Mayor Helena Moreno’s new blight task force aims to move some of New Orleans’ 6,500 adjudicated properties back into commerce, with focused work starting in the Lower 9th Ward and Hoffman Triangle.
Citywide, more than 5,700 of those parcels are vacant lots, and over 3,800 have sat that way for at least five years. In the Lower 9th Ward alone, 792 properties are adjudicated, 768 of them empty, about 10% of everything in the neighborhood.
That is a real step toward reducing the problem. It has not yet answered a harder question: Who gets the property back?…