Kent Montgomery settled in for bad weather last week under a roof in the Lower 9th Ward that’s been gashed since 2005.

He slept on a metal cot, surrounded by bare wall studs, dangling wires, spiderwebs and shattered glass, in a gutted brick apartment building on North Derbigny Street.

He awoke one recent morning and backed his wheelchair through a swarm of bees into a courtyard dotted with graffiti and trash. Doctors amputated his left leg two years ago, said Montgomery, 61. Another set of scars runs down his right knee.

“Twenty-two trap. I took a lick from the blind side,” he said, describing a play and an injury he dated to a college game, after attending Francis T. Nicholls, the neighborhood high school later renamed for Frederick Douglass.

Montgomery has taken plenty of licks since: repeated drug convictions, years in prison, runs through homeless shelters, a lost leg.

Low on options, he returned to the Lower 9th Ward, and familiar surroundings.

“I love my neighborhood,” he said. “They know me.”

Chicken vs. egg

Grim hideouts like this one are plentiful across a Lower 9th Ward that 15 years ago became a world symbol for poverty, neglect and utter devastation, and since has shown few signs of a rebound.

Overgrown lots still blanket the landscape in the “backatown” area lakeward of North Claiborne Avenue, where the market for homes has flatlined.

Houses here continue to cost far more to build than they sell for, so much so that $75,000 in subsidies are often needed to bridge the gap in some areas, said Seth Knudsen, planning director for the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority.

But there is a citywide demand for low-income housing, which is where developers working with NORA, and others, have turned much of their focus in the Lower 9th Ward.

Critics fear a downshift in the aspirations for a revival of a neighborhood developed in the 1940s and 50s that had a jaw-dropping rate of homeownership and a population that was 98% Black when Katrina struck.

Brenda Breaux, NORA’s executive director, argues that the neighborhood must address “a chicken-and-egg problem” in a desert for services, such as a supermarket.

“That portion of the Lower Ninth Ward that didn’t come back, and hasn’t come back, that’s the reality of where we are. We are rebuilding a neighborhood,” Breaux said. “We’re talking about how to get more rooftops in an area and a community that fulfills all the things everyone wants to see.”

Gwendolyn Guice, for one, wouldn’t mind seeing less wildlife.

“I have to throw mothballs down to keep the snakes away,” she said.

It was hardly so rural or weed-infested when Guice, 73, bought into the neighborhood four decades ago, raising her three children in a house that would sit under 18 feet of water in Katrina.

Guice had barely made it to Texas when she resolved to come back. “I hate Houston right now today,” she said.

A patchwork recovery

In 2007, she and her next-door neighbor, Josephine Butler, became the first Lower 9th Ward residents to move home into new houses on their deserted street, both built by ACORN. Soon, another neighbor joined them. One more came home. The 2300 block of Delery Street had a quorum.

But then no one else did come back, Guice said. Another neighbor was planning a return, but died first. One by one, the three neighbors who had joined her back home passed. Butler died in 2015.

Guice’s daughter, Karonda Williams, moved three years ago to a spot just beyond Jackson Barracks in St. Bernard Parish. Guice said what keeps her on Delery Street are the memories. The house had to be stripped down and re-drywalled a few years ago.

“We are homeowners. That’s the reason I thought they would come back,” she said. “They said they was gonna build up everything, and da-da-da, and they didn’t do nothing. I think they took all the money that they promised to put down here and put it Uptown. Didn’t put it down here. Because the streets been falling apart down here.”

Just about every home that gets built in the neighborhood is still subsidized, one way or another, Knudsen said. NORA offers up the land in many cases at a steep discount, from a glut of more than 500 properties it owns here, many of them sold off to the state’s Road Home program by former residents who walked away.

The federal rebuilding program was found to have discriminated in its funding formula against claimants in depressed areas like the Lower Ninth Ward. The formula pegged the payout to home value, rather than the cost to rebuild, leaving many people here well short of the money they’d need for a house.

That was one among many well-chronicled roadblocks for Lower 9th Ward residents trying to make it back. Most still have not.

As recently as 2018, the neighborhood’s population stood at about a third of its pre-Katrina levels, with fewer than 5,000 residents, according to U.S. Census estimates.

There were 4,820 households in the Lower 9th Ward in 2000, five years before Katrina. Five years after the storm, the census logged 1,060 households. More recent estimates place the number at about 1,675, according to an analysis by The Data Center.

Tangled succession issues continue to plague numerous properties that have sat idle for years.

For NORA, that has meant development of enclaves of houses in areas where the agency has managed to aggregate enough lots, such as along Andry Street, lakeward of Claiborne, where houses line the block.

For longtime homeowners like Freddie Ross, it spells an eyesore.

“That right there is real, real irritating. I’m sick of looking at it. Katrina’s been, what, 15 years? It’s a damper on my day,” he groused from his porch on Tupelo Street.

Across the street rose a cloud of brush that blotted out the house facing his neatly manicured compound. Ross, 63, expanded after the storm, buying the properties on either side of him through the popular “Lot Next Door” program. He’d been tending to those lawns anyway while they sat.

“I went to a lot of meetings about rebuilding,” he said. “They come with broken promises.”

Managing expectations

On a recent drive through the Lower 9th Ward, City Councilwoman Cindy Nguyen offered a scorched-earth proposal as she slowly passed dump sites, tire piles and empty lots choked by weeds along streets shrouded in overgrowth near Florida Avenue.

“You know what I really want to do with all this? Burn it down,” she said.

Not all of it, Nguyen clarified. She didn’t mean, for instance, the nearby Sankofa Nature Trail and Wetland Park — a post-Katrina restoration project that offers peace from an urban bustle somewhere else.

Then she turned back from Florida Avenue, a haven for illegal dumps.

“Look at this lot right here. If I want to buy it by auction, buy the tax lien – which is probably high – then I still gotta invest probably about $40,000 to get the land clear,” she said. “Now if you burn it down – controlled burn – it’s a way of really getting things going.”

Nguyen, a first-term councilwoman from New Orleans East who worked for Road Home after the storm, said city fire officials balk at her plan. In the meantime, she’s pushing a resolution, urged by developers, to free up narrow lots by removing a driveway requirement in the neighborhood on the lakeside of Claiborne Avenue

“I want to change the neighborhood according to people that live out here now, not based on people that used to live out here,” Nguyen said.

“I think people out here would love to have a little bit more people out here. Some green space where their children can play. Small little delis in between these neighborhoods. I’m saying burn it down so we could entice people to do something.”

The recent closing of a CVS pharmacy that opened to fanfare in 2016 on North Claiborne didn’t shock too many residents.

“Every time I went in there the only person in there was me and an employee,” said Lisa Lemieux as she swept a broom across the narrow walkway in front of her house on Egania Street, which she bought in 2003.

Lemieux pointed to an abandoned house on North Robertson, a gray wooden shell. Her friend Floyd, the “godfather” of the block, had lived there. He’d put on a new roof after Katrina, but died soon after Hurricane Isaac in 2012, she said.

“The old values are gone, because the older people don’t live here anymore,” she said. “It’s more like a new neighborhood starting over.”

Nguyen favors a gut-check on expectations for commerce in the Lower 9th Ward.

“I’ll be candid — having Wal-Mart come to the neighborhood, it ain’t gonna happen,” she said. “The concept of even like a Raising Cane’s, I don’t think it’s going to happen.”

Nguyen cited local tastes for the latter.

“This is just a reality OK, and this is not putting anybody down: I think people in the Lower Nine like those greasy fried chicken [places],” she said.

“I don’t like to have conversations just to sugarcoat people and say, ‘Yeah, we can get a Raising Cane’s,’ when you know very well that people here like those chicken, those fried chicken…You can’t ask people to start up a business and not be able to make money.”

Meanwhile, Nguyen said she’s pushing a plan to have “Black Lives Matter” painted in huge letters on St. Claude Avenue, outside a civil rights center that broke ground at the old McDonogh 19 Elementary School a few days before the pandemic struck in March.

Affordable housing is planned above a museum and anti-racism center at a site where a 6-year-old Leona Tate walked up the steps to help desegregate New Orleans schools one morning in 1960, amid racist jeers from the street. Tate is a co-owner of the project.

The devotion to honoring the neighborhood’s tortured history and musical culture endures, along with a crumpled infrastructure.

Lately, municipal crews have been digging up numerous cockeyed, neglected streets along the Industrial Canal and farther downriver. The “full-depth” reconstruction project, funded by FEMA, promises new water and sewer lines, sidewalks, curbs.

But the direction she sees in redeveloping them — and talk of burning debris-riddled lots — doesn’t sit too well with Laura Paul, executive director of lowernine.org, a bootstrap nonprofit that has rebuilt 89 houses for pre-Katrina residents since 2012.

Paul said she still fields calls from people seeking help getting back. She argues that private and non-profit builders are sacrificing the neighborhood and its legacy by providing cheap rentals, buttressed in some cases by low-income housing tax credits on one end, and guaranteed market rental rates on the other.

“The reason that it’s owned by NORA at all is because of a discriminatory federally funded program,” she said.

Paul is particularly critical of New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity, one of four steady contractors participating in a long-running plan with NORA to build scores of new homes in the neighborhood.

“It can’t just be, ‘Let’s get this property back into commerce.’ It has to be meaningful and mindful and respectful of the community, and none of this is respectful of the community,” Paul said.

“How can you talk about affordable housing as a priority while you are keeping Black families in poverty?”

A ‘conscious decision’

Habitat, the nonprofit homebuilder, is more than a year into a five-year plan to build 16 doubles and 48 single-family homes in the neighborhood on lots in NORA’s inventory. The goal is a mix of owner housing and rentals, not unlike what existed before the storm, said executive director Marguerite Oestreicher.

“We made a conscious decision when we started working on this to frontload with rentals. It’s a faster way to build density. We need families, need children for schools, enough people to support stores,” she said. “I think everybody thought it would happen faster.”

Oestreicher said there’s interest in buying into the Lower 9th Ward, though the invitation elicits strong reactions from prospective low-income “partners” at Habitat outreach events.

“Some, they grew up there and want to come back,” said Oestreicher. Others take a quick pass.

“I think we’ve all learned to have a fresh appreciation for the power of water,” she said, “and it’s hard to escape those ghosts.”

Quiet, open space and ample parking are among the draws now across the Claiborne Avenue bridge, where new gardens have popped up on some lots left empty since Katrina.

“If you go back in the history of the Lower 9th, if you go way back, people had gardens and there were small farmers who filled their produce for food businesses in the French Quarter,” Oestreicher said. “People like the spirit of community, the folks who know it.”

‘That’s the ballgame’

Social and land use policies dating to the Industrial Canal’s creation a century ago, splitting the 9th Ward in two, came to haunt the neighborhood, said Tulane University history professor Andy Horowitz.

Horowitz pointed to the more robust though still uneven rebound across the border in largely white St. Bernard Parish, which suffered no less devastation in Katrina, overwhelmed by water.

At the parish border, “flood vulnerability doesn’t change, but vulnerability to punitive social policies does,” said Horowitz, author of the recently published book, “Katrina: A History, 1915-2015.”

“If you have two people waiting two or three years for their Road Home grant, and one person has the money in the bank to start rebuilding, that’s the ballgame, folks.”

Such policies nurtured what had long been a defining trait of the Lower 9th Ward: A strong sense of otherness, the bond forged by neglect from a city that moated it off. Hurricane Betsy in 1965 flooded 6,000 homes there, said Horowitz — at least 1,000 more homes than Katrina.

“Basic amenities, civic services, muddy roads and streetlights that never turned on. The big structural problems, not just traffic,” Horowitz said of the neighborhood’s formative years. “There was a long list of things they justifiably complained about for generations.”

Horowitz also described “the extraordinary sense of possibility that circulated among people that were usually the first in their families that were ever to own their own home in America.”

Moving on

The push to meet citywide demand for affordable rental housing isn’t only occurring on NORA’s land in the Lower 9th Ward.

The neglected apartment house on North Derbigny Street where Montgomery slept on a cot, for instance, has won conditional city approval to house seniors, the disabled and disabled veterans in 15 units, said Victoria Lewandrowski, Nguyen’s economic development liaison.

The application was waiting on approval by the Housing Authority of New Orleans for “project-based” housing vouchers. Rob Marks, who owns Reed Real Estate, the building’s listed owner, said he took over the property three years ago.

“It’s an investment for me, but I’m not looking to hurt the community so I can make some money,” he said, adding that the project depended on HANO’s commitment of the vouchers, 20 years of steady funding he could take to the bank.

Marks appeared at the property recently with an associate to board up the front entrance and broken-out windows, at the request of Nguyen’s office. He said the building was renovated right before Katrina. Vandals had since ripped out the metal stairwell and balcony railings.

As Marks sized plywood, Montgomery rolled through the courtyard to the front. He praised Marks for his investment, then pondered his own options. He’d spent weeks in the husk of a rear apartment, but his days there appeared to be numbered.

“They need to put me in a location somewhere. I’d rather be alone. It works out better for me,” Montgomery said of his preference for permanent housing, and his need for help.

He said he’d been evicted from his last apartment in New Orleans East over a housing violation involving a weapon, but that he’d cleared it up and had a new Section 8 voucher approved. The pandemic had stalled his efforts to claim it, he said.

“Gotta find another location,” he said, pushing off toward Tupelo Street with a cup for change and a cell phone on his lap. “Too many bees around.”

April 27, 2020April 27, 2020 B37AcV Flooding

Report on Misuse of Funds by the Sewerage & Water Board

A month ago, the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General released its audit of S&WB spending and tracking of all the FEMA dollars it has received for damages from hurricanes Katrina, Gustav, and Isaac. The audit was begun in the wake of the August 5, 2017 flooding. The findings were devastating, and confirmed much of what New Orleanians have suspected for years: S&WB has no idea how to manage the hundreds of millions of dollars that have come its way, and will likely have to return a very large chunk of it.

OIG-20-21-Mar20

August 31, 2019 B37AcV Environmental Justice, Flooding, Healthy Homes

Victory on Stopping Formaldehyde Poisoning in FEMA Trailers

A Community Voice has been working with Earthjustice to change the formaldehyde regulations in light of the poisoning that occurred from the FEMA trailers placed in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

EPA agreed to make the compliance deadline for the formaldehyde regulations June 1, 2018. They have now issued its first enforcement action for violations of the formaldehyde regulations. EPA entered a settlement agreement with Global Sourcing Solutions to resolve the violations. Under the settlement agreement, Global Sourcing Solutions must take corrective actions to come into compliance and pay a penalty of $544,064. Please find below EPA’s press release on the enforcement action.

Thank you Earthjustice!

EPA Addresses Violations of Requirements for Formaldehyde Emissions for Imported Composite Wood Products

WASHINGTON (August 26, 2019) —Last week the Environmental Appeals Board approved a settlement resolving violations of the Formaldehyde Standards for Composite Wood Products Act of 2010 and its implementing Formaldehyde Rule (effective June 1, 2018). This is the first enforcement action taken by the agency for violations of the Formaldehyde regulations.

Formaldehyde is a colorless, flammable gas at room temperature and has a strong odor. The chemical is found in resins used in the manufacture of composite wood products (i.e., hardwood plywood, particleboard and medium-density fiberboard), among others. Exposure to formaldehyde may cause adverse health effects including irritation of the skin, eyes, nose, and throat and at high exposure levels may cause some types of cancers. The Formaldehyde Rule sets limits on how much formaldehyde can be released from composite wood products and establishes a program in which independent certifying organizations will verify that composite wood panel producers comply with the limits on formaldehyde releases.

The settlement with Global Sourcing Solutions, A Division of Turner Logistics, LLC (GSS) of Montvale, New Jersey, resolves violations associated with the importation of noncompliant composite wood products. Under the Consent Agreement, GSS agreed to take corrective actions to come into compliance and will pay a penalty of $544,064. The settlement reflects the company’s cooperation with EPA, its immediate efforts to come into compliance, and its implementation of the corrective action plan. As part of the settlement GSS, although not admitting liability, has modified its practices in construction projects across the country to assure future compliance with the Formaldehyde Rule requirements.

To read the Consent Agreement:https://yosemite.epa.gov/oa/EAB_Web_Docket.nsf/RecentAdditionsv2/35EF5959F6E2771685258457006C2202/$File/Final%20Order%20and%20Attachments.pdf

June 25, 2019 B37AcV Flooding

A Community Voice Joins the United Flooded States of America Campaign

SUBJECT: Record Floods Prompt Nationwide Campaign

Local communities exhausted by consistent flooding with little relief

Alliance of flood survivors launch United Flooded States of America

“We’re hurting, and need action to stop floodplain development and climate change” – Alliance Director Harriet Festing

More than 30 local and regional leaders across 16 states are joining together to start a national campaign to combat flooding. The United Flooded States of America, an initiative of Higher Ground, represent hundreds of thousands of people in cities, suburbs, towns and villages from across the U.S., who have been harmed by irresponsible building and climate change. They want action now to stop development in wetlands and floodplains, reform flood insurance laws, and reduce human-caused greenhouse gases that cause global warming. Their flag shows 50 stars, representing the 50 states, above a scene of flooded streets.

Starting July 1st, community leaders and flood survivors will bombard local, state and national politicians with videos, photographs, emails and postcards, documenting flooding that plagues many communities and often goes unaddressed. No one is safe from flooding, and these flood survivors are examples of that. They come from all walks of life and many have dramatic stories to tell.

The campaign was initiated by Harriet Festing, who leads Higher Ground, the largest flood survivor network in the country. “I’ve been working with some of these community leaders for almost two years, helping them find the resources they need to rebuild. But every time we meet, the subject returns to how to stop future flooding, not just recover from past disasters. After this year’s record-breaking flooding in the Midwest, we agreed that the time to speak up is now.” Pensacola, Florida leader Gloria Horning puts it this way: “These politicians must be part deaf not to hear what’s going on. So, we are going to shout out loud as we can: No building in floodplains and wetlands. Stop global warming now.”

Another leader in Port Arthur, Texas, Hilton Kelly, has seen all he needs to of flooding and contaminated streets, homes and waterways. “In our town, the oil and gas companies get what they need from our federal government and we get dirty and wet. We won’t take it anymore. They need to clean the place up, fix our homes, or pay us to move someplace safe and clean. When will our legislators get the message? This campaign is all about making sure they do.”

Higher Ground and Anthropocene Alliance are funded by a generous grant from the Kresge Foundation. Additional funding for Higher Ground has been provided by the U.S. Climate Action Network, and the Climigration Network, which recently named Harriet Festing an “Agenda Setter.”

Contact:  Dr. Stephen F. Eisenman
Co-Founder, Anthropocene Alliance, and Director of Art and Policy
s-eisenman@northwestern.edu 626-394-3311

Harriet Festing
Co-Founder, Anthropocene Alliance and Executive Director
www.anthropocenealliance.org harriet@anthropocenealliance.org

Press release – UFSA 06.20.2019

April 17, 2019April 18, 2019 B37AcV Blight, Flooding

ACV wins! 1st time ever the Mayor’s Office sends Four Representatives to Upper 9th Ward Meeting who Respond to our Demands for Change

April 17th, 2019

ACV Members in the Upper 9th Ward Take Action on Streets, Drainage, Flooding & Blight to Bioswales

ACV members in the Upper 9th Ward met with the Mayor’s Office on the corner of Law & Piety streets to show them their struggles with blight and flooding due to torn up street and drainage systems.

Despite numerous calls from residents like 74-year old Gloria Williams, an A Community Voice member who lives in the 3200 block of Law street in a beautiful home and perfectly manicured yard, City Officials are nonresponsive to pleas for help to deal with blight, flooding, unpaved streets and potholes.

“I worked hard to come back from hurricane Katrina,” says ACV member Gloria Williams, “I spent all this money to rebuild and the City doesn’t care about how we are in a jungle with no paved streets and no drainage.”

Mrs. Williams cuts the abandoned lot next door to her home and struggles every day with dump trucks, school buses and city buses speeding down her dusty unpaved, potholed-riddled streets. Chronic flooding occurs due to lack of drainage and buses driving on the sidewalks to avoid huge potholes. The street is littered with abandoned homes. Children have to wait for the school bus next to an opened and un-boarded abandoned house. Residents have respiratory problems due to the white dust from speeding buses on the unpaved streets in front of their homes.

Residents can hardly make it to Pastor Johnny Arvie’s Law Street Missionary Baptist Church on a Sunday morning because of all the potholes and bad drainage leading up to his church at 3132 Law Street. Possums and all types of wild animals come out of the 3300 block of Law Street due to the jungle of overgrown blight. These lots would be prefect for A Community Voice’s Blight to Bioswales Campaign to install raingardens/Bioswales on abandoned lots to reduce flooding and chronic blight.

A Community Voice asked that the Mayor address the residents’ concerns and fix their street, install working drainage systems, cut the vacant lots and allow the installation of Bioswales to reduce flooding in the street, as well as stop the speeding buses and dump trucks from damaging their homes.

ACV next steps on the Blight to Bioswales campaign is to meet with the Mayor and City Attorney about access to blighted lots for the installation of Bioswales/raingardens and to follow on the residents’ concerns from today’s meeting. To report blighted lots in your neighborhood, call us at 504-941-2852.

February 13, 2019February 13, 2019 B37AcV Flooding, Industrial Canal Expansion

Comments on Plans to Replace the Lock at IHNCA from A Community Voice

A Community Voice (ACV) is a membership non-profit community organization, based in New Orleans, LA. Most members are low to moderate income working and moderate income African-Americans, and many are senior citizens, nearly all are native New Orleanians. Thousands of family members of ACV reside within the ninth ward of New Orleans.

A Community Voice is opposed to the nature of this process which is not transparent and has not been made public under any decent set of factors used for outreach and notice of the public.

A Community Voice is against any expansion or movement of a lock within the Industrial Canal (IHCNA) for the following reasons, and therefore any treatment of historic properties includes:

1. The residents of many parishes were affected adversely by the flooding after Hurricane Katrina, due to the unsafe levees under the aegis of the Army Corps of Engineers. Most community residents have not been fully compensated for their property losses from those levee failures, and can never be emotionally compensated for the lives lost, property damaged and completely altered historic communities of New Orleans east, lower 9th ward and the upper 9th ward of New Orleans, especially in Orleans Parish. The Army Corps of Engineers has an unnatural civil immunity for the failure of the levees or even its current responsibilities there, and has never apologized to the community nor affirmed in anyway that it harmed so many people, disrupted so many lives and forever changed these communities. When held liable in court, for the flooding due to MRGO, the people were still never compensated. The historic communities in Orleans, St. Bernard, Plaquemines and other parishes affected have been irreparably harmed, property damaged, culture lost, and in many cases, lives shattered. This irreparable harm and lack of immunity presages one solid reason to prevent any further losses to historic communities by allowing the expansion of, replacement and movement of the lock and any other project that can possibly under any scenario, under any name or project of the IHCNA cause further harm to these historic communities and properties. In fact, the IHCNA needs to be removed from the Orleans Parish communities. It is inappropriate to have a mostly unregulated large industrial site with hazardous materials flowing back and forth in the middle of densely residential communities.

2. Important historic properties in Orleans, St. Bernard and Plaquemine Parishes cannot be replaced if they are destroyed. Preservation planning provides for conservative use of these properties, preserving them in place and avoiding harm when possible and altering or destroying properties only when necessary. Every effort to protect these irreplaceable structures and communities should be taken by our government, and never put at risk by dangerous projects like moving the lock within the IHCNA.

3. The IHCNA should be permanently moved to lower St. Bernard Parish with the permission and guidance of its citizens, for many reasons.

Conditions in St. Bernard Parish have shifted dramatically since Hurricane Katrina and the parish has considerable reasons for promoting the canal there. It would make it safer for St. Bernard residents who have a greater chance of flooding if the canal is expanded in Orleans Parish. Further, their citizens could gain greater access to work and other functions in Orleans, Jefferson and other parishes, simply through reduction of naval traffic on the canal, as the bridges would remain down. They need the $50 million in mitigation funds to shore up their levees and protect their parishes.

4. ACV has requested help directly and through other elected officials from the Army Corps of Engineers for help in determining the cause of explosions along the Industrial Canal. These nighttime mysterious explosions have continued for three years, and yet, even though they have damaged homes along the canal and likely have damaged the canal, there has been no solution found to stopping them. This is further evidence that the Corps has no interest in historic preservation or even its own responsibilities along the Industrial Canal.

5. ACV supports the federal process for dealing with ramifications to historic areas, communities and properties as outlined here, and these are the procedures that should be followed in this instance, as well. The notice of the official comment period for this project was buried with a link in a notice to certain groups and not made public, as one of the vital planks of transparency and public notice. This process should be amended and follow these guidelines: Preservation planning includes public participation. The planning process should provide a forum for open discussion of preservation issues. Public involvement is most meaningful when it is used to assist in defining values of properties and preservation planning issues, rather than when it is limited to review of decisions already made. Early and continuing public participation is essential to the broad acceptance of preservation planning decisions.

Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Preservation Planning (https://www.nps.gov/history/local-law/arch_standards.htm.

Submit your comments against the Lock at IHNCA to mvnenvironmental@usace.army.mil

December 12, 2018December 12, 2018 B37AcV Blight, Flooding, New Orleans, Water Issues

From Blight to Bioswales

December 12th, 2018

Action on Bartholmew Street in the Upper 9th Ward neighborhood of New Orleans to address blight.

We are demanding a long-term solution to prevent blight in our city on overgrown lots and to prevent flooding through the use of raingardens or bioswales.

ACV is working with LSU to create bioswales to prevent flooding and reduce blight. These bioswales provide a way for the lots to be maintained and kept safe, as we wait for more families to return and build in the community. At the same time, they provide the benefit of reducing street flooding that comes with climate change and failing pumps.