10,000 N.O. homes withering away
City cleanup order being enforced slowly
Sunday, February 04, 2007
By Michelle Krupa
Sandwiched between a shotgun single choked to the rafters by knotty weeds and a vacant two-story double bearing a rusty flood line 5 feet high, Joe Cross has become a lonely sentinel in his once-buzzing neighborhood.
All along this stretch of Almonaster Boulevard, between Claiborne Avenue and the Norfolk Southern railroad line, doors flap on twisted hinges and broken windows reveal moldering furniture, a grotesque testament to desertion 17 months after Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters ravaged more than 100,000 homes and businesses in New Orleans.
Cross, a maintenance man at a school in Gert Town, gutted the shotgun double he shares with his wife and three children within four months of the storm. His mother moved into one side last winter. The rest of the family followed in August, keeping the house in line with a city law that forbids property owners from letting structures wallow in post-Katrina funk....
... But up and down Almonaster and across the city's flood plain, muck-ridden houses still litter the landscape.
A block-by-block survey of flooded areas completed last month shows that about 10,000 properties in New Orleans remain in a state of withering neglect, according to records provided by City Hall. This means they are in violation of a so-called gutting law that gave owners until Aug. 29, the first anniversary of the storm, to clean out their houses or at least get on a list to have someone do it for them.
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City cleanup order being enforced slowly
Sunday, February 04, 2007
By Michelle Krupa
Sandwiched between a shotgun single choked to the rafters by knotty weeds and a vacant two-story double bearing a rusty flood line 5 feet high, Joe Cross has become a lonely sentinel in his once-buzzing neighborhood.
All along this stretch of Almonaster Boulevard, between Claiborne Avenue and the Norfolk Southern railroad line, doors flap on twisted hinges and broken windows reveal moldering furniture, a grotesque testament to desertion 17 months after Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters ravaged more than 100,000 homes and businesses in New Orleans.
Cross, a maintenance man at a school in Gert Town, gutted the shotgun double he shares with his wife and three children within four months of the storm. His mother moved into one side last winter. The rest of the family followed in August, keeping the house in line with a city law that forbids property owners from letting structures wallow in post-Katrina funk....
... But up and down Almonaster and across the city's flood plain, muck-ridden houses still litter the landscape.
A block-by-block survey of flooded areas completed last month shows that about 10,000 properties in New Orleans remain in a state of withering neglect, according to records provided by City Hall. This means they are in violation of a so-called gutting law that gave owners until Aug. 29, the first anniversary of the storm, to clean out their houses or at least get on a list to have someone do it for them.
- jimlouis 2-04-2007 11:14 pm