Yes on 780

Link!

Common sense insurance policy to protect Lower Mid-City from demolition if LSU doesn't have financing.

Clipboard Brigade To March On Lower Mid City

Docs 4 U!

The state of Louisiana writes to Lower Mid City property owners about the upcoming eviction process.

Page 1

Page 2

Mission Accomp... Naaah

What a blast I had today at City Hall delivering the petition to dismiss Sanitation Director Veronica White.

Each City Councilor's office has received their very own limited edition personalized copy of the petition.

Of course, so has the Office of the Mayor.

Did it work?

Well, Veronica White is still on payroll. So no, not yet.

However, I was able to generate some press for the issue, and for the greater specter of progressive grassroots coalition building.

Earlier this morning, Mayor Nagin announced some difficult budget decisions.

Council decided to hold a significant portion of the Sanitation Department's budget in reserve, presumably giving Veronica White the opportunity to prove that she has the credibility to lead the agency.

The Mayor's office has rejected that.

Instead, the Mayor is reducing the sanitation budget by cutting services.

I'm happy to sacrifice the French Quarter's chemical lemon scent, but I don't believe such action does anything to address the fundamental issues plaguing the Department of Sanitation. There is an underlying lack of transparency and credibility that has undermined public trust.

Service cuts don't address the procedures for awarding sanitation contracts. They don't magically reproduce the accounting numbers that were so poorly kept over the last two years. We're not being reimbursed for services not rendered. Seemingly, we're further away from a citywide recycling program than we were a year ago.

Relieving SDT of some of it's French Quarter responsibilities certainly does nothing to address the flawed demolition process that has allowed some of our neighbors' homes to be rendered prairie mid renovation.

The Department of Sanitation cannot change until our Director of Sanitation has the legitimacy needed to earn back the trust of the public.

Veronica White has lost that basic credibility as a public official. She must be replaced.

I'll be standing with Lower Mid City

Yes, let's crush a live neighborhood to make way for a big giant hospital development project right next to an abandoned public hospital. Let's ignore calls to rehabilitate and reopen Charity. Let's not even look at other sites that wouldn't demolish a neighborhood.

These Times-Picayune articles by Kate Moran suck. They barely scratch the surface in terms of context. (At least the paper is paying attention to other things, now.)

Adam Nossiter of the New York Times provides a much more honest narrative.

It's an excellent article, actually. Highly recommended.

Maybe I'm not gauging this properly, but I think people will chain themselves to their homes if they have to.

You mean we're not done yet?

Updated below

Are we really still shrinking?

This represents a major undertaking by Gordon Russell and the Times-Picayune.

Take a look here, here, here, and here as well. There are a bunch of different parts.

---

Ambitious effort

One of my biggest complaints about the Times-Picayune, and about political discourse in New Orleans generally, is the lack of comparative context. New Orleans will never succumb to American typicality, nor should anyone want it to. That doesn't mean that it isn't useful to examine what makes other cities tick and what kinds of policies and practices might be easily fitted to the New Orleans template. I have tried to do this from time to time with the other city that I know well, Philadelphia.

I have done a lot of complaining about how reactionary this city's policies are toward development, poverty, and crime. Mayor Nagin's policies toward homelessness were so backward, for instance, that the Bush administration sent officials down to urge him toward a more humanitarian (and effective) approach. An examination of the permanent supportive housing policies being embraced throughout the rest of the country, in similarly poor cities like Washington D.C would have been extremely useful. Katy Reckdahl did some of that, but the effort was not wholeheartedly embraced or featured by her masters at the editor's desk.

I wrote about Philadelphia's grassroots-driven master plan for the Delaware River waterfront in comparison to the behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing to push the Reinventing the Crescent development forward with hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

Perhaps no New Orleans institution deserves that kind of comparative treatment more than our criminal justice system, an objective embarrassment by any standard in the industrialized West and plenty of standards in the developing world.

To date, the Times-Picayune never once mentioned Naomi Klein's name or the theories of Shock Doctrine, her book, though she specifically compares governmental responses to catastrophic disaster. There's even a chapter about New Orleans specifically. Ray Nagin is reading it.

To see Gordon Russell make the effort to contextualize some of the challenges facing New Orleans with a lengthy comparative article is certainly encouraging and opens many additional avenues that I hope the Times-Picayune will stroll.

Wrong Cities

There are a number of issues with this particular effort, however, that I'd like to discuss. The first article of the series sets up the rest of the work. In it, Russell outlines some of the issues facing New Orleans, putting forth the fact that New Orleans was on the decline for decades before Katrina. This, he offers, makes it similar in some ways to Rust Belt cities like Youngstown, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, because these cities have also lost population over the last several decades.

While he does also mention the reasons for those cities' decline - the loss of manufacturing jobs - he doesn't quite convince me of the utility of the comparison.

For one, nearly every historic urban core in the United States bled population during the second half of the 20th Century. Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington D.C., and Boston and others were also victimized by white flight and the decline of manufacturing. The key difference is that the cities Russell puts forth also experienced incredible population decline within their respective metro regions. Certainly, the growth of the Sunbelt dispersed economic and political clout from all of the Northeast but the urban decay in Philadelphia, D.C., and Boston was balanced by overall metro area growth.

Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Youngstown, though they did experience area suburbanization, were so devastated by the decline of manufacturing that the overall metro region decayed to an extent not seen on the Eastern Seaboard.

The New Orleans metro area, though it underperformed in comparison to other Sunbelt cities, did not decline the same way that Rust Belt cities did. Rather, the Gulf Region has grown in spite of the population loss in Orleans Parish proper.

A town like Youngstown has to undertake policies that assume further population loss because they don't have a large enough metro population to bait back into the urban fabric. Baltimore, on the other hand, has a huge suburban population that can be brought back into the city. That is why Baltimore is not bulldozing neighborhoods or talking about shrinking their footprint - and Baltimore has scores of social challenges that Youngstown does not.

Flawed Premise

The other major idea coming out of Russell's article is this dichotomy between 'smart growth' and 'smart decline.' Observe:

The hardest part of "getting real" is figuring out what to do in the parts of town bleeding population.

It's the mirror image of typical urban planning. The debate in a rapidly growing city like Phoenix tends to be: How much must we widen Road A to accommodate new Subdivision B?

Those who study shrinking cities say depopulation should inspire a similar process -- "smart decline," some call it, riffing on the familiar "smart growth."

(later)

In many cities, moving out of the denial stage -- what Bingler called "getting real" -- is the hardest part.

That's because shrinkage connotes defeat. But advocates of smart decline say it shouldn't. After all, continual expansion brings its own curses: sprawl, traffic jams, cookie-cutter subdivisions and chain restaurants, much of which New Orleans has mercifully avoided.

Terry Schwarz, a planning professor at Kent State University's Cleveland campus and an expert on shrinking cities, speaks with wry disdain of her parents' adopted home of Phoenix, a city whose explosive growth is often seen as proof of its desirability.

"Have you ever been to Phoenix?" she asked. "It's an awful place."

There is a major problem here. Pheonix, and most every other growing city in the Sunbelt, do not typify 'smart growth.' In fact, 'smart growth' was developed in direct response to places like Phoenix. (By the way, Phoenix is indeed an awful place. It is the worst place I have ever visited in my whole life. Ever.) Places like Phoenix, Dallas-Forth Worth, Houston, Tampa Bay, Atlanta, etc., expanded and developed wildly with no attention paid to urban sustainability. 'Smart growth' is a relatively recent response to that type of wild free-market expansion; it attempts to regulate development in a way that protects residential interests, environmental sustainability, and the limits of infrastructure systems within the framework of dense urbanity. 'Smart decline' is not a response to Sunbelt homogenization or to smart growth - it's just planners and academics trying to be cute with their terminology.

I don't think there's a single person in Orleans Parish advocating for the kind of cul-de-sac, big box, chain restaurant, subdivision, unregulated expansion that the article's dichotomy seems to imply. Rather, I think everyone recognizes the need to regulate how development happens in Orleans Parish moving forward. The problem here is that certain planners like Steven Bingler continue to push for a shrunken footprint, the closure of whole swaths of the city, and the enshrined displacement of Katrina victims. While this is a morally perilous approach, it is also not feasible now, not after tens of thousands of residents returned to the very neighborhoods typically circled for closure. Bingler and the larger planner cabal that brought us the failed BNOB plan continue to cling to that divisive recovery model and continue to poison ongoing efforts to craft a consensus master plan that provides for both sustainability and Parish-wide recovery. It is an illusion to think that nobody will have to sacrifice anything - there's going to need to be green space - but to suggest that 'smart decline' is the right model for New Orleans is counterproductive and wrongheaded.

I'd argue that it is the decliners that need to "get real." They seem to be the ones that continually advocate for dumping hundreds of millions of one time only dollars into gigantic trickle down projects like Reinventing the Crescent, the LSU/VA, and a Superdome Entertainment District while sustainable neighborhoods all over the city cry out for micro investment. It is absolutely silly to proritize the Reinventing the Crescent project over basic investment in New Orleans East, but that's what we're doing. The sliver by the river will do just fine if we stall a massive riverfront redevelopment but can New Orleans East make it another ten years without an urban mainstreet?

Aren't We Still Growing, Anyway?

Though repopulation has stalled, we're still regaining population, not losing it. And as I'm recalling, there are still some 85k Road Home properties and some 15k affordable housing units in the pipeline still, though they're tenuous because of the credit crisis, etc. Correct me if I'm wrong about that...

Nagin, Leadership to Blame

Though he doesn't spend enough time making the point, Russell smartly fixes blame where it belongs:

Put bluntly, Mayor Ray Nagin's declaration that a laissez-faire "market forces" approach would drive New Orleans' population higher than before the flood seems well off the mark. Although some neighborhoods have recovered strongly, in many the population remains down by 50 percent or more. Across the flood zone, ghost homes sit empty by the hundreds on blighted, overgrown blocks.

This is the biggest reason why we continue to have acrimonious and divided debates over recovery. The only time New Orleans could have made the big changes was right after the storm. At that time, if it was clear that, for instance, much of New Orleans East would remain an unsustainable place to live in the short and medium term, a Mayor could have set forth an ambitious agenda to properly compensate homeowners and renters from those parts of the city and to provide ALL victims of the Federal Flood with access to housing in more sustainable areas of the city where investment and development made more sense. I'm not saying that effort would have worked, as clearly the current civic leadership did not and does not have the trust of the people or the urban vision to pull anything like that off, but that was the time to try it.

Instead, Nagin et al permitted a jack-o-lantern recovery that has really hurt the ability of city government to provide decent services and of residents to have a decent quality of life. But now that we already have that, perhaps the right thing to do is to put some of these big trickle-down projects on the back burner and instead invest more creatively in grassroots neighborhood recovery.

--

What do you think?

My vote for next big Gordon Russell spread is the criminal justice system. You could maybe make up enough money for Reinventing the Crescent by 'shrinking' the local prison-industrial complex alone.

--
UPDATE

An anonymous university type, via email:

I think you miss the key point. The majority of displaced blacks were employed (Washington Post survey in the shelters, September 10-12) and New Orleans had a robust economy. People with jobs were forced out of the city a gunpoint, whether they were flooded or not. Their jobs, housing, schools, are still here in one form or another. They are locked out and any policy to discourage their return is racist. When you are forced out of your home at gunpoint and given a one-way ticket out of the city, that’s an injustice that deserves to be remedied regardless of the desires of the urban planners for a middle class city. They use Rigamer’s numbers because the exaggerate by 100,000 the black population to give the illusion that everyone is home that wants to come home. The census bureau says we are missing about 200,000 black folks.

Nagin is no free-marketer. Look at his BNOBC plan—that’s about as draconian as you can get. He just refuses to let white folks, who virtually all think like the TP, to sit down and draw up a plan because the outcome will be to reduce the poor and black population. Would you let Janet Howard and Boysie Bollinger back in the door after what happened before? And this time they would learn from Vallas—make the plan 2,000 pages long so no one can figure it out, then submit to the council for approval while you have a white majority council.

Later:

The point about Nagin as a free-marketer needs to be made—he just uses that as a ruse and the media swallows it. Where’s the free-market ideology in the hospital debacle? He’s just using conservative terms against conservatives. Bottom line is that he made a commitment to the black community not to greenspace it and he has no reason to let urban planners make a liar out of him. The number of blocks with isolated occupied homes is minuscule—and no one has data on it. It stands out when you see it, but it’s hardly an economic problem—one more block for SDT to drive—what’s that, 10 cents in gas? I think the utility companies are the ones primarily behind the “footprint” stuff. They never wanted to re-wire the city and even balked on restoring the gas grid in the ninth ward. My brother-in-law works for a contractor for the phone company and he said that Bell could have rewired the phone service for the whole city in a few months, but decided to use the disaster to convert from copper to fiber optics so they could compete with Cox, thus delaying the recovery of the East by at least 18 months.

One of my friends in the east says 80% of the homes on his block are re-building. I see that all over the east, especially on weekends when people return to work on homes.

This is good stuff. Why don't the university guys talk more often? Are we just not asking?

HANO Destroys More Houses

Sad article.

The list of 500 properties includes more than 50 units at HANO's Christopher Park development on the West Bank, another 50 at the Press Park development in the Desire area, dozens in Gentilly and in the Irish Channel, and hundreds in eastern sections of the city and in the Lower 9th Ward.

The targeted properties have been untouched since Katrina, despite Walker-Woodfork's personal campaign for a restoration program. For at least the past year, Walker-Woodfork has addressed the HANO board at each monthly meeting with a list of scattered-site addresses in her hand.

"Can you tell me when Imperial Drive will be rebuilt?" she would ask. And she would similarly ask for information about plans for Dale Homes, Painters-Lesseps and other residential developments in the HANO inventory.

Once, the board chair told her that she'd asked the exact same questions the previous month.

Walker-Woodfork said that she was asking the same questions because she "never got any answers."

On Wednesday, Walker-Woodfork said she and other residents had met with HANO before the board meeting and had seen the list of homes to be demolished. She was glad to at least know something about the fate of the properties, after three years of asking questions.

But she still has no repair timetable for the remaining scattered-site inventory, saying she has only heard of plans for repairs to about 40 apartments.

Stall, stall, stall, then demolish, then come up with a plan to house people.

Nagin Endorses Historic Preservation?

Karen Gadbois highlights President-Elect (it feels so good) Barack Obama's policies on cities, affordable housing, and historic preservation:

The response of some to these statistics is to call for still more demolition, abandonment and neglect of older and historic neighborhoods. In the last three decades we lost from our national inventory of older and historic homes 6.3 million year-round housing units. Over 80 percent of those units were single-family residences. The vast majority of them were simply demolished – were thrown away as being worthless. These demolitions occurred at the very same time that the number of units of affordable to low-income households has fallen. In essence, America has been worrying about how to dismantle the barriers to affordable housing and the same time it has been dismantling the very homes that are, or could be, affordable.

For a variety of reasons, a better way is to revitalize our older and existing neighborhoods. For starters, studies show that repairing older homes, even those with moderate or server physical problems is a cost effective way to create housing. While rehabilitation isn’t the only solution to the affordable housing crises, there are as many as 3 million vacant older and historic housing units that could be brought back to use. These homes can be put back into service – either in homeownership or scattered site rental projects – through market forces and the wise use of CDBG and HOME funds as well as the enormously successful technique of twinning federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credits and federal Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credits.

Expect Mayor Nagin to announce tomorrow a total reversal of his entire recovery policy to this point in order to match the directives of the new Obama administration. After all, Ray Nagin wholeheartedly endorsed Barack Obama and his vision for revitalizing America's cities. He certainly wouldn't want to be an obstacle to change and progress by continuing policies antithetical to those for which Barack Obama stands. Also look for the Times-Picayune to more forcefully differentiate between Barack Obama's urban vision and that of the Nagin-Blakely syndicate in its articles and editorials. You'll recall that the Times-Picayune endorsed Barack Obama specifically because

He knows cities -- historic cities, gritty cities. He came by his knowledge pounding the streets of Chicago's South Side as an organizer, grappling with the needs of poor people. For our own great and complex city, we could use a national leader who appreciates that we are more than a sentimental memory of a college romp on Bourbon Street; that we are a culturally rich American treasure, filled with resilient citizens and worth protecting from the encroaching forces of nature.

Right? We can expect these things to happen, can't we?

Blakely's Legacy?

Lots

We Do Not Have A Record But At Least You Have The Land

This is a portion of my Wednesday morning email to members of City Council advocating for the complete repeal of Executive Order 08-04:

I am reading in the Times-Picayune that the Mayor is granting some sort of "concession" on Executive Order 08-04, which suspended an unbroken NCDC review process in favor of a secretive process seemingly rife with opportunity for mistaken demolition, contractor fraud, and/or contractor noncompliance with environmental mitigation procedures. I believe this only serves to further complicates a process did not demand post-Gustav modification. Even if you don't care one iota about either transparency or the preservation of architectural heritage, you must still unequivocally demand the total repeal of 08-04. Executive Order 08-04 re-initiates the same types of cloudy demolition procedures that lead to the still-pending multimillion dollar lawsuit against the city for the tragic demolition of the homes of some neighbors. Why would the Mayor eliminate a functioning system of checks and balances that had no purview over the demolition of structures in imminent danger of collapse in favor of the same type of convoluted demolition process that could yield more lawsuits, more bad press for the city, and more mistrust between citizens and municipal government?

Such alarmists we are, just assuming the city would keep poor records and not properly inspect buildings put on the chopping block. I mean, shouldn't the Nagin administration be given the benefit of the doubt?

No it shouldn't. Not ever again.

Read the whole thing from WDSU:

After Hurricane Katrina, Williams put $34,000 of her own money into renovating the house. But when she returned from evacuating after Hurricane Gustav she got a phone call from her contractor she'll never forget."He said he didn't even know how to tell me -- that my house was gone. I thought he was clowning. I said what do you mean the house was gone?" said Williams.

Mayor Nagin's legally redundant and antagonistic executive order has just yielded another lot of demolished dreams and exposed city coffers to yet another demolition lawsuit.

Last week, Williams said she took the matter to the Safety and Permits department."The man was very nasty. He said it was emergency demolitions that they were doing around the city. It got torn down and there's nothing anybody could do about it. He said, 'At least you have the land,'" said Williams.

--

The list of homes in imminent threat of collapse after Hurricane Gustav includes 4825 Laine Ave. When Williams went to city hall, she said there was a picture of the home she owned at 4829 Laine Ave. associated with the demolition order.

"We do not have a record of that property being demolished by the city. So we will investigate further," said James Ross, with the mayor's office.

Read today's T-P for some details on the city's imminent danger of collapse classification procedures. Here's a taste:

The city's code, however, provides no criteria for designating structures in "imminent danger of collapse." Instead, it places the determination solely in the hands of a "code official" and the Department of Safety and Permits.

Councilwoman Jackie Clarkson, whose presence on Council must be an increasing source of embarrassment for reporters, citizens, and colleagues alike on her hearing's "achievement":

"When the mayor walks in to a recovery meeting at my specific request and rescinds the order within 48 hours, you don't say, 'That's not good enough.' "

It's not like it's the Council's job to ask questions as to why the order was issued, why the city does not use structural engineers to evaluate properties, or why the Mayor allowed 'enterprising individuals' to game the system to push through their pet demolition projects without the approval of NCDC?

Mayor Nagin Caves In Advance of Council Hearing, Council To Receive Spoiled Milk

Onslaught of phone calls and emails overwhelms administration!
C. Ray: “Stop blogging. Stop blogging right now!”*


From Michelle Krupa of the T-P:

After taking heat for suspending the work of a panel that reviews requests for demolition permits in many historic neighborhoods, Mayor Ray Nagin has agreed to stop issuing teardown orders for properties that usually fall under the committee's purview.

-

Nagin's press office and Recovery Director Ed Blakely, whose department oversees demolitions, have dodged questions about the intent of the mayor's order.

-

Ross said that by Tuesday morning, three of the city's five district council members -- Shelley Midura, Stacy Head and James Carter -- had asked the administration to stop issuing demolition orders for properties in their districts without their permission.

Councilwoman Cynthia Hedge-Morrell confirmed that she made a similar request, though she was not on Ross' list. Meanwhile, Councilwoman Cynthia Willard-Lewis, whose district falls mostly outside the committee's jurisdiction, did not ask for the exemption, Ross said; a representative for her could not confirm the report.

So nice to see the Mayor and Ed Blakely's Expiring Contract pulling a Palin: they'll take no questions at this time. Also nice to see City Council unify to secure a concession the Mayor.

I'm not quite sure what this is though:

...[D]emolitions will be allowed, however, if the City Council member who represents the property gives his or her consent, officials said.

--

Well what that is, is a bunch of B.S.

A consent decree for City Council merely complicates an already unnecessary Executive Order. This is crumbs from Ray Nagin's plate, a pithy response that disrespects Council's intelligence with a sarcastic smile and dismisses the concerns of informed citizens with a yawn and a fart.

What we had before the Mayor's Executive Order was a system that seemed to function fairly well. The NCDC reviews allowed citizens to challenge demolition permits in their neighborhoods and issued for culturally significant structures without holding up the demolition of buildings in imminent danger of collapse even for one millisecond.

Now we have an increasingly clustered f#ck.

Perhaps if the Mayor or Dr. Blakely would speak to reporters, we might be able to ascertain what their justification for the Executive Order was. Instead, they're intentionally mute.

City Council, maybe just in comparison to the Mayor, has enough credibility to refuse the Mayor's pittance. They have enough political capital to demand unconditional disclosure and a complete repeal of Executive Order 08-04. Anything less sells us out, anything less represents unjustifiable toothlessness.

Take the time to write one more email.

Have You Written to City Council Yet?

Have you made any phone calls?

If you'd like City Council to stand up to the Mayor on Executive Order 08-04 there's a meeting about it tomorrow. Force your representatives to stand up for you by letting them know how important this issue is.

Contact the Council.

We can get this repealed rather quickly if we stand up now and make ourselves clear. I suspect that administration are not particularly interested in yet another protracted and reputation-stomping confrontation.

Priorities: Rate-Gate v. Abuse of Power

Mayor Clarence Ray Nagin sure did create a stir toward the end of last week at a hastily organized press conference to entice Houston-area evacuees to come stay in New Orleans. In what has become his public speaking trademark, Mayor Nagin went off script, appealing to Hurricane Ike evacuees with promises of reciprocal hospitality.

From WDSU:

"Just ask for the Mayor Ray Nagin special rate," Nagin said. "I guarantee you're going to get one of the best rates you've ever gotten in the city of New Orleans. We're ready for you to come, to take care of you like you've taken care of us."

Immediately, this didn't sit well with the Gambit and after a few phone calls it was established that there had been no effort to actually organize a discount for Hurricane evacuees.

It turns out that these comments are indeed marginally problematic. While the Mayor may have only intended to attract evacuees to area businesses still suffering the economic impact of Hurricane Gustav, his off the cusp joke that hotels would be offering a "Mayor Ray Nagin special rate" to Ike evacuees was irresponsible. It is un-mayoral and insensitive to joke at a press conference billed as an informational appeal to hurricane evacuees. With millions of people displaced from the Houston, unsure of the fate of their homes, scrambling to find the cheapest way to safety, and vigilantly monitoring the airwaves for serious reports, Mayor Nagin's playful attitude was out of place. His quip alluding to a special discount for Hurricane evacuees opened the door for unnecessary confusion, potentially adding insult to injury to Houston-area evacuees.

Bloggers were pretty outraged over the Mayor's comments but I was very surprised to see that the Times-Picayune deemed the Mayor's false advertisement of a 'special rate' to be front page material for Saturday's paper. The AP wrote about it too and the story got picked up all over the place at WWL, WDSU, and nationally via MSNBC.

Was this a front page story?

No way. Not even close. Not even on a Saturday. The head of the hospitality bureau had to hastily send out a clarifying email to hotel managers? God forbid.

And it's not as if this was a particularly slow news day.

Our national financial institutions are being compromised, a major hurricane was bore down on the fourth biggest city in the country, and the most important election ever is just seven weeks away.

On the local level, Hurricane Ike brought new flooding to areas still powerless after Hurricane Gustav. State and municipal officials flunked on the basic task of food stamp distribution for thousands of New Orleans struggling to get back on their feet.

Even if the paper were to only cover Mayor Nagin and ignore everything else going on in the region or on the planet, "rate-gate" still doesn't deserve main page coverage.

This does. Also read this, this, and this.

In a strangely calculated grab for power, Mayor Nagin issued an unnecessary executive order during the Gustav state of emergency that suspends the Neighborhood Conservation District Committee that reviews properties slated to be demolished by the city. The stated rationale for doing this was to expedite the demolition of buildings in imminent danger of collapse. Yet immediately we know that this is ridiculous because buildings classified as in imminent danger of collapse already automatically bypass the NCDC. We know this because the Mayor was already rebuked for his lack of knowledge of the demolition process in July when he claimed that a collapsed building in Broadmoor would force the administration to streamline the historic review process. That building had long been cleared for demolition and was not held up by any review process but instead by the private contractor hired by the city.

So if NCDC has no purview over buildings classified as in imminent danger of collapse, then why has Mayor Nagin suspended it? From the T-P:

Of 162 demolition permits issued since last week, 64 percent were assigned to the city contractor hired to tear down properties in imminent danger of collapse, according to a review by Matt McBride, an activist who maintains a database of demolition permits granted since Katrina.

Of the remaining 57 permits that were handed to private contractors or to the city vendor assigned to tear down Katrina-damaged buildings, 52 are located in areas where the committee's review would have been required. Of those, 24 were slated for review at a meeting scheduled for Sept. 2, the day after Gustav struck, the review shows.

Very plainly, Mayor Nagin's suspension of the NCDC was not about IDC properties but about subverting the review process to hand out demolition permits that otherwise may not have been authorized and pay out demolition reimbursements to another closely-tied private contractor firm. Durr Heavy Construction, which appears to be the biggest monetary beneficiary of demolition contracts, is registered to Steven Stumpf. Remember that the Stumpf is amongst the partners that profitted from the post-Katrina reopening of the Old Gentilly Landfill. Stumpf and Jimme Woods, of the much-maligned Metro disposal, secured a sweetheart deal at the end of the Morial administration:

In 2001, Stumpf and Woods formed a joint venture and submitted the only proposal to operate the new facility. In the final days of the Morial administration in early 2002, they signed a deal under which -- provided the landfill received a state permit -- they would keep 97 percent of the proceeds, with the city getting the other 3 percent.

According to campaign finance filings, the Amid partnership organized for the landfill have given $12,500 to Ray Nagin since the storm. The last $2,500 was given in 2007 while the first $10,000 was given in two $5,000 chunks a few days apart in April of 2006. The donations were obscured so as not to overtly violate campaign finance law. The first $5,000 donation came from Amid Metro Partnership LLC. of 817 Hickory Ave. 70125. The second came from Amid Landfill of 817 Hickory Ave. 70123. Another Stumpf company, Harvey Canal Holdings, gave an additional $5,000 to the Nagin reelection campaign that same week. The only listed contribution originating specifically from Durr Heavy Construction was one for $2,500 received in 2004.

When you give $15,000 in a one week period to a candidate fighting for his political life you tend to get your needs met.

(FACT CHECK UPDATE: It would appear that I misinterpreted the relationship between the executive order and Durr Heavy Construction. In fact, the regular permits that normally bypass NCDC for imminent danger of collapse go to Durr Heavy Construction. The city has continued to issue these types of permits since Gustav to Durr. However, the under the Executive Order, a separate contractor is used, DRC Emergency Services, the biggest beneficiary of the Mayor's unnecessary order. DRC Emergency Services is moments from being fired by the city for failure to live up to the requirements of it's post-Gustav debris removal contract. In addition to being one of the primary contractors indirectly implicated in the federal lawsuit filed earlier this year against the city for improper demolitions, Moldy City reminds us that they've won at least one Post-K contract in partnership with Southern Scrap. From the T-P:

DRC also holds a contract with the city to demolish blighted homes. A company executive, Robert Isakson, co-hosted a fundraiser for Nagin shortly after his 2006 election. DRC, a sister company and Isakson combined donated at least $11,500 to Nagin's war chest.

But as Moldy has pointed out already, DRC's relationship with the city is complex and has been alternatively hot and cold. Sorry for the confusion, it seems I got caught up in the alphabet soup.)

So while I applaud the T-P and other New Orleans news sources for having picked up on the NCDC suspension scandal, I would suggest that it is an everyday headline-caliber story. With everything going on, to so scandalize the hotel rate slip-up seems awfully petty, particularly when considering the Mayor's much more vindictive and unethical activities this week.

UPDATE:

New Orleans bloggers are increasingly aware of the influence they have. We can fight the Mayor on this and we must. Contact members of the City Council NOW

Let me second this post from Moldy City. Councilman James Carter, a candidate for Congress, has had ample opportunity this summer to win over skeptical voters by exercising his power on Council and standing up to Mayor Nagin. During the NOAH scandal, after Jackie Clarkson embarssed herself in a feeble attempt to make it appear as though everyone was playing nice, Councilman Carter could have stood up and provided real leadership during a tense week. He did not.

He would be wise not to pass on this. It may be his last opportunity to demonstrate in practice what he promises he'll do at Congress in theory.

Not Again

T-P:

City mistakenly demolishes couple's newly bought home

The offended couple ought to get involved with this important lawsuit.

News and NOAH(ts)

- Today the Times-Picayune stopped ignoring the NOAH story, publishing a brief rundown. The characterization was cautious, sidestepping obvious red flags to focus on a less sinister 'confusion' theme. While this initial approach falls short, I have some confidence that the Times-Picayune is going to be on board as inquiries move forward.

--LATE EDITION--

NOAH's official website is kaput.

--

Two days later, the NOAH site is back up and running.

We've Become A Clearing House For NOAH Info

Click the NOAH tag to get up to speed.

Nagin The Casual Observer

So nice to see the Mayor out on the street with the people after a home collapsed into another home which collapsed into another home.

The initial house that collapsed has been identified as an imminent health threat, as in danger of collapse, and has been slated for demolition for six months. This is fact.

In the WDSU report that Karen links to, Mister Mayor strolls onto the scene and offers his assessment of his administration's failure to hold private contractors accountable for their failure to deliver timely services (or any services at all) for this and other municipal programs:

"I'll be honest with you, I am shocked and surprised that we haven't had more situations like this. . . Maybe this will now force us to look at that process and maybe streamline the historic process also."

Repeat after me: This House Was Cleared For Demolition

The only thing that needs any "streamlining" is the jumbled process in which your advisers are supposed to tell you what is happening in the city you get paid to administer.

WDSU inexplicably lapped up the Mayor's blatant distortion of the historic review process and the obvious deflection of blame from his friends in the world of private contracting to the preservationists that have thankfully saved countless homes from the type of illegal demolitions that the city is now going to pay for in the form of a lawsuit. They repeated the Mayor's blatantly misleading talking point about "streamlining." They also fell short of their responsibility to the public.

Since I am out of town and busy at this conference deal, I'd like reader assistance in tracking how other mainstream media outlets cover the collapse story. Comment here or post to your own blog a critique of WWL, the TP, or whoever else...

The NOAH Ten {UPDATED}

See below.

Last year's T-P reported that the NOAH program actually spent $15 million in municipal money, not the 2-4 million stated in the original press release.

Additionally, Karen has discovered that NOAH gutted a home at 2225 Willow St. for Orleans Metropolitan Housing, the non-profit playpen of the Jefferson Machine. (To reiterate, NOAH's home remediation program was funded to provide free gutting services to seniors and low income New Orleanians.)

Again, from the Mayor's press release, we can ascertain the 10 contractors hired to perform gutting services for seniors and low income New Orleanians.

Biagas Enterprises, BNOB Construction Services, Carter’s Renovations, Charbonnet, Inc General Contractors, Blue Carpentry Construction Co., Matthews Developers, Myers and Sons Enterprises, W.T. Verges Construction Co, General Contracting Co., Inc., and Moon-Glo Developers.

Let's get to it using the Secretary of State's corporate data base. This is a good tool we can use for other things so bookmark this link.

1. Biagas Enterprises

Two relevant search results. One for Biagas Enterprises and another for Biagas Enterprises and Construction. The former entity has expired. The latter is inactive due to failure to file the 2007 annual disclosure report.

2. BNOB Construction Services

BNOB is in good standing. However, Scott Sewell of BNOB/Benetech is a former Bush staffer. See American Zombie for more on BNOB, Benetech, and Nagin.

3. Carter's Renovations

There is nothing for a company called Carter's Renovation, it is unclear if it exists in that form. There is a link for a "Carter's Residential & Commercial Construction" and a "Carter Renovation and Development Company." Both are classfied as inactive by action of Secretary of State for failure to file annual reports.

4. Charbonnet Inc. General Contractors

There are several business entities with the name Charbonnet and it is unclear which one got the contract. Charbonnet Inc, Charbonnet General Contractor Inc. Austin, Charbonnet Development, and Charbonnet Construction Inc., Pierre are either "not active" or "not in good standing." Charbonnet Construction Company, Inc. is active and in good standing. We'll still need to find out which Charbonnet was hired to do work for NOAH.

5. Blue Carpentry Construction

According to the SOS database, Blue Carpentry Construction Co. Inc. is Active but "not in good standing for failure to file current annual report."

6. Mathews Developers

There is no listing for any business with that name. We do have a Mathews General Contractors, a Mathews Properties, LLC, and a Mathews Builders Inc. They are all active and in good standing. No such thing as Mathews Developers though.

7. Myers and Sons Enterprises

Active and in good standing.

8. W. T. Verges Construction Company, Inc.

Active and in good standing.

9. General Contracting Co., Inc.

Active and in good standing.

10. Moon-Glo Developers

There were four relevent search results here, all listing Alphonse Martin Jr. and Dan Williams. Two non-profits called Moon-Glo of New Orleans and Moon-Glo, Inc. are now defunct. A business corporation also called Moon-Glo Inc. is inactive. There's another business corporation called Moon-Glo Development, L.L.C. that is active and in good standing.

--

So being as generous as possible, only five of ten contractors awarded municipal money for NOAH's remediation program are verifiably active and in good standing. Two firms, Biagas Enterprises and Blue Carpentry Construction are clearly defunct. Two more, Carter's Renovations and Mathews Developers may not exist at all, at least as they are described in the Mayor's press release. That leaves Charbonnet Inc General Contractors, which also may not exist but may also be a reference to one of many other construction companies named Charbonnet.

We will need to get some more clarity as to whether or not Carter's Renovations and Mathews Developers actually exist. For some of the others, there is some discrepancy as to which listing refers to the actual NOAH contract winner. We should start cross-checking some of the names and addresses listed for the contractors with campaign contributions given to the Mayor and members of City Council. You can use this site to do that. If you find something, post in the comments section.


UPDATE:

I have emailed Stacey Jackson of NOAH with two public records requests. One asked for the contracts signed with the ten companies paid for remediation work. The other asked for the database of properties serviced under the program not excluding the name of the contractor responsible for each property. I tried two different email addresses for Ms. Jackson, I'll keep you posted.

THURSDAY AFTERNOON UPDATE:

I have amended the records request for the contracts that NOAH signed with the ten contractors listed in the press release to also include ALL contractors that did remediation work for NOAH to make sure we catch contractors that may not have been included in the press. Ms. Jackson has not emailed me yet. Legally, she must respond by Tuesday evening at the absolute latest.

Also, what do people think about the unclear listings for Carter's Renovations, Charbonnet, and Mathews Developers? Any clue which entity is accurate?

NOAH's A Farce {UPDATED}

Three cheers to Karen Gadbois for uncovering the latest in efficient and transparent municipal governance.

Apparently, New Orleans Affordable Housing or NOAH was given 2-4 million dollars in taxes to funnel to different contractors to gut homes for seniors and low income residents.

NOAH has been in existence since the late 80s but it launched Mayor Nagin's remediation program was launched after the storm. That link yields a press release from March of 2007, though the program had already been in full swing for an unclear amount of time before then. (This is a hole that we'll need to get filled in)

To date, NOAH has remediated nearly 350 properties throughout the city of New Orleans, with the majority of those properties located in District D, which includes Gentilly, Pontilly and Gentilly Woods. They have utilized the following ten contractors: Biagas Enterprises, BNOB Construction Services, Carter’s Renovations, Charbonnet, Inc General Contractors, Blue Carpentry Construction Co., Matthews Developers, Myers and Sons Enterprises, W.T. Verges Construction Co, General Contracting Co., Inc., and Moon-Glo Developers. NOAH will meet with an additional ten contractors from the Office of Planning and Development Certified Contractors List in an effort to work with all of the contractors on the list.

Karen Gadbois has recently noticed brand new signs on homes around town touting NOAH's remediation successes. She has also noticed that some of the same homes are now slated for demolition as imminent heath threats.

So to recap, the City spent CBDG funds to clean out the house and then spends FEMA funds to demolish it. The other comical element is that the signs are NEW and they still have Donna Addkison listed as a City employee. In the last 2 years I have seen 4 of these signs and all of them in the last month.

What a sleuth, eh?

We've still got a lot of questions to answer about the transparency in the demolition process.

But this one isn't just about the demolition committee and that messed up process.

Take a look at that press release again.

They have utilized the following ten contractors: Biagas Enterprises, BNOB Construction Services, Carter’s Renovations, Charbonnet, Inc General Contractors, Blue Carpentry Construction Co., Matthews Developers, Myers and Sons Enterprises, W.T. Verges Construction Co, General Contracting Co., Inc., and Moon-Glo Developers.

Who the hell are these guys?

I was reading Karen's post late last night -

{I know that it reflects poorly on the popular perception of E from WeCouldBeFamous as a handsome and charming late-night galavanter to admit to staying in and researching municipal mismanagement on a Saturday night but in fairness to that popular (and totally accurate) perception, I'm in the middle of moving to my new loft condo space.}

Anyways, it was just past midnight and I saw Karen's post and wondered about those contractors. I'd never heard of any of them.

So I took out my magical google machine and looked up the first one on the list, Biagas Enterprises. Their website listed a toll-free phone number. I decided, to give that 866 number a call. I figured I could easily figure out if this was a real company or not upon hitting the answering machine. I knew I'd hit the answering machine because it was 12:30 AM on a Sunday.

Turns out someone was on the other end. A woman's voice.

"Hello?"

I hung up figuring I must have misdialed.

I didn't.

I got a phone call 10 minutes later from another number, a local area code. It was the woman at the other end of the 866 I dialed. She asked if I had called her.

I said, "yes I was trying to call a construction company, I thought I'd dialed an 866 number."

She replied:

"No, this is a 225 area code."

The number she'd called me back from matched a directory listing for Biagas Enterprises in Baton Rouge.

This episode struck me as extremely bizarre. I supposed that you could reroute a toll free number to go to a cell phone. And I supposed that this could be a small enough mom-and-pop construction firm that it wouldn't have a business landline. (Even though Thaddeus 'Matt' Biagas has "a long history in government projects.")

Anyways, I decided to just go ahead and google machine the other contractors on the list.

The only hit for "Carter's Renovations" is the Nagin press release I already linked to. There's not even a directory listing - in all of google.

I coud only find the press release for various searches for a phone number or website for "Charbonnet."

Good luck on "Inc. General Contractors."

Ditto for "Blue Carpentry Construction Co."

I found a "Mathews Developers" based out of Illinois.

I was able to find a directory listing for "Myers and Sons Enterprises" and will have to try to call tomorrow.

Couldn't find much on "Moon-glo developers" but they showed up on a Louisiana list of accredited lead supervisors.

There is a directory listing for "W.T. Verges Construction Company."

"General Contracting Co." has a listing and the phone number was legit, at least according to the irritable man on the other end of the line. He still wants to know why I was asking questions about his phone number.

The only exception to this general pattern was "BNOB Construction Services" which has a professional website, a big internet footprint, and has clearly been awarded many larger-sized contracts.

For at least a couple of these companies, I was able to find obscure online directory listings last night but couldn't find them again this evening. For a few, I couldn't find anything last night or this evening. I'm sure with a little bit more time, we might be able to find something on the internets for most of the firms, but it doesn't seem like it will to amount to much.

So I'm not sure what's going on here.

But it's something.

In talking to People That I Know Who Might Know Something, or PTIKWMKS, I have learned that there have been rumblings about NOAH and NOAH contractors for some months.

Some of the firms may be dummies or fronts to funnel money to family members of people that are already famous.

We need to get the names behind these companies and see who they've donated money to.

Feel free to pitch in with what you know or are able to find out in the comments.

I'm very late for work so I've got to sign off for a little while.

UPDATE:

To add a little more, I'll say that I've been hearing that these quasi-dummy contractor fronts may be tied to well-known municipal officials.

MONDAY EVENING UPDATE:

Karen is visiting homes "serviced" by NOAH's remediation program. It would appear that perhaps some of these properties were not visited by contractors. The property that Karen shows us today is owned, in violation of NOAH rules, by a delinquent landlord, not a low income senior.

In the comments section, an Anonymous points out that NOAH is not in good standing with the state for failure to provide annual reports.

Additionally, many of the contractors are also not in good standing and at least one of them does not appear to exist at all.

I am in the middle of a move but I will document that with links as soon as I can.

Finally, I called NOAH's office today to request a list of homes awarded free remediation. The woman on the other end of the line was extremely defensive and informed me that they had never received such a request before. When inquired as to the proper procedure for obtaining the records, she told me that she would have to refer it to lawyers at another agency. She then told me that NOAH was in the middle of changing offices and did not have an opporational email account to which I could send an electronic request.

The response to this story has been great so far, I think we can get to the bottom of it.

Land Value Maximized When It's Empty

Okay, these are some city initiated demolitions isolated from a much more daunting map that looks a little something like this:


When you look at the big map, the one of the whole city with the huge huge clusters of dots, it's hard to actually visualize what that looks like on the ground.

But when you look at the map isolating that gorgeous neighborhood lakeside of the French Quarter, it feels that much more sinister. That's valuable land that's being cleared. It's just north of the most profitable land in the city. It has poor people living on it.

It makes the theory that this demolition fetish is the result of gross negligence, incompetence, and mismanagement seem sadly naive.

It makes it seem down-right targeted and thought out, doesn't it?

---
Not that this next thought is related or anything...
---

I was thinking that since the new developments aren't working out after all...

Maybe it's time we came up with a game plan for the hundreds of empty lots because I'm afraid they'll be around for a long time...

First, we've got to remove the arsenic.

What kind of crops should we grow? Corn? Poppies?