport's Property Standards, stands amidst the rubble and swats at mosquitos with one hand.
"This building will be gone before the end of the week," Green said.
The house is one of the adjudicated houses on the city's demolition list. But thousands of others — at least 7,000 — will continue to blight the City of Shreveport.
In 2015, Shreveport demolished 60 blighted structures for a total cost of $187,399 and has 197 buildings waiting to still be demolished, according to data from the mayor's office. The city also spent $519,514 on weed abatement for more than 7,500 adjudicated lots and more than 900 private lots.
"It's a huge problem in our community," said Jeff Everson, city councilman of District B. "It's very difficult to get the results we want. Louisiana has very strong laws about property ownership."
Under current legislation, Shreveport is one of only a few cities in Louisiana that doesn't have bonding capacity or taxing ability in its arsenal of tools to fight blight. The recently passed HB 769 did grant the city the ability to form a Redevelopment Authority, however, which Everson said is a major step toward reducing blight.
In addition, Mayor Ollie Tyler started a litter abatement program which includes the "Don't Be Trashy, Keep it Classy" anti-littering campaign as well as monthly sweeps to reduce blight in communities throughout Shreveport. Michael Dunn, a liaison officer with the Community Oriented Policing Bureau, said workers arrive in a community around 8 a.m. and spend the entire day there.
"Mayor Tyler is really trying to get rid of the eyesores and the blight," Dunn said.
Everson said community engagement and increased personal responsibility are critical, as the city can only do so much. To encourage community engagement, Property Standards also provides a dumpster for neighborhood residents to get rid of whatever trash or blight they have during sweeps.
“The big thing that can help this city is when people start to help themselves and don’t depend on the city to do everything," Green said. "People need to have a little more pride. Neighbors need to help neighbors.”
Some of the city's residents, however, have taken their own major steps to help beautify Shreveport.
Tom Arceneaux, lawyer and vice president of practice development at Blanchard, Walker, O'Quin and Roberts, moved to the Highland area with his wife to restore her mother's house. Arceneaux has since restored several of the historic buildings in the area.
But Arcenaux said the remaining blight drags down property values and also scares people away from moving to the neighborhood.
"Our concern is without raising property values in the area, you can't get money out of them," Arceneaux said. "It's not a matter of tearing down homes, it's a matter of restoring value to the properties."
While the blight problem may seem daunting, Arceneaux said it is important to not lose hope the city's properties will see better days.
"We simply can't be overcome by the sadness and discouragement, because then everything stops," Arceneaux said. "We don't need pity for our city, we need people to come and live here. It really takes a crusader to do this because it takes a long term commitment. People have to have a vision of what this could look like. I believe we can do this."
New Orleans' multi-disciplinary approach
In 2005, Hurricane Katrina flooded more than 80 percent of New Orleans' housing units. By 2010, the city had an estimated 43,755 blighted residential addresses and one of the highest rates of blight in the country.
In 2010, Mayor Mitch Landrieu set the goal of reducing blight in New Orleans by 10,000 units by 2014, which the city accomplished by working with the Greater New Orleans Foundation and Tulane University Public Law Center and taking a multi-disciplinary approach.
David Lessinger, director of planning and strategy for the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, said one of the first changes the city made was collecting more comprehensive data.
“Good data is critical. You can’t make good decisions without good data,” Lessinger said. "Before, Code Enforcement's daily work was unclear. We had no maps. It was unclear how many tax-adjudicated properties there were."
Lessinger said New Orleans started using LAMA, an information technology system used to track all code enforcements and permitting activities in the city government. The city also created monthly BlightStat meetings, where city leaders and managers from the Department of Code Enforcement, the Office of Community Development, the Office of Information Technology and Innovation, the Law Department and the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority reviewed the city's progress.
The team partnered with Code for America in 2012 to make the monthly performance data available to the public through a website called Blight Status, where citizens can review information such as the total number of inspections, number of inspections completed within 30 days, backlog of cases and number of voluntary abatements.
The Redevelopment Authority has the power of expropriation — seizing properties that don't comply with property standards — but Lessinger said expropriation is expensive and can take long periods of time. Instead the city encourages voluntary compliance, with fines of of up to $500 per violation per day, as well as establishing lien foreclosure.
Lessinger said New Orleans changed its law so property owners couldn't pay taxes until they paid liens they owed the city. If owners failed to pay their liens, their properties would be sold at public auction.
“That hit people hard," Lessinger said. "It gave them a deadline. They knew they could have property adjudicated if they didn’t pay their lien.”
Lien foreclosure, available to cities like Shreveport, inspired higher rates of compliance in New Orleans and also raised more than $4 million in back taxes and code enforcement fines between 2010 and 2013, according to a 2014 Blight Reduction report.
By 2014, New Orleans' multi-step approach had resulted in a 30 percent decrease in blight in the city.
“It did seem like a daunting challenge when we first started," Lessinger said. "But there were glimmers of hope because people were engaged, people were trying to hold their neighbors responsible. New Orleans has always been optimistic. We believe when people come together we can make a difference.”
Lafayette's data-driven approach
In 2014 Lafayette reported 1,145 adjudicated properties — an increase of more than 56 percent from 2006. The city applied for and received a Technical Assistance Scholarship from Community Progress, one of the nation's leading organizations in land revitalization.
With help from Community Progress, Lafayette created PlanLafayette — a 20-year development plan where the city would form a multi-department team to monitor and manage blight reduction efforts, improve data collection and also establish data sharing between the Lafayette City-Parish consolidated government and the Lafayette Parish Tax Assessor's Office.
Sara Toering, general counsel for Community Progress, said communities that make significant progress in reducing blight share four key characteristics: good data, a multi-department approach, strong leadership and smart use of funding.
“Communities making progress have real diversity of leadership making a coordinated effort,” Toering said. “Leadership that’s willing to stay at the table for the long term and come up with a strategic and comprehensive solution."
Toering added community engagement was another important part of the blight solution. PlanLafayette includes a community character section where neighborhood "coteries" — or planning groups — as well as a Neighborhood Action Team play active roles in the planning process and community revitalization efforts.
"There’s a huge expertise among residents of distressed communities about the sources of a problem as well as what it might take to resolve it,” Toering added. “From our perspective on a national level, cities are not alone. While there’s no silver bullet solution, progress is absolutely possible, especially if you have deep and thoughtful relations.”
Shreveport's options
In addition to the community blight sweeps and Tyler's anti-littering campaign, Everson said the city is looking to minimize the time involved in the appeal process entitled to noncomplying property owners.
Bossier's Property Standards has an expedited process in which they automatically start the appeal process for individuals who don't comply following a 10-day period after the initial notice.
"We automatically do it, then notify them when the appeal is going to be," said Property Standards supervisor Mickey Frazier.
Bossier's Property Standards also charges a $150 administration fee when they have to step in, which Frazier said "convinces people to do what they need to do."
Everson said Shreveport is also looking for a "middle ground" between doing nothing and demolition for owners who fail to comply.
"What's been upsetting in the past, if there are extreme violations, we can either tear it down or do nothing," Everson said. "Those are pretty much our options."
While the Mayor's Office collects data on blight's cost to the city and the total number of adjudicated properties, more specific data and data sharing among multiple departments could help the city target problem areas and more effectively distribute resources.
Marcus Hines, public information officer for the Shreveport Police Department, said the department works closely with Property Standards but does not track data specific to vacant or abandoned properties.
“The current format in which our agency’s calls for service are dispatched does not include a tracking or logging mechanism which can generate a report determining if someone calls the police regarding a blight issue that is connected to drugs, thefts or any other violence category," Hines wrote in an email. “The time and resources dedicated to tackling the issues of vacant properties that the police department responds to is not something that we track.”
While Shreveport's Property Standards reported 7,000 adjudicated structures, a more specific breakdown — such as how many were buildings or vacant lots, and whether the properties were foreclosed or property-tax delinquent — was not immediately available.
“Sometimes the easiest and cheapest problem is vacant lots," said Susan Wachter, co-director of Penn Institute for Urban Research. "Blight is both an opportunity and a problem for the city. Mostly it’s just there, but it should be a call to act.”
Wachter said replacing vacant lots in Philadelphia with urban gardens or grass greatly reduced crime rates and increased property values by up to 10 percent.
“It’s not that expensive, a few thousand or so, and a few hundred for maintenance,” Wachter said. “Do it strategically, choose the lots that are ready for fair market rate investment and that will produce the greatest return. The benefits in terms of tax revenue, quality of life and health impacts are huge.”
Establishing lien foreclosure in local law could also help the city. Green said one of the specific challenges to Shreveport are properties picked up by tax sale buyers, who then charge reduced rent to potential residents without doing any maintenance work beforehand.
"They pick it up for nothing, turn it around and charge $200 for rent," Green said. "People are going to be living in substandard structures, and that's not fair."
But Green remained optimistic about Tyler's plan for beautifying the city and reducing blight.
“The mayor has been working across departments more than ever at keeping the cost down," Green said. "There’s a lot more of the city working together.”