A Crying Shame

From the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

Doris Grandpre knows exactly who gutted her 7th Ward house last year, then helped her start rebuilding the single shotgun where she lived for three decades before Hurricane Katrina.

"There was David. You got Christopher. Then there was Jason. Oh, and Simon," Grandpre, 76, said this week, recalling the student volunteers who came from Boston and Seattle to tear out her plaster walls and save the few precious items the flood did not destroy.

"I call them my little angels," she said.

It appears, however, that another crew has taken credit for demolition work at Grandpre's house. City records show that Hall & Hall Enterprises, the highest-paid contractor in Mayor Ray Nagin's home remediation program, billed the city $7,830 for gutting and boarding up the house and cutting the grass at the St. Anthony Street property.

The house is one of at least seven addresses that appear on two lists detailing post-storm remediation. One list belongs to the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana's Office of Disaster Response, which organized volunteers from across the country to come to New Orleans and provide free home remediation services, such as gutting and boarding up homes, to residents in need of help.

The level of corruption, incompetence, and lack of oversight by the city officials in New Orleans is mind-boggling. Think FEMA on a smaller scale. No wonder folks get Katrina fatigue. The Jericho Road program of the the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana works to provide housing for the people of New Orleans and organize the many volunteers who have given generously of their time and talents, and both groups have done great work, only to have contractors paid for work they did not do.

On Tuesday the Times-Picayune reported:

Stacey Jackson, the embattled former director of a city-financed program [NOAH] aimed at easing blight, bought four blighted properties herself through another city program two years ago but has done little or nothing to get them back into commerce.

Just last month, a company controlled by Jackson and her sister sold one of the four properties, an empty double lot at 1925-31 Sixth St., to a charity group that has been praised by City Hall and others for building new homes for first-time buyers in Central City.

The charity, Jericho Road Episcopal Housing Initiative, paid Jackson's company $20,000 for the land, three times what Jackson paid for it in 2006. As it happens, Jericho Road had been trying to get control of the land back then, but lost out to Jackson.

In fact, Jericho Road thought it had the property in 2006, having been awarded it by City Hall under a program designed to give nonprofit groups land adjudicated to the city because of unpaid taxes. But as the Jericho Road was trying to clear title to the Sixth Street property, the group learned the land was unavailable because Jackson had already staked a claim on it with the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, according to Brad Powers, Jericho Road's executive director.

Powers, whose group has built about 17 houses in the neighborhood since Hurricane Katrina, said he is glad Jericho Road finally purchased the double lot, where it will build two houses. But Powers said he regrets that the difference in the 2006 price and the 2008 price will accrue to Jackson, when his group could have spent it instead on building more affordable housing.

"Is it painful to have to spend $20,000" knowing the history? he asked rhetorically. "Yes, it's painful."

I'm sure it's painful, and it's a travesty that this sort of operation was allowed to continue for so long. How about reparation money from Stacey Jackson to the Jericho Road program? I'll wager my blood pressure soared to new heights as I wrote this post.

I hope that this news does not discourage the workers and volunteers in the Jericho Road program. From this one relatively small program, the result is 17 families in homes of their own, with more to come.