2301 Valmont

The owner of this property has been aggressively trying to demolish this property. Under his current “Emergency Order” the owner went in, applied for and now has a permit to demolish.

The owner, Freret Hardware has found a way to game the system and it seems that the City is going to continue to encourage it. While the City has been pieced back together with the efforts of the citizens the Mayor again willfully ignores these efforts.

Meanwhile the building comes down and another parking lot blossoms…

UPDATE I have received word that the permit will be rescinded. Let’s keep an eye on this..

Karen Gadbois co-founded The Lens. She now covers New Orleans government issues and writes about land use. With television reporter Lee Zurik she exposed widespread misuse of city recovery funds and led...

4 replies on “Under the Mayor's order”

  1. Ok, so the owner wants his building torn down and they got the city to do it. Good for them?

    I’m having a hard time connecting this to Nagin’s ineptitude.

    Or is this a case where the property owner had enough money to do it themselves, but they got the city to flip the bill?

    I’m not being argumentative, I’m just trying to understand your point better.

  2. We will hopefully add “disaster capitalism” to our collective vocabulary and eventually add “disaster opportunism” to our lexicon as well.

    This is clearly shaping up to be demolition for the connected opportunists.

  4. I got word yesterday morning that Ed Horan did call the demo/salvager, Willie White, and rescinded the demo permit on this property while the issue of the EO is reconsidered. I urge concerned residents to email Nagin and the City Council that the current ordinance contains the proper mechanism to permit the demolition of dangerously collapsing buildings already and that the EO was simply not necessary to address urgent issues and the NCDC could continue to review marginal buildings such as this without hindering recovery at all. The EO open now is under to suspicion that there was some other purpose for its issuance in the first place such as a friend of Nagin who wanted a building demolished even though it was not damaged. What we call a “Mardi Gras Demo”. That is a demo done when people are pre-occupied and they think that no one is paying attention.

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