Five months into her term, Mayor Helena Moreno is launching a new task force aimed at blighted properties in New Orleans neighborhoods, a quality-of-life issue that’s long frustrated residents and that her two most recent predecessors struggled to solve.
At a press conference in the Lower 9th Ward on Thursday, Moreno and her top deputy for housing and community development announced that officials from several different City Hall departments were forming the Adjudicated Property Task Force.
The goal, outlined in an executive order signed late last month, is to resolve tax and title issues for a set of blighted properties in the Lower 9th Ward and Hoffman Triangle area.
And while the list of properties — 15 to 25 in the Lower 9th Ward and five to eight in Hoffman Triangle — is a fraction of the 6,500 the administration says are in dire shape, the task force hopes to create a model for bringing them back as housing that can be replicated with other blighted residential properties throughout the city…