Abandoned homes still a problem for parish

Frank Reyes fears for his health.

For three years, he’s woken up in his Slidell area home and stared in disgust at his neighbors’ house at 219 Tiffany Lane. Weeds, 6- to 10-feet high, have swallowed the façade. Crumpled donut wrappings and several tattered, faded and soggy phonebooks lead up to a mud caked doorway caked with a blue “x” left over from Hurricane Katrina. And shattered windows seem to let any critter inside.

“It’s disgusting,” Reyes said Wednesday, standing across the street on the porch of his manicured lawn near Kingspoint Village. “The place is going to make people sick. It’s going to get big rats. Something needs to be done.”

Reyes’ story is one of hundreds echoed throughout Covington, Lacombe and Slidell. Three years after Hurricane Katrina slammed ashore, hundreds of homeowners have no plans to return and repair their decrepit homes. Instead they are left to rot, heaping the burden on their neighbors.

But St. Tammany Parish government recently assured the public it’s trying to cap the problem, slugging forward in a slow process to identify and demolish abandoned homes, or at the very least enforce owners to repair them.

“We are working our way though the legal process of condemnation,” Parish President Kevin Davis said. “We must work to restore our neighborhoods while respecting individual property rights. We are moving as quickly as the law will allow.”

Following Katrina, 4,378 homes were reviewed by parish code enforcers for possible structural damage, 4,000 of which were “potentially abandoned,” Parish Planning Director Sidney Fontenot said. Today, roughly 705 of those homes are designated for possible legal action.

“Our goal is to get a house renovated and somebody in it or demolish it,” Fontenot said. “At the very least we want to get them cleaned up and secured.”

But no magic wand can fix the complicated process, he said.

First, many homeowners cannot be found, leaving parish planners with the burden of navigating confusing tenant laws. If, however, homeowners are found, planners then set up a review process with owners to discuss rebuilding plans and fend off demolition.

Thirty such reviews are scheduled for Monday, but like other such meetings, many homeowners may not attend, starting the process again, Fontenot said.

Then there is the problem of negotiating the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s bureaucratic web of rules to secure money for demolitions.

It’s a complicated process that takes times, he said.

Realizing a heap of work was facing the planning department after Katrina, Fontenot and his team started inspecting home after home, but with such large quantities and limited number of staff, parish officials couldn’t handle the backlog alone.

“Some places were so overgrown we couldn’t physically break through the brush,” he said. “My staff couldn’t handle these numbers.”

Inspection consultants were soon hired to help, but the time frame still lagged.

Dilorenzo knows this first hand.

Dilorenzo, a neighbor to the 219 Tiffany Lane home, has called Parish Councilman Ken Burkhalter, parish code enforcement officials, the Sheriff’s Office and others in hopes of finding out the fate of the “monstrosity” next door. While everyone has been courteous, no one has an answer, he said.

Although it’s been three years, he has no recourse but to toss his hands up and wait longer, he said.

“I’m glad I’m not trying to sell my house,” he said. “There’s no way I could get a buyer with that place looking like it does. Look at it.”

Dilorenzo, like many others, wonders why no one will buy the house or others like it, the majority of which are in Slidell where Katrina storm surges swallowed the southern half of the city. With the housing market on the skids, rising gas prices and the overall economy sluggish, even contractors and those who “flip” homes won’t touch the property, he said.

It’s the same story nearby at 2019 Wellington Drive, where the parish has posted a demolition sign on the tree outside the house. Particle board plastered over the front window warns passerbys to “Keep Out.” Wasps dart in and out of the gutted house’s shattered front door window, where a trail of four or five carved wooden ducks rests on a shelf nearby.

Meanwhile, the owner has lived inside the gutted home, stripped to nothing but studs, for years, said Jeff Gavitt, a neighbor.

“When the parish put up the demolition sign three to four days ago, he moved into a trailer next door,” Gavitt said.

No one answered a knock on the trailer’s door, posted with a FEMA trailer extension permit that expired Feb. 1, 2008.

Fontenot said the scene is fairly common.

“Some people just don’t care and are living in a house that is falling apart,” he said, adding sometimes those people are squatters or kids looking for a place to hang out.

Meanwhile, neighbors are still left to deal with the aftermath three years after Katrina.

“Recently, I just gave up,” DiLorenzo said.

For a list of properties in the adjudicated hearing process and a blighted property list, go to Topics of Interest on the parish’s Web site, www.stpgov.org.