NO blight easily tops that found in other cities

Three years after Hurricane Katrina, many New Orleans neighborhoods still struggle to recover. New data analysis, announced this week by Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, reveals that 16 of 50 New Orleans neighborhoods that flooded following Katrina have less than half of the households they did in June 2005.

21 August 2008
by Gordon Russell and Bruce Eggler

New Orleans has a far greater proportion of vacant homes than any other city in the country, due in large part to a lagging recovery in about a third of the neighborhoods that were badly damaged by Katrina, new analyses show.

The nonprofit Greater New Orleans Community Data Center released two reports today, the first of which used data from the U.S. Postal Service compiled in March to compare New Orleans to seven other American cities with large inventories of blighted or vacant housing.

When it comes to abandonment, New Orleans is in a class by itself, the report indicated, with more than one in three residential addresses now vacant or unoccupied. No other city surveyed had as many as one in five.

Detroit, which has lost roughly 1 million people in the last half-century and become synonymous with urban decay, was the No. 2 city on the list. The survey found that 18 percent of Detroit's residential addresses were vacant or unoccupied.

For each city, the inventory of unoccupied homes is divided into two categories: vacant and "no stat," a Postal Service term meaning that an address is unlikely to receive mail for a long time.

According to Allison Plyer, deputy director of the nonprofit, the Postal Service considers a property "vacant" if it is habitable but unoccupied. "No stat" properties -- a category that contains more than 90 percent of New Orleans' inventory of unoccupied addresses -- includes properties that have been demolished and those that are heavily blighted or boarded as well as those where new construction is under way.

Plyer said data indicate that from 2,000 to 3,000 new units may be under construction. But even when those are completed, it would have little impact on the overall figure of 71,657 unoccupied units.

The nonprofit's second analysis, also based in part on postal data, offers some clues about where New Orleans' blight explosion has occurred.

That report found that, of 50 neighborhoods that flooded after the levees breached, 16 have less than half as many households as they did two months before the storm.

Thu-Huong Nguyen and Zack Murray walk through the 9th Ward of New Orleans, surveying properties for a report to assist ACORN Housing and city recovery plans.

Some of the biggest losers, household-wise, will surprise no one. Atop the list was the devastated Lower 9th Ward, which has just 11 percent of its pre-Katrina households, according to the survey.

The analysis found a correlation between pre-storm income levels and post-storm recovery. The slowest-recovering areas have tended to be the poorest; along with the Lower 9th, the Florida and Desire sections have been among the most sluggish to regain population.

New Orleans Post-Katrina graffiti, January 2008.

But income is certainly not the only determinant of a neighborhood's future. The survey noted that some middle-income sections -- including Lakeview, the West End and Pontchartrain Park -- have all failed thus far to recover 50 percent of their pre-Katrina households.

More hopefully, the analysis found that a number of neighborhoods that suffered heavy flooding have come back fairly strongly. Broadmoor, Mid-City, Treme and Lakewood all had more than 70 percent as many households as of March 31 as they did in mid-2005.

The survey relies on a database of households receiving mail that is maintained by Valassis, a marketing firm that "owns the most comprehensive mailing list in the country," according to Allison Plyer of the GNOCDC.

Plyer's data closely track a similar set of numbers compiled by demographer Greg Rigamer, who with Plyer helped the city prepare a formal challenge to the U.S. Census's most recent estimate of New Orleans' population.

Rigamer attempted to estimate populations in each area rather than the number of households. But both he and Plyer came up with the same estimate for the Lower 9th Ward: that 11 percent had returned.

Rigamer's data are based a series of factors, including utility bills, postal-service data, census figures, Sewerage & Water Board bills, garbage-cart registration and field observations.