<body><div><figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=1qWOx6_1DbFQQUf00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=1qWOx6_1DbFQQUf00" width="990" height="438" ><figcaption>Advocate staff photo by JOHN McCUSKER -- Grass grows between the sidewalk cracks in front of an abandoned house in the Lower Ninth Ward on. Tuesday, August 25, 2015. After thousands of homes were demolished from uptown to New Orleans East after Katrina, many empty houses remain.</figcaption></figure>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?City officials acknowledge that succession issues slow much of this work down. That is heirs' property, and Louisiana has lived with its consequences since Hurricane Katrina, when families with land passed down across generations but never formally retitled found themselves locked out of insurance payouts and federal aid. Heirs' property remains a leading driver of land loss for Black families nationwide.New Orleans' tax sale and adjudicated property system was never built to forgive that debt. It was built to recover it through investors, who pay off delinquent taxes to win a certificate or title while the original owner gets a narrow window to repay them, plus penalty and interest, or lose the property. In the city's last major auction cycle, 770 properties returned to commerce. Only 89 were redeemed by the people who owned them.Part of the solution may already be written into city law. The New Orleans Code of Ordinances gives first preference on adjudicated property sales to people who were domiciled in Orleans Parish before Katrina and whose home was declared uninhabitable from storm damage. It also authorizes financial-hardship payment agreements on back taxes for that same group. An heirs-first framework is technically already on the books.Yet nothing Moreno, her housing director Jeff Schwartz or the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority’s Brenda Breaux has said publicly about this task force mentions that ordinance. And the law itself has a real gap. It covers the person who was displaced, not explicitly their heirs. Twenty-one years after Katrina, many of those original residents have died, leaving the question of whether their children or grandchildren can use that preference unanswered. That is not a technicality. It is the difference between a law that protects generational wealth and one that quietly expired with the people it was written for.New Orleans already has some legal infrastructure for this. Act 81 lets heirs file a simplified affidavit to clear title on smaller estates, and Louisiana Appleseed has used a similar process to clear dozens of titles through free legal clinics. A nonprofit called 1735 Inc. already does this kind of case-by-case research and guidance for owners and heirs navigating adjudicated property. None of that requires inventing something new. It requires the task force to build with the tools and partners already doing this work, instead of running a separate process around them.The task force should answer that question directly and then go further. Verified heirs should have delinquent taxes, interest, penalties and code enforcement fines waived outright, not capped, so the property comes to them free and clear.Pair that with free legal support to complete a full succession through probate and require proof of funds or financing to build affordable housing, or another structure consistent with the parcel's zoning, before any title transfers. A waiver without a building plan just recreates blight under a new owner's name.A decade ago, Mayor Mitch Landrieu told the New Orleans diaspora, "y'all can come home." The invitation was real, but it never came with property terms attached, and the law that might have backed it up has gone unused and unexplained. The task force has the legal tools, the partners and the public mandate to fix that.</div></body>

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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...

Guest Column: New Orleans’ property task force needs an heirs-first track

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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 i

Guest Column: New Orleans’ property task force needs an heirs-first track

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