It’s midday and the Creole Lunch House on 12th Street is bustling with customers — some visiting from out of state — sitting at tables with yellow plastic cloths, digging into stuffed bread, catfish and chicken fricassée. That liveliness stands in stark contrast with its surroundings: old cement foundations sitting on overgrown yards, promises of generational wealth now as absent as the homes that once stood there.
This does not sit right with Raymond Herbert, the second-generation owner of the popular Northside restaurant. “There needs to be a way for families to be able to re-own these properties,” says Herbert.
Now, after years of inaction, a new approach to redevelopment promises a long-sought resolution.
SB 107, signed by Gov. Jeff Landry in July, gives priority access for turning around blighted properties that plague neighborhoods along the Evangeline Thruway to the Lafayette Economic Development Authority, in an effort to build and improve on a previously failed experiment…