BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER
A recent design competition promised novel ideas for vacant land in New Orleans. It ended with some very unhappy participants.
 
From the October 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine
On Friday, March 6, 2015, the city of New Orleans posted more than 1,700 properties online and began auctioning them off. Most were vacant lots. The city was hoping to attract investors who could put these properties back into circulation, so to speak, in part to raise tax revenue and also to continue chipping away at the scourge of blight that had afflicted New Orleans since well before Hurricane Katrina.
Today, somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 lots sit vacant in New Orleans, about the same number as before the levees collapsed but significantly fewer than the 43,000 tallied in 2010. The city has employed a number of strategies to bring that number down, including these online auctions, a strategy later adopted by the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority (NORA), a public agency that owns close to 2,500 vacant lots in the city. Despite the lack of implementation, Future Ground has informed the city?s approach to vacant land, including the creation of a Strategic Acquisition Program. New Orleans Redevelopment Authority
Auctions can be good for a city?s bottom line. They generate revenue and reduce maintenance costs?NORA?s lots are typically mowed about every three weeks, which means the agency is responsible for some 45,000 maintenance visits over the course...