In a report finalized last week, a Bloomberg Harvard fellow helping Shreveport through a new program meant to get a handle on its blight problem challenged the city to treat the issue “not as a siloed enforcement issue, but as a holistic challenge tied to long-term community health.”
Still in its early stages, the Mayor Tom Arceneaux’s Block by Block program aims to make neighborhood revitalization the solution to blight. It’s backed by the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, and over 10 weeks this year a fellow from that program worked with local leaders on solutions aimed at achieving those goals.
Bloomberg Harvard Summer Fellow Rachel Fischer authored the report, which outlines as some of the key challenges facing Shreveport’s efforts are gaps in code enforcement data collection and sharing, slow and inefficient administrative processes and a lack of both legal and economic tools to deal with the blight issue…