[StBernard] St. Bernard Parish faces challenge of filling in the blanks after Hurricane Katrina

[Westley Annis]

St. Bernard Parish faces challenge of filling in the blanks after Hurricane
Katrina
Published: Friday, August 27, 2010, 8:00 PM 
 Chris Kirkham, The Times-Picayune 
 
Drive down Palmisano Boulevard in the heart of Chalmette, where stately
brick homes line nearly every bit of the divided thoroughfare, and memories
of a pre-flood suburban landscape emerge.

But just two blocks to the east along Riverland Drive, it's a flashback to
the 1960s, when subdivisions across St. Bernard Parish were first springing
up from drained wetlands. There's a checkerboard of one or two houses per
block, with vast sections of open lots interrupted by a few lingering
concrete slabs.

"When we bought this lot, we bought it off a map, so nothing was here
either," said Melanie Hoover, who purchased the lot off Riverland Drive with
her husband more than 30 years ago.

The five-year process of home and slab demolitions after Hurricane Katrina's
floodwaters drowned the parish has left her neighborhood feeling in some
ways as it did in the beginning, she said. But the second start is fraught
with many more questions than the first. 

"There's a lot of space now, but I don't know what there is to entice
newcomers to build on the space," she said.

The differing fates of these two closely linked blocks can be seen all
across the parish, where a complex brew of individual choice and financial
circumstance have largely dictated the repopulation of neighborhoods. No
other Gulf Coast community was undone so profoundly as St. Bernard, a
tight-knit suburban enclave that has often remained a footnote in the annals
of Katrina's destruction.

Its population has rebounded to 41,000 - 60 percent of where it was before
the storm - a remarkable turnaround from total destruction. Yet restitching
it back together, with fewer people over the same amount of space, is a
challenge that will shape the destiny for future generations.

As with New Orleans, there were early plans to strategize redevelopment
patterns in St. Bernard, with a citizens' recovery committee supporting a
limited-footprint concept that would have restricted development in
lower-lying areas closest to the back levees that failed during Katrina and
pushed more of the population to higher ground near the Mississippi River.

But those plans for concentrated green space were never acted upon by the
parish government, leaving random patches of open space scattered throughout
St. Bernard. The result is what could be termed "ruralization," a
smorgasbord of neighborhood settings ranging from the dense suburban style
that dominated the years before Katrina, to patchier, almost country-like
sections where few houses have returned.

The absence of a consistent redevelopment plan after Katrina also led to a
rash of quick-hit, low-quality home renovations, many by out-of-state
investors, before there was a realistic demand for housing. The excess
supply drove down prices for the entire market, and continues to do so,
cementing St. Bernard's role as the weakest real estate market in the metro
area - down more than 9 percent in the first half of this year, compared
with 2009. 

"It was one of the least expensive parishes historically, and I always
presented that as an advantage, if people were first-time buyers," said Wade
Ragas, a retired University of New Orleans professor who analyzes home sale
trends for the New Orleans Metropolitan Association of Realtors. "But the
reality meant if you were an existing owner there, there wasn't much price
appreciation. Now of course it's the reverse. Prices keep trending
downward."

Backlog of unused land

Though lingering blighted and abandoned houses and shopping centers still
irk many residents, St. Bernard has been much more aggressive than
neighboring New Orleans in its push to clear vacant lots and eliminate
physical reminders of the destruction.

But what has emerged as the biggest challenge for the parish is how to fill
in those blanks, nearly 8,000 of them haphazardly distributed across the
area. Some 4,400 of the vacant lots are owned by the state, after properties
were sold to the Road Home program. Thousands of others are still in the
hands of private property owners, many of whom live elsewhere, giving the
parish government little control over their future use.

A much-anticipated, long-stalled lot-next-door program promises to offload a
portion of the properties to adjacent homeowners, who can use the lots for
home additions but not new construction. 

But within the next year, the parish government will become one of the
single largest holders of developable land in St. Bernard, as thousands of
Road Home lots are transferred over. It's a task that carries immense
responsibility for redevelopment in the decades to come, and one that will
also bring considerable added costs. Once lots are transferred from the Land
Trust to the parish, the monthly lawn care bills for lots that aren't
purchased by neighbors will be St. Bernard's responsibility.

Already the parish is down more than $7.5 million in revenue from taxes,
licenses and fees from 2004 levels, taking out federal disaster loans that
have buoyed St. Bernard's budget since Katrina. Next year will be the
parish's first full budget year in which government services are not
subsidized by federal disaster loans.

With the contrasting landscapes throughout the parish, services are becoming
stretched as fewer people pay into a system tasked with providing basic
parish services such as water, garbage pickup and fire protection over the
same geographic expanse. Last year, voters shot down a Parish Council
request for an additional $20 per household per month to cover major
shortfalls in garbage collection and paying the fire department.

Now the parish is scrambling to pay firefighters to staff stations across
the same pre-Katrina parish geography. Earlier this year the parish
negotiated a $875,000 federal subsidy that will allow the hiring of 13 new
firefighters over the next two years, but there's no guarantee that will
continue.

"When you talk about services, this is where we knew we were going to get to
a challenge point, and we're quickly approaching it," said Parish President
Craig Taffaro.

'I'm in the crosshairs'

The parish is also on the verge of completing more than $1 billion worth of
FEMA-financed infrastructure repairs to sewer lift stations, parks and
government buildings. Maintaining that new infrastructure will bring added
costs.

Residents who returned know they will feel the pinch.

"You take a step back, how are you going to finance this?" asked Mark
Abshier, who lives on Palmisano, one of the few largely repopulated sections
of Chalmette. "You've got a physical plant, but where's the money going to
come from to keep it up? Uncle Sam's not going to pay it. Me as a taxpayer
with a job, I'm very nervous right now because I'm in the crosshairs."

On one hand, the parish is blessed with an industrial base that includes a
port facility, two oil refineries and a sugar refinery, which continue to
pay much of the freight for government.

But staving off further declines in the real estate market by persuading new
residents to settle within a fragmented landscape will be a long-term
challenge, made doubly hard by the recession and a tightening in credit
markets for potential investment.

Still, many in the parish say the five years of recovery have positioned St.
Bernard at a point for rediscovery. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, much of the
central part of the parish was built out and dense, the product of poor
planning as the parish boomed in the 1960s and 1970s.

Though the open space isn't concentrated, it is available in much greater
quantities than it had been decades before Katrina.

"You start to look at that, and we have a superabundance of land in St.
Bernard. You've got a canvas that's blank to work with," said Cliff Reuther,
a real estate agent and homebuilder in the parish who served on the
citizens' recovery committee. "That's what's so interesting about this. You
can paint it any way you want, and you can make it into anything you want it
to be.'' The question now is how to prioritize and divvy up that land in a
way that encourages newcomers and increases the value for those who have
already returned.

Parks and open spaces

During the next six months, Taffaro expects the parish to complete the
lot-next-door program that will push properties sold to the state's Road
Home program into the hands of adjacent homeowners. The presence of more
than 4,000 concrete slabs, which had to be removed in a separate process
after home demolitions, has put St. Bernard's lot-transfer program behind
the one in New Orleans.

More than 1,500 homeowners have expressed interest in the lots, with 833
already putting down deposits.

Some of the remaining lots will be used to improve drainage by creating more
open space around canals or building community lakes that would provide
public space and floodwater retention benefits. Many neighborhoods have
ideas to package lots into park space or community gardens, even community
orchards for some of the larger open spaces.

"We're at a tipping point now," said Howard Luna, the president of
Rediscover District C, a neighborhood organization in Chalmette. "I would
like to see us move past the recovery and into the creation mode.''

The parish eventually plans to bundle lots for investors to rebuild homes,
possibly combining two lots into one to space out development over time. Of
course all of these plans are still in their infancy, and observers caution
that the longer the parish waits to come up with a comprehensive plan to
deal with its vacancy, the more signals it sends to the market that it is
not a viable option.

"Everybody wants to fixate on the technical solution for how you deal with
8,000 vacant parcels. That's not the story. The story is what a vacant
parcel represents, and what it represents is unpredictability, and that's
what the market hates," said Charles Buki, a community development
consultant who has studied market trends in St. Bernard and other local
parishes on behalf of the Greater New Orleans Foundation. "The market is
looking for the parish to cowboy up, show some cojones and say, 'This is how
the game will be played in St. Bernard.' And they haven't done that."

Seizing the opportunity

Although the newfound open space is a marked improvement over the derelict
houses of a few years ago, it's now the smaller things - the toppled
chain-link fences ringing abandoned properties, the derelict signs lining
Judge Perez Drive - that nag at homeowners wanting to move beyond recovery.

"We're not pulling up houses, we're not cleaning up streets, we're not
cleaning up debris anymore. Now we're looking at overgrown properties. That
shouldn't become the norm," said Polly Campbell, president of the Lexington
Civic Corporation, who is now working as the director of neighborhood
initiatives for the St. Bernard Community Foundation, an arm of the Greater
New Orleans Foundation.

St. Bernard this summer received a $305,000 grant from the remaining
proceeds of the Louisiana Recovery Authority to develop a master plan for
the parish, including strategic land use and zoning regulations that would
make better use of water resources in the parish. It is expected to put the
package out to bid next month.

"I believe our major task right now, at the five-year point, is to make sure
that we are marketing the community so that when there is a surge, we're in
the consideration in the metropolitan area to live and raise a family,"
Taffaro said. "We are on the cusp now of not being a laughingstock of a
community. . Katrina put us on a stage. Now if we miss that opportunity,
shame on us."


Chris Kirkham can be reached at ckirkham at timespicayune.com or 504.826.3321.

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