When critics blasted the slow rebuilding of New Orleans, Ray Nagin shocked the world when he answered that all New York had to show for its recovery was a “hole in the ground” where the Twin Towers used to be. 

            Outrage flowed from all corners; yet ironically, Research Fellows at the conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute essentially argued that the Mayor was correct.

            While New York City’s government-led, centrally planned 1776 ft Freedom Tower remains uncommenced, neighborhood initiative matched with a distinct lack of central planning has allowed New Orleans to recover faster than the Big Apple--and in far more innovative ways.

            As Nicole Gelinas wrote in the Institute’s magazine City Journal, “In one crucial way, New Orleans’s modern history of weak, ineffectual government helped it recover after Katrina. Though the [Bring New Orleans Back Commission] luminaries drew up their [government led] plan swiftly, nobody had the political will, knowledge, or resources to enforce it. Property owners could show what they thought of the plan—and of various other utopian schemes bandied about by the nation’s architectural giants—by ignoring them.”

            “This approach—or better, lack of one—differs markedly from the reaction to the nation’s other recent large-scale disaster, the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In New York, the state government, which had a long history of centrally planning huge projects, quickly monopolized control over rebuilding. Ground Zero, unfortunately, seemed the perfect opportunity for such a project. After all, the World Trade Center had been built as a government scheme 30 years before the attacks, and the towers’ single leaseholder, real-estate investor Larry Silverstein, sweated under immense political pressure to cooperate with the government in its ambitious reconstruction plans. Six and a half years later, Ground Zero is still an early-stage construction site. Worse, what’s eventually built there could be a white elephant.”

            From Brad Pitt’s Make It Right “green construction” and Habitat for Humanity’s efforts to reconstitute the Ninth Ward with affordable homeownership to the Preservation Resource Center’s Katrina Cottage “kits” or homes that blend in with the historic appearance of devastated neighborhoods--and are still financially reasonable at $70/sq ft--to residents of Broadmoor & Lakeview taking responsibility for their own recovery at the neighborhood level, Gelinas outlined how New Orleans is bouncing back in ways that could teach much to the city’s critics around the nation. 

            The Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow did, however, credit one local government program in Crescent City.  She cited the Lot Next Door Initiative as effectively helping fight the much feared “jack-o-lantern” effect specifically because it works on the grassroots level.  The city ordinance allows homeowners that have already rebuilt to purchase adjoining properties to their houses at cut rate prices. 

            Neighbors can buy these contiguous properties--acquired by the city under the Road Home program--for a percentage of the pre-storm values.  Mostly, they are already empty lots, and homeowners can opt for larger yards, expanding their properties on the sides, or behind, their repaired home.

            With the city’s population already a 150,000 fewer than before the storm even by the most optimistic estimates, Gelinas, a urban planning reporter, explained that the Lot Next Door “could mean the difference between blighted and bucolic for neighborhoods that may become less dense“.  

            Reducing the city’s footprint--not by government mandated greenspace, but by allowing the homeowners who decided to return and reinvest in their houses to purchase surrounding lots and convert them into expanded backyards--fights blight.

            A formally urban street may now have just have three or four houses on it, yet where the grass is cut and the yards are maintained, it is still a viable neighborhood, all be it more rural in feel than the pre-storm urban density the residents once knew.

             The Lot Next Door Initiative is a key element to recovery of New Orleans.  Unfortunately, its price tag is too high for the many homeowners.

            While the program is reshaping many neighborhoods, Lot Next Door’s effect in the most devastated portions of the city, in New Orleans East and the Lower Ninth Ward, is limited.  Many homeowners cannot afford the usual $10,000 price tag of purchasing the adjoining properties.

            Having nearly bankrupted themselves on contractors to restore their homes, most New Orleanians are leveraged to max.  They may wish to spend ten or twenty thousand to expand their back and side yards, but no equity remains in their homes after the repairs to finance such acquisitions.

            In neighborhoods with high rates of return and ascending property values, these empty lots will be purchased in time and reoccupied, but in less dense, poorer areas, the city faces the danger of “jack-o-lantern” urban waste lands when there are viable homeowners ready to maintain the empty properties if given a chance.  

            The Mayor, City Council, and the agency which controls the purchased Road Home properties, have a simple choice. 

            As the third anniversary of Katrina approaches next Friday, the Editorial Board of The Louisiana Weekly has recommended that in neighborhoods with less than 50% reoccupation, the Lot Next Door Initiative should suspend any fair market costs--and allow any homeowner who maintains and improves his adjoining properties to receive title to them free of charge. 

            Call it homesteading for the 21^st Century. 

            Cut the lawns, and keep the land clean for three years, and you will own that property.

            Of course, the program would be limited, as it is currently, to properties either acquired under the Road Home program or that had previously come under the ownership of the city.   No one would lose a lot he or she already owned and planned upon which to rebuild. 

            In fact, this homesteading program would provide a financial incentive for people to rebuild and return to the most devastated areas, primarily in the Lower Ninth Ward and New Orleans East.  Those that have currently not reconstructed their houses, out of anxiety that their former neighborhoods would be grounds of blight for years to come, would now see that if they now rebuilt, they too could gain title to the properties around their current land.

            Old fashioned entrepreneurialism would solve much of the problem of blight as people saw the Lower Nine or the East as potential half acre lots rather than crumbling suburban aftermath.

            Homeowners would have to not only cut the lawns and maintain the adjoining properties, but in cases where houses still stand on the land, either tear them down or fix up the exteriors.  (In practical terms though, in the most devastated neighborhoods, these houses have been demolished already, except where historical considerations apply.  The rules are obviously different in 100 year old protected areas.)

            Critics of this homesteading concept argue that the city would lose revenue by giving away the land rather than selling it, but these individuals forget that the city assumes massive maintenance costs as long as the properties remain on the books.  Moreover, they ignore the fact that long term, the homeowners who acquire the land would have to pay property tax on the lots as the aggregate market value of their larger homesteads increase.

            These homeowners will not complain.  Who has a problem paying a bit more in tax long term if you received a quarter acre homestead for the price of cutting the lawn?

            Plus, this expanded Lot Next Door program would solve the impending problem of aging suburbs becoming blighted through depopulation.  As the general population grows older, fewer houses are needed, and many suburbs around the nation threaten to morph into ghost towns, abandoned streets where children once played. 

            If New Orleans, and its surrounding parishes, sets into law now the precedent that homeowners can redevelop neighboring blighted property for merely the price of maintenance, the metro area would take major step in fighting the depopulation of the suburbs that is already plaguing parts of California and other states.

            Meanwhile, on those rare square blocks where no one has cared to return and all have sold their properties to the Road Home, the city should convert those lands into public parks.  While the NORD budget is definitely overextended, FEMA grants exist to dirt and sod publicly owned land. 

            In the short term, simply make those few square blocks where no one cares to return into green fields that the surrounding homes can use, further converting them over time into expanded playgrounds for children as funds become available.

            Neighborhoods, after all, are places where children play, and having more land, either privately or publicly, means those neighborhoods would live again.

by Christopher Tidmore, a contributing writer for Bayoubuzz and a staff writer for the Louisiana Weekly.  This article first appeared in the Louisiana Weekly.