The 22 one- and two- bedroom houses are the last of the now-notorious  “Katrina Cottages” that, almost seven years ago, were conceived as salvation for New Orleanians displaced by hurricanes Katrina and Rita and desperate to come home.

All told, the state built 461 of them. The last-gasp New Orleans batch of these units were shoved across the finish line in a flurry of hasty repairs and added spending, as the developer rushed to beat an April 30 federal deadline.

Though modest in size – the largest is 1,112  square feet – each Katrina Cottage cost taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars more than was budgeted for their development.

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They’re being sold by the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority for between $72,000 and $122,000, but they’re not called Katrina Cottages any more. The new name, purged of unhappy memories, is “New Orleans Cottages,” and they’re meant to be permanent, not temporary shelters. They’re available through a soft-second-mortgage program meant to help hurricane victims and low-income New Orleanians find their way home, affordably.

According to officials with the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, a dozen of the homes now listed for sale in their colorful brochure have met the city’s compliance requirements with “all specifications, assurances, and programmatic requirements.”

Prospective customers can choose among three main models: The KC1080 (The Prieur), the KC874 (The Derbigny), and the KC1112 (The Miro). All were built by Louisiana System Built Homes to weather-resistant (if not hurricane-resistant) specs. Concrete pavers lead to front stoops, and the units sport bright paint jobs. Lawn signs warn that the homes are protected by security systems.

Two of the 22 Katrina Cottages offered by the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority are in the 7th Ward and the rest are in the Lower 9th, in the blocks between Caffin Avenue and the Industrial Canal that were the epicenter of Katrina’s devastation. It’s a part of town with a receptiveness to innovative housing ideas and plenty of vacant lots to build on. And yet many of the cottages have been dropped next door to blighted properties that are likely to impair their marketability.

Nonetheless at least five of the homes were under contract as of this week.

View Katrina Cottages in a larger map

Proceeds from the houses are turned back to the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, said Christina Stephens, spokeswoman for the state Office of Community Development, under whose aegis the FEMA grant is administered and monitored. “In accordance with their contract with the state, NORA retains all funding to maintain units,” said Stephens, “with remaining funds to be used for affordable homeownership initiatives.”

The five-state Katrina Cottage program was intended to provide quick-to-produce emergency housing that would be a more “dignified” alternative to the once-ubiquitous and much-maligned FEMA trailers. Other states deftly implemented their pieces of the program. Mississippi, for example, could boast of having built at least 500 cottages by mid-2009, though some would prove less sturdy than initially claimed. During the same interval, Louisiana – its program foundering in a sea of politics, liens, bankruptcy, mismanagement and cost overruns – had built exactly none.

Stephens pointed to the overall success of a program that eventually built 461 units around the state at an average of $130,000 per unit. “These quality new homes are certainly in line or less expensive than other affordable housing” constructed with disaster recovery funds, she said.

She added that, though the state is satisfied with the overall administration of the program, it will issue a report in June offering “lessons learned.”

There could be quite a few of them.

Politics at play

Louisiana’s Katrina Cottage program is the story of a development rooted in cronyism and questionable judgment by both the Blanco and Jindal administrations. Gov. Kathleen Blanco threw the initial $75 million FEMA contract to an upstart company with zero experience in the real estate field but strong ties to a powerful Democratic tycoon. Upon taking office in 2008 Gov. Bobby Jindal rushed to reform the program but then added months of delay when he demanded contracts be canceled and program administration shifted to the Louisiana Recovery Authority.

Adding to the mess, the program got bogged down to a cost-spiking crawl as the site selection process in New Orleans dragged on. Cottages were designated for lots too small to accommodate them or that had not undergone an environmental review. At least one cottage was moved five times before reaching a final resting place, records show. Some lots were burdened with liens that had to be paid off. Others had persistent pools of standing water and required drainage.

Of the 20 cottages that wound up in the Lower 9th Ward, 18 were modular units built off-site. As a result of the multiple layers of delay, every one of them had to be completely gutted and rebuilt – obviating the efficiencies of off-site, assembly line-style construction.  Floors, subfloors, walls and doors had to be torn out and replaced at the last minute.

“It is important to remember,” Stephens said, “that any modular units that have to be transported need some restoration.”

Stephens said that the state, FEMA, and New Orleans all knew that the units would require extensive repairs once they got to New Orleans, but that “protective measures like indoor warehouse storage of the units would have cost more than the methods we used on the units, which were wrapping the roofs and restoring them” on-site in New Orleans.

The price of delay was steep: Homes budgeted at  $110,000 came in $40,000 above that figure. Add to that the cost of hauling some of the more nomadic cottages from lot to lot – in one case, records indicate that a unit went from St. Martinville to New Iberia to two different locations in the Louisiana National Guard’s Jackson Barracks before winding up in the 9th Ward.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent repairing the units that had become uninhabitable.

“One was sitting around for so long, when we opened it up, it looked like it had gone through a hurricane,” said a source who had ongoing access to the building sites this winter.

“They are pre-fab houses but almost everything in them had to be demo’d and replaced,” he said. “In every house, every floor had to be torn out.”

Records obtained by The Lens show that in the final spasm of spending, nearly $1 million in cost overruns were amassed in a scramble to meet the April 30 deadline set by an exasperated FEMA.

Among cost increments:

• Late-stage repairs to the 18 modular homes: $367,795.
• “Acceleration” costs, as the deadline approached: $194,700.

“Every unit we’ve put in service,” Stephens said, “has had to meet the approval of FEMA, the state, and the receiving entity – in this case, NORA. There should be more concern if little or no additional funds were expended to place these units and ready them in final sale.”

But other contractual add-ons had already goosed the budget for these units by nearly $500,000 before the damaged cottages even got to New Orleans. These included storage fees and the controversial payment of liens against a bankrupt St. Martinville subcontractor who feared the units under construction would be seized by his creditors. Approved by the Jindal team’s new program managers, that bailout alone cost taxpayers another $121,000.

Bottom line: The 22-home project for New Orleans, originally budgeted at $2,334,356, came in at $3,303,592 – a 42 percent overrun of $969,236.

A response to disaster

With the New Orleans disaster prominently in mind, Congress created the Alternative Housing Pilot Program in the summer of 2006. Co-sponsored by U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., the $400 million program was a search for alternatives to the FEMA trailers that had proved to be a less-than-ideal solution to the housing crisis that followed the 2005 hurricanes.

The trailers – condemned for use in areas subject to hurricanes — were later deemed to be health hazards because of formaldehyde fumes and other problems.

The search for a sturdier, more hospitable alternative led to a burst of ideas from proponents of “new urbanism,” a movement among planners and architects that seeks to incorporate pedestrian-friendly, small-town design concepts – including an abundance of owner-occupied, single-family housing – in an urban setting. Other names had been proposed for the units before “Katrina Cottages,” prevailed – among them  “Carpet Cottages,” “Courtyard Cottages,” and “Katrina Kernel Cottages.”

In December 2006, FEMA awarded $74.5 million to Louisiana, to build about 500 of them, and in due course Katrina Cottages wound up in four locations around the state: Lake Charles, Baton Rouge, the Jackson Barracks National Guard facility in New Orleans, and finally regular New Orleans streets. The remaining federal money was divided among Texas, Florida, Mississippi and Alabama.

The original grant said construction and siting of the Louisiana cottages was to be completed by the end of 2009.

Within a day of the program’s announcement, in October 2006, a company known as  Cypress Realty Partners secured incorporation papers in Louisiana and, despite its lack of a track record, was chosen by the state from among 45 companies seeking to be the sole developer of Katrina Cottages in Louisiana.

Cypress was founded by four college friends, according to profile of them in the University of Virginia’s alumni magazine: Jonathon Cave, William Smith Jr., Kristopher Kirkpatrick and Benjamin Dupuy, all of whom graduated from UVA in the 1990s.

Cave is a co-founder of The Cypress Group, a Washington, D.C.-based corporation that “provides institutional investment and corporate managers with actionable intelligence and analysis of political processes with outcome-specific probability and immediate market relevance,” according to marketing materials.

Before the Katrina Cottages came along, the Cypress Group had no experience in real estate development.

Dupuy was a Washington lobbyist at the time Cypress Realty Partners was incorporated.

Kirkpatrick, a scion of one-time state Rep. Claude Kirkpatrick of Baton Rouge, in June 2007 formed a second entity, Katrina Cottage Partners, LLC, to claim a piece of the action under the federal program Cypress Realty Partners was managing. Louisiana System Built Homes, operating out of the abandoned Fruit of the Loom site in St. Martinville, was to do the actual fabricating of the modular units.

Cypress Realty also enlisted the services of Cusato Cottages, LLC, and the architecture firm of Duany Playter-Zyberk & Co.

A new-urbanist architect and planner prominent in recovery planning after the 2005 hurricanes, Andres Duany is credited with developing the original Katrina Cottage concept, which he rolled out at a post-Katrina conference on emergency housing held in Mississippi in October 2005.

In marketing materials describing the Louisiana project, cottage developer Marianne Cusato said, “The premise of the Katrina Cottage is to create a house that is safe, affordable and can be built quickly – yet at the same time looks nice.”

Cusato said that the cottages, “originally designed as a dignified alternative to the FEMA trailer,” had “evolved into a nationwide sensation that is finding popularity as affordable housing, guesthouses, resorts and camps.”

Problems getting a clean budget 

Throughout 2007, Cypress Realty Partners offered several budgets to FEMA and the Louisiana Housing Finance Authority, but according to a 2009 state legislative audit, the company was unable to establish a “legally acceptable budget without duplicative fees and excessive profits.” The audit also had trouble “determining the legal status of Cypress Realty Partners.”

Cypress Realty Partners LLC was not subject to state bidding requirements because the company was engaged as a consultant rather than as a construction company. (State agencies seeking professional services are not required to choose the lowest bidder.) Further exemption from bidding lay in Cypress having been deemed a “sole source” cotractor by the state Division of Administration, according to the 2009 legislative audit of the program. Sole-source contracts allow companies to skirt public bid requirements if they are, for example, the only such company that can perform the needed service, or if a contract is signed under emergency circumstances.

But with Cypress unable to produce a budget acceptable to FEMA, the Louisiana Housing Finance Authority hired Luster National Inc. to assist with budgeting and contract negotiations.

Luster, a consulting firm that specialized in managing capital improvement projects, proposed a budget that expanded the role of the Louisiana Housing Finance Authority, the state agency that handles affordable housing. The authority was to pick the sites and oversee the purchase of any real estate, order construction materials and streamline implementation of the federal grant by cutting out layers of subcontractors that Cypress, as a consultant, otherwise would have had to hire.

Under the Luster proposal, Cypress retained a management role, and would collect a 6 percent fee for managing the $75 million in federal money.

The Luster takeover looked like a step toward lower costs:

One Cypress proposal would have built 440 units at about $170,000, which was a step down from the initial $192,000-per-unit bid floated by the upstart firm. Luster expanded the order to 700 cottages (250 of which were never built), but whittled the per-unit cost to $105,000.

After months of negotiations, Cypress’ budget was approved on Aug. 22, 2007. Its management fee was raised to 10 percent — or about $7 million — and the average cost to develop each unit rose to $110,000.

Soon after the budget was approved, FEMA released $74.5 million to the state, and by the end of September 2007, the Louisiana Housing Finance Authority finalized the Development Services Agreement with Cypress.

Four years later, development costs had risen yet again to an average of $140,000.

In a late-October 2007 letter to then-Governor Kathleen Blanco, Louisiana Housing Finance Agency director Milton Bailey wrote that “barring any further delays…it is reasonable to expect that the first ground-breaking could occur within 60 to 90 days.”

Within a month, Bailey had hired Grace & Hebert, a Baton Rouge architecture firm, to orchestrate the efforts of Cypress Realty, project subcontractors and federal and state auditors. Bailey identified the Jackson Barracks site as having the highest potential for fast-track completion of the program’s first cottages, but another two years would pass before the base’s 91 units were housing military personnel.

As she dropped plans to seek a second term and yielded the governorship to Bobby Jindal, Blanco had blamed Bailey for the sluggish pace of the state’s Katrina Cottage program.

“Louisiana received its grant award from FEMA on Dec. 22, 2006,” she wrote in November 2007. “Here were are, eleven months later and not a single cottage has been constructed.”

By that time, at least 570 cottages had been built and occupied in Mississippi.

Blanco accused Bailey of “strangling this project in red tape,” owing to concerns it had raised about the selection of Cypress on a no-bid basis.

Bailey retaliated by accusing Blanco of playing politics with the program. One problem with the Cypress proposal was having hired the Shaw Group, one of the state’s largest construction companies, as a subcontractor to provide “mobilization/design services.”  The Shaw Group’s founder, Jim Bernhard, is the former chair of the Louisiana Democratic Party and had been a staunch supporter of Blanco.

In 2005 the relationship was in the news after Bernhard flew Raymond “Coach” Blanco, husband of the then-governor, to Orlando in the Shaw corporate jet for a Louisiana State University football game. Blanco was traveling with Japanese industrialists looking to build a factory in Louisiana and eventually reimbursed Shaw for the flight.

According to documents reviewed by The Lens, Shaw Environmental earned $377,777 from the the Katrina Cottage program.

Citing the cronyism, Baton Rouge attorney Wayne Woods defended Bailey and the board of the Louisiana Housing Finance Agency by blaming Blanco and Cypress for the delays. Woods reminded Blanco that “Cypress was a newly formed company, created for this project. It had little or no development history, and its principals were reluctant to provide and/or dilatory in providing … information to LHFA.”

Woods charged that after six months spent developing a budget, the first one  Cypress submitted  contained “excessive fees and expenses, including layers of management, which served not to build as many cottages as possible, but to maximize profits instead.”

Cypress had “stonewalled efforts by both FEMA and LHFA to negotiate a legally acceptable budget and used local and national political clout in an attempt to strong-arm the LHFA,” Woods wrote. “Having no construction experience itself, Cypress awarded the construction part of this contract to Shaw Construction, a company not noted for expertise in residential land development or home construction.”

When the Louisiana Housing Finance Authority trying to rein in the cost of the cottage program, Woods noted the Shaw contract had been “emailed to board members on Friday evening, Oct. 26, 2007, with Cypress insisting that the Agency approve it by Monday morning, Oct.  29, 2007.”

The agency “will not administer this project to advance a political agenda or reward politically connected companies or individuals,” Woods declared.

Reshuffling the deck

Bobby Jindal took office as governor of Louisiana on Jan. 14, 2008, and in February he transferred authority over the Katrina Cottage program to the Louisiana Recovery Authority. According to documents from the time, all Katrina Cottage-related contracts from the Louisiana Housing Finance Authority were canceled by March 28, 2008.

The transfer of authority did not accelerate the program, however.

The Louisiana Recovery Authority spent seven months renegotiating the “developer services” contract with Cypress. Shaw Construction had been sliced out of the new agreement, but the terms were otherwise little changed from the contract that had been negotiated by the Louisiana Housing Finance Authority a year earlier. “In the second contract, Shaw opted not to participate,” Stephens said.

To replace the Shaw Group, Cypress hired Apex Solutions, a Baton Rouge company owned by realtor Donnie Jarreau.

Jarreau did not respond to several attempts to solicit comment from him for this story. A spokeswoman for the Cypress Group referred all inquiries about its performance and that of its subcontractors to “the state.”

Under the terms set out by FEMA, Cypress would have until September 2009 to build and site Louisiana’s Katrina Cottages, a deadline soon extended to January 2010.

In March 2009, state legislative auditor Steve Theriot warned that time was running out. If the state didn’t complete its cottage program by Dec. 31, 2009, it stood to lose its $75 million federal grant.

By the end of 2009, about 120 units had been completed at St. Martinville, and an additional 230 were under construction. Units had been moved to lots in St Charles, Baton Rouge, and Jackson Barracks, but none had arrived for use by the general public anywhere in the New Orleans. A further snag lay just ahead.

In May 2010, the founder of Louisiana System Built Homes,  Aubre Shoemake, filed a petition for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. He would later claim that delays in Katrina Cottage payments from the state stood to force him into Chapter 7 bankruptcy proceedings.

Records show that to bail out Shoemake, Apex Solutions paid $83,553 to Farmers & Merchants Bank to avoid possible asset seizures of Katrina Cottages at the St. Martinville plant. Apex also paid $109,000 to Premier Staffing, money owed Premier for provided construction crews for the St. Martinville plant.

The add-on payments led to further months of delay, as Apex fought with federal and state auditors over whether these were acceptable “change order” charges. In the end, Apex recovered the money from taxpayers.

As it worked to avoid asset seizures at the St. Martinville house-building plant, Apex relocated completed modular Katrina Cottages to an outdoor staging area in nearby New Iberia. And there they would sit, for almost two years.

New Orleans finally gets its share 

“It’s been awhile since I have been in contact,” wrote the Cypress Group’s Erik Spansel to the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, in an email dated Oct. 8, 2010, “but it looks like we are finally getting started with the construction of homes under the Alternative Housing Pilot Program.”

That was a full year after construction on Katrina Cottages in Louisiana was supposed to have been completed.

By then, city officials had identified lots for its share of Katrina Cottages, but Spansel’s letter was the first indication that even more delays were in the offing as Cypress struggled to complete its contractual obligations.

The city wasn’t ready to receive the units, in any case. The New Orleans Redevelopment Authority’s Alice Martin reminded Spansel the next day, “we are still in the permitting phase and have not started construction.”

The city agency had worked with the state to find lots for the houses, but once again the program was bedeviled by snags. Email exchanges between city officials and the various players – the state, FEMA, and the Cypress Group – reveal some of the problems: Some of the lots under consideration had liens that needed to be settled or dropped. Others were reportedly too small for the Katrina Cottages constructed in St. Martinville. Further delays resulted from confusion between Cypress and the city over which map of parcels Cypress should be working from as it sought to place the cottages.

“Certainly we encountered a number of hurdles associated with building permanent construction,” said Stephens, “including federal environmental clearances, historic reviews and complicated local partnerships that sometimes caused project delays.”

Officials with the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority said in an email to The Lens that the sites were selected “based on clustering development around areas of strength, through existing assets like schools or through [the] strength of the surrounding neighborhood and active redevelopment.”

By the end of 2011, the modular units that would eventually make their way to the Lower 9th Ward were still languishing in New Iberia.

At last, in early January, the units started arriving on the Lower 9th Ward lots, triggering the frantic effort to remediate damage incurred during the years they sat unused.

According to documents provided by the state and city, Apex Solutions workers on the site had to remove all the floors, scrape the floor insulation, and install new floor pads and floorings in every house. They had to dehumidify the homes and complete a “mold/mildew treatment.” All the sheetrock and wall insulation had to be removed and replaced; all the interior doors had to be removed and replaced. Interiors and exteriors were re-painted.

The remediation work was completed on all the units by the first week of February, and the next two months were spent sorting out the remaining details that go along with new home construction, all of which had to be rushed in order to make the April 30 FEMA deadline. In the end, “the repaired cottages are the same quality as all of the other cottages,” insisted Stephens, adding that there was “no latitude” in replacing anything in the damaged units with materials that weren’t approved by FEMA.

The city vouches for the quality of the cottages it is offering to Katrina and Rita victims: “We wouldn’t be selling them if we weren’t confident about the structural integrity of the units,” said New Orleans Redevelopment Authority spokeswoman Jasmine Haralson.

Officials at the redevelopment authority declined to comment on the nearly $1 million in overruns incurred in the struggle to bring the cottages to market.

“No, thank you,” they wrote to a reporter. “This question would be better directed at the state.”

Earl Myers, who ran Myers & Sons and Excel Development contracting services, stands accused of collecting more money than he earned from a city agency — the New Orleans Affordable Homeownership Program — for post-Katrina remediation work, and then returning some of the money to the city official who doled out the work, according to government court filings.

City officials used bright signs to tout remediation work by the New Orleans Affordable Homeownership program. Photo by Karen Gadbois

Myers is “cooperating with the government somewhat, and that is the most I can tell you,” his attorney, Richard Moore, said this morning. “He is a nice guy and I hope he catches a break.”

Myers initially pleaded not guilty to theft of federal funds because the program was financed through money from the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department. Court documents show, and Letten’s office confirmed, that a hearing to allow him to change his plea to guilty is scheduled for April 26 before U.S. District Court Judge Nannette Jolivette Brown.

“I think he is not the only one cooperating,” Moore added.

Contractor Trellis Smith, who ran Parish-Dubuclet Services, also faces charges in the same manner as Myers. Three others were also charged in the scheme.

Myers and Smith were charged in March  by federal prosecutors through bills of information, rather than a grand-jury indictment, generally a sign that the accused is cooperating with the government.

The charging document for Myers said he took part in the scheme because he feared losing the city work if he didn’t conspire with “City Official A,” whom the documents say was the executive director of the program.

Stacey Jackson held that position during the time in question; Jackson has not been charged.

Myers is accused of accepting checks from NOAH for more work than he performed, then funneling some of the overage back to City Official A and keeping some of the extra money. Myers’ companies earned more than $500,000 from the program, and he kicked back more than $7,000, court documents allege.

The court filing also says Myers renovated property owned by City Official A and was paid for the work with city money.

Three others accused in the scheme, Shantrice Dial, Jamon Dial and Richard Hall, are set to go to trial May 29. Trellis Smith’s trial is set for June 4.

Karen Gadbois, a founder of The Lens, worked with investigative reporter Lee Zurik, now with our reporting partners at FOX8, to uncover the story in the aftermath of Katrina. Their 50-part series exposing the scandal won some of journalism’s highest honors, including a Peabody Award, a duPont Award and a Gold Medal from Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Though many thought the program was shut down years ago, NOAH continued to quietly operate until recently.

It’s a 19^th century house significant enough to have attracted a state Historic Building Recovery Grant of $45,000. And that was on top of $135,000 in Road Home money, plus another $20,000 grant from the Arab emirate of Qatar.

Whether to dismantle the house or repair it, work continues at 2013 Dumaine St. in defiance of a legal notice. Work has continued recently.

But today, with only minimal work to show for all that money, the Greek revival house at 2013 Dumaine Street has been slapped with a city demolition order, and Treme neighbors wonder if ongoing removal of old brick, timbers and architectural detail might lead the structure to collapse even before the bulldozers show up. The dismantling continues in defiance of a stop-work order slapped on the property.

The chain of events leading to the likely demise of yet another architectural gem is a tangled tale of botched rehabilitation efforts and seemingly little follow-up on how government grants for recovery and preservation are spent.

As early as 1946, l’Hote Townhouse – to give the residence its proper name – was identified in a city inspection report as “out of plumb 2 feet,” meaning the structure was starting to tip over. And the need for further remediation was noted in 2000 when the house was designated a landmark.

Efforts to save it intensified in early 2003. Owner Rod Lindauer, a local artist, occupied a small portion of the upstairs with his wife as they set about rehabbing a house that was falling down around them.

Termites had invaded the side of the house built of wood, but a wall of solid brick was structurally sound, Lindauer recalls.

Overwhelmed by the scope of the work, in 2004 the Lindauers sold the place to New York real estate investor Coy LaSister for $55,000.

Katrina likely worsened the subsidence that was tipping the house, Lindauer said, but on his visits to the place after selling it, he saw no sign that repairs were under way.

Neighbor Will Germain got the same impression. Now and then LaSister would come by and hang potted plants but, so far as Germain could tell, the new owner never spent a night in the house. To Germain it looked like an open-and-shut case of “demolition by neglect.”

Messages seeking comment from LaSister were intercepted by a brother who said he is ill and in a nursing home.

The historic townhouse dates to the 1860s.

The definitive study of the area’s housing stock, “New Orleans Architecture: Fauborg Treme and the Bayou Road,” describes the circa 1860 residence as a two-story Greek revival townhouse with significant iron work, the “major decorative element” on an otherwise “extremely restrained” façade.

After Hurricane Katrina, LaSister applied for and received funding to stabilize and renovate the property.

The $45,000 Historic Building Recovery Grant was awarded in March 2007. Work began but records on file with the state are spotty and in some instances were submitted past deadline or seek reimbursement for ineligible expenses, such as scaffolding, according to documents obtained by The Lens through a public records request to the state.

According to the contract LaSister submitted to the state, the work was being done by TH Montano General Contractors LLC, with a “principal place of business” on St. Claude Avenue.

Louisiana’s Secretary of State website shows no listing for TH Montano General Contractors in New Orleans, though there is a TH Montano Construction in Baton Rouge.

Lisa Batiste Swilley owner of the Baton Rouge business denies doing work on the Dumaine Street property but acknowledged that she has done work in the past with Tracy Williams, who eventually bought out LaSister and is now the owner of the beleaguered mansion along with David Taffet, her business partner on several real estate projects.

The New Orleans property assessor’s website lists Taffet’s home outside Philadelphia as the mailing address for Dumaine 2013-2017 LLC. The Secretary of State’s website calls Williams the LLC’s manager.

According to a letter written by Coy LaSister’s brother, Knox LaSister, an extension for the historic preservation grant was requested and approved, pushing the completion deadline back to December 2008.

In the letter submitted to the state, Knox LaSister said the contractor was “overwhelmed by the scope of the work” and subsequently fired.

LaSister went on to explain to state officials that a new contractor had been identified as well as additional funds from The Road Home and the Qatar Foundation’s $20,000 grant, which was to redo the roof. LaSister then  requested a further deadline extension, to May 2009.

In February 2009 LaSister was awarded the Road Home grant of $135,000. But in April 2009, the state partially withdrew the historic preservation grant. LaSister was forced to return $11,150 but was permitted to retain $7,000 as reimbursement for some early site-prep work. The rest of the $45,000 had not been spent.

In May 2009 LaSister sold the property and, by covenant written into the title, the obligations to rebuild the house with the grants received passed to the new owner, 2013-17 Dumaine LLC.

Williams, who owns numerous properties in the area, says she believes an earlier permit for repairs, issued in July 2011, is all she needs to continue the work; the city disagrees. On March 22, inspectors declared the house in imminent danger of collapse and issued a demolition permit.

Four days later, the city issued a stop-work order.

According to neighbor Will Germain, workers have been on site in recent days hauling away the bricks, in defiance of the stop-work order.

Williams contends the brick is being removed only temporarily and will be returned to the site as part of the restoration she plans.

Christina Stephens, communications director with the state Office of Community Development, the agency overseeing Road Home grants, declined to speak about individual cases but made clear that an owner who buys a property that has been awarded rehabilitation grants is responsible for completing the work.

“The new owner who accepted the covenants would be bound by the same timeframe for rebuilding and re-occupancy,” she said.

In the case of this property the deadline was February 2012, Stephens said.

She added that LaSister’s eligibility for hurricane recovery grants hinged on his being the owner/occupant of the property when Katrina struck, not just someone who came around from time to time to hang potted plants, as neighbors allege.

“If we suspect that this was not the case and the program had been misled by the applicant, certainly we would investigate the situation for potential fraud,” Stephens said.

Germain assumes the 150-year-old house is doomed. As he watched a laborer hauling off a wheelbarrow of ancient brick recently, his only question was whether removal of structural materials will cause the building to collapse even before the city demolition order can be executed.

A fading assessor's office photograph shows the billboard has been bestride the now blighted shotgun at 2724 N. Claiborne Ave. for quite some time.

By Karen Gadbois, The Lens staff writer |

One of the great philosophical conundrums of our time played out before the Neighborhood Conservation Committee this week: when is a house a billboard (and vice versa.)

At issue was the city’s desire to demolish a blighted Ninth Ward shotgun alongside the old concrete bridge that carries Claiborne Avenue up over the railroad yard near Franklin Avenue.

What makes the house distinctive is the giant billboard not just near the house but squatting on top of it. Assessor’s records place the value of the house at $5,300 – about what a well-placed billboard throws off in rental income every few months, according to industry sources.

The city Office of Code Enforcement applied for the demolition and said it plans to use FEMA funds to knock the house down.

The committee, which oversees demolitions across a wide swath of the city, heard what amounted to a chicken-or-egg argument as they tried to figure out which came first – the billboard or the house – and who owned what.

One member of the committee suggested the house was there before the billboard, but another said the foundation for the billboard was actually inside the house. In any event, the large support poles for the billboard run right through the roof and these days probably play a structural role in the shotgun as well.

The committee spent some of the session trying to determine the actual owner of the property, named on the assessor’s website as Industrial Outdoor Display, a Metairie based firm owned by the estate of Edmond and Eunice Brignac.

The billboard company, CBS Outdoor, said they purchased “the asset” some time ago and that they maintain the billboard but not the house. While they were prepared to yield to the city’s yen to demolish the house as part of the Landrieu administration’s ongoing “war on blight,” they said they wanted to make sure the billboard stayed put.

That complicates things. Most blighted houses are mowed down with a few quick passes by a bulldozer or claw. Disentangling a house from a billboard’s uprights is more exacting work and anyway, partial demolitions – which is what this becomes if the billboard remains standing — are never allowed.

Several committee members questioned the legitimacy of  using FEMA funds to demolish a house that is obviously a commercial money-maker for the property owner. Upkeep is an owner’s burden, not the state’s.

The description on file with the assessor does not list the billboard as part of the house.

That’s consistent with Louisiana tax law, according to New Orleans assessor Erroll Williams. Billboards are listed on the business owner’s personal property self-reporting form, and their value can be kept confidential, Williams advised in an email to The Lens. “While we believe that structures like these are permanent improvements and should be treated as real estate, [Louisiana Tax Commission] guidelines do not allow us to do so,” Williams wrote.

However venerable a part of the neighborhood, the house with the billboard growing out of its roof got no sympathy from the preservation committee. They voted to demolish the house – while somehow saving the billboard.

City Council approval is needed for fences that block city traffic, a judge ruled Tuesday. Photo courtesy of Keith Hardie

By Jessica Williams, The Lens staff writer |

A drawn-out battle over the right to gate a public street reached a milestone Tuesday when a Civil Court judge ruled in favor of keeping Newcomb Boulevard open.

Residents of Newcomb Boulevard, a ritzy Uptown neighborhood parallel to even ritzier Audubon Place, in 2006 got the go-ahead from the city’s Department of Public Works to block the Freret Street end of the block that runs to St. Charles Avenue.

Two neighborhood associations – The Maple Area and Carrollton Riverbend groups – struck back. The City Council must approve any requests for street closures, they argued, not Public Works.

On Tuesday, Civil District Court Judge Michael Bagneris agreed.

The judge also ruled that the city violated state law in allowing a private neighborhood group to pay for fencing off a public street.

In coming to his determination, Bagneris cited a city-financed study that found traffic on Newcomb Boulevard not excessive. Newcomb residents had argued that Tulane University students brought a high-volume of traffic to the area. Then-public works director John Shires ignored the study when he gave residents the go-ahead, Bagneris said.

Bagneris’ ruling marks an initial victory for fence foes, but isn’t the end of the squabble, Keith Hardie, a neighborhood resident  who was the suit’s named plaintiff, said Wednesday. Newcomb Boulevard residents or the city could  appeal the case or petition the City Council to close the street, he said.

“We hope the council will recognize that public streets are for the public,” Hardie said. “A street is needed for public circulation in a congested university area.”

Thomas McEachin, the attorney for the Newcomb residents, said the defendants definitely plan to appeal the ruling. He said the suit was brought by “a few disgruntled neighbors” and that the fence went up to enhance public safety.

“In 2006, the Newcomb Boulevard Association precisely followed the application process, as explained by the City,” a statement from McEachin said. ” To be told, six years later, that the Association should have followed an entirely different procedure is very disappointing, and, we believe, legally incorrect.”

For now the fence still stands.

Lane Hughes stood his ground last June as city deferred decision on whether to demolish his rundown home. (photo: Karen Gadbois)

By Karen Gadbois, The Lens staff writer |

With its tangled title, backed-up taxes, and an ambience that hovers somewhere between junkyard and barnyard, it’s no showplace. But for Lane Hughes, the waterless wreck of a house has been all that stands between him and the streets or a shelter.

In proceedings last June on whether to take down the Mid-City “eyesore”, Neighborhood Conservation District Committee members had been a tad startled to realize that the man taking the microphone to oppose demolition of the “abandoned” structure was, in fact, its occupant.

There’s a philosophical question at the heart of the matter. In this particular skirmish, is the city’s war on blight at cross-purposes with efforts to combat homelessness?

This week, after months of temporizing and red tape, the city bureaucracy ground into gear and spat out what Hughes has long fought: a demolition order.

The property, in the 1900 block of St. Louis Street across from the Lafitte Greenway, has been Hughes’ home since he moved to New Orleans after Katrina to help out his family. His Uncle Pike, a housebound Vietnam vet had inherited the place from Hughes’ grandmother, Octavia – in whose name the property remains. Why? Because, when Uncle Pike died and Hughes became the sole occupant, the assessor required payment of $8,500 in fines and back taxes before he would rework the title. For Hughes, who scrapes by collecting soda cans for sale to a nearby scrap metal dealer, that sum was, to say the least, a stretch.

Hughes’ may be the only house in the area with chickens pecking in the dooryard and a magpie’s accumulation of junk scattered all over the place, but then this stretch of St. Louis Street is never confused with Audubon Place. Other properties have been put to light-industrial use – cinderblock warehouses; a delivery truck garage – as zoning allows.

Hughes, now in his mid-40s,  sees himself as an artist and the debris as yard art. His contention that friends of the Lafitte Greenway are his foes in the demolition fight have been denied.

He did not turn up for this week’s fateful meeting of the Neighborhood Conservation Committee. Nor did he answer a reporter’s knock at his gate the next day. But an early morning visit to the property showed signs of recent gardening, a fresh profusion of plastic flowers and some roof work — evidence that he still lives there.

The NCDC’s 6-2 vote appears to doom the property. What happens to its occupant remains uncertain.

Informed that demolition appeared imminent, Martha Kegel, of Unity for the Homeless, said she would “reach out the Veterans Administration“ to see what services they might be able to provide Hughes.

City Hall says sexton's cottage in Lafayette No. 2 is too damaged to repair. (Photos by TombTrekker.com)

Correction: Based on misinformation provided by City Hall, an earlier version of this article stated incorrectly that  FEMA’s  March 1 meeting on the West Bank is open to the public. It is for consultants only.

By Karen Gadbois, The Lens staff writer |

The latest skirmish in the preservation wars: whether to demolish century-old sexton’s cottages in four historic New Orleans cemeteries and replace them with concrete block sheds.

City Hall has applied for demolition permits and, almost seven years after Hurricane Katrina, has secured $46,000 in FEMA funds to tear down the damaged cottages once occupied by cemetery caretakers.

Two of the cottages are on the grounds of Lafayette cemeteries No. 1 and No. 2, within blocks of each other on Washington Avenue; another is within Holt Cemetery on City Park Avenue, and the fourth is in the Carrollton Cemetery on Hillary Street.

Angie Green, executive director of Save our Cemeteries, a non-profit “dedicated to the preservation and restoration of the historic cemeteries of Louisiana,” has issued a statement opposing three of the four demolitions. The exception is the one within Carrollton Cemetery, which has been heavily modified over the years.

Demolition would “be detrimental to the overall feel and tout ensemble of these cemeteries,” Green’s statement says.

As reasons to proceed with the demolitions the city cites “long-term neglect and termite infestation that has impacted the structural integrity.” The cottages will be replaced with concrete block structures of “appropriate design,” according to documents provided by the city.

Green said that she would never consider concrete block to be historically appropriate in this context.

Drawing primarily on bond funds and a small FEMA reimbursement, the city has dedicated approximately $2.8 million for repairs to city cemeteries.

The cost of the concrete-block structures that the city proposes to build is uncertain. Caretakers would not be expected to live in them.

Lafayette No. 1: cottage slated for demolition

Joining Green in opposition to the city’s plans, Sandra Stokes, director-at-large of the Foundation for Historical Louisiana, declares Lafayette No. 1 to be an “internationally known tourist attraction” and “economic driver” for the city.

The cemetery is across Washington Avenue from another major tourist draw, Commander’s Palace restaurant.

The cottages “were built in the 1800’s- and reflect the era,” Stokes argues. Their “historic rehabilitation is clearly feasible,” she says.

A report on the sexton cottages issued by FEMA raises another concern. Demolition has “the potential to affect archeological resources as well as human burials” within the cemeteries, according to archaeologist Richard Williams.

Consistent with federal rules, to identify interested parties who may want to advise FEMA on the proposed demolitions, a public meeting will be held on March 1, from 10 a.m. to noon, at  FEMA’s West Bank office, 1 Seine Court.

When a discussion of the Lafitte Greenway arose during today’s City Planning Commission meeting, panel member Lou Volz asked why he had to learn from the news media – not the planning staff – about changes sought by the planned Winn-Dixie grocery store on North Carrollton Avenue.

The Lens reported two weeks ago on the request by Winn-Dixie to cross the proposed linear park with vehicular traffic and create an additional parking lot.

Winn-Dixie made the case to Mayor Mitch Landrieu for the intrusion on the greenway, and the mayor appealed to the advocacy group Friends of Lafitte Corridor to approve the request. The organization said it was strongly opposed to the move, but the mayor made the deal anyway.

Volz was surprised that commission business was being decided before it made its way on to the City Planning Commission agenda. He asked City Planning Director Yolanda Rodriguez for a clarification.

Rodriguez explained that the project would only be viewed and vetted at the staff level.

That’s because the project complies with all zoning regulations, so it only needs administrative approval. The commission will not be involved, Rodriguez said.

A plumber with headquarters on Broad Street did his best to follow the rules when he filed an application to demolish a building in a historic area – except that it’s not his property.

The fiancée of the owner was at a recent hearing of the Historic District Landmarks Commission, and she said she’s living there and that neither she nor the owner want it torn down.

The two-story commercial brick structure is at 1206 N. Broad St.

An application to demolish this South Broad Street building was a little premature. Photo by Karen Gadbois

Horace Bynum, owner of Bynum Plumbing adjacent to this property, had requested in 2007 and again in 2011 permission to demolish another adjacent property around the corner on Gov. Nicholls St. to create more parking for his business. Both requests were denied.

A visibly frustrated Bynum approached the commission last week with his plan to purchase the neighbor’s Broad Street building. He said buying that spot would make business sense only if he could knock the building down. He said he wanted the commission’s blessing before he began negotiating with the owner in earnest.

He assured the commissioners that he had a plan to rebuild on the site but had not yet drawn them up.

Property owner James Tregler is in prison awaiting trial on federal bomb-making charges, said his fiancée, who declined to be identified. She said they need the property to raise money for his criminal defense.

But she said Bynum acted in haste when he requested the demolition.

Commissioner Sonny Shields was among the many members who didn’t think the commission had legal standing to hear the application and wanted to know how it even was filed.

HDLC Director Elliot Perkins told the commission that his office often accepts applications from people interested in buying a property and who may have a purchase agreement, contingent on getting permission to demolish. He also said the owner’s fiancée had made the original application, not Bynum.

Deputy Director Eleanor Burke chimed in and said, “If I spent time verifying who was being honest, it would take all day.”

The commissioners took no action on the request.

The fiancée later told The Lens that she is trying to raise money for Tregler to hire a criminal defense attorney. She said that if convicted, he faces up to 12 years in prison for confecting a bomb to blow up a car,  a crime he said he didn’t commit.

Click to enlarge. The city has agreed to let Winn-Dixie cross the proposed Lafitte Greenway in one direction, from the mail lot into the satellite lot, despite objections from greenway supporters. Map courtesy of Google Maps.

By Ariella Cohen and Karen Gadbois, The Lens staff writers |

Over the objections of Lafitte Greenway advocates, Mayor Mitch Landrieu has granted Winn-Dixie permission to cut a short roadway across the long-planned bike and pedestrian path so the grocery store can connect with a satellite parking lot.

Cars will be able to cross the greenway between North Carrollton Avenue and David Street, to reach a new Winn-Dixie lot behind Massey’s Outfitters. The grocer needs the off-site parking lot to meet city requirements.

Greenway supporters want as few breaks in the Treme-to-City-Park path as possible, which already will be interrupted by several major thoroughfares.

The connection was a non-negotiable issue for the project’s Covington-based developer, Stirling Properties. Nearby competitor, Rouses Supermarket, located directly across North Carrollton Avenue, has three entrances to its parking lot.

“If you come into the main entrance of the center and there is no available parking and you can’t get to the other parking lot, you create traffic in the neighborhood and lose shoppers,” said Townsend Underhill, vice-president of development for Stirling.  “We would not be able to do the project without the crossing.”

Click here for a sizeable pdf showing the plans for the site.

Winn-Dixie’s hardball stance apparently had an effect on the mayor. On Monday, Landrieu called the outgoing president of the Friends of Lafitte Corridor, Bart Everson.

“I was taken aback the mayor would call me,” Everson said. “For me, that was an indication that the mayor understood this was a hot-button issue and that he felt the stakes were high.”

“The community was heard,” Everson said. “We just didn’t get our way.”

Urban planners and open-space advocates frown on crossings such as this one because of the obvious dangers created when car traffic is introduced to a recreational area designated for bicyclists and pedestrians.

Connecting “two high-traffic parking lots on either side of the greenway [effectively] creates a new roadway over the greenway, introducing safety hazards for walkers, joggers and cyclists,” Rachel Heilgman, executive director for Transport for Nola.

The greenway spans three miles between Lakeview and Treme, crossing busy intersections at Carrollton Avenue, Jefferson Davis Parkway, Broad Street, Galvez Street and Claiborne Avenue. The Winn-Dixie right-of-way, however, is the first crossing to be created along the route. The move frightens advocates who say it could set a “dangerous precedent” for development along the trail.

“People feel really strongly that there should be no extra crossings, so it’s disappointing and disconcerting to see one being created,” Everson said. “We are extremely concerned.”

Greenway planners aren’t the only ones concerned. In an email to The Lens, City Councilwoman Susan Guidry, who represents the area, emphasized that the crossing is a concession she does not hope to give again.

“This limited crossing is a negotiated exception to what will be a guiding principle that no new crossings be permitted,” Guidry said.

The greenway long has been discussed as an asset that will bring new development to the neighborhoods it passes through. In other cities, such as New York and even Covington, greenways have become popular tourist destinations as well as draws for bicycle commuters and recreational cyclists. That economic benefit can’t be ignored, Landrieu said in a statement issued to The Lens.

“The commercial redevelopment of the corner of South Carrollton and Bienville, including the old Bohn Ford site, is critical for the continued revitalization of that important Mid City corridor,” he said.