NEW ORLEANS — Officials and community advocates are quietly planting the seeds for an enterprising program that could give the government temporary control over thousands of privately owned homes damaged by Hurricane Katrina.
An increasing number of Louisiana housing authorities believe the proposal, based on an arcane legal concept called "usufruct," could be a key to determining whether New Orleans will again be a seminal American city or whether it will stagnate with a population, like it has now, equal to that of Duluth, Minn., and Fort Smith, Ark.
Nearly two months after Katrina, the nation's attention has shifted largely to the "old city" -- the French Quarter, the Garden District -- which was relatively unscathed and is showing considerable signs of life.
But New Orleans' future will be decided elsewhere, in neighborhoods that, while they were rarely seen by tourists, were home to the bulk of the city's residents. There, damaged homes sit empty for miles on end, with no power, no water and no hint of recovery.
"The entire redevelopment of New Orleans rests on this issue," said Mtumishi St. Julien, a longtime community advocate, a housing advisor to Mayor C. Ray Nagin and the executive director of the Finance Authority, one of the primary local agencies that administers government housing programs. "We have a lot of people who, through no fault of their own, do not have the capability to come home and fix up their property. So our greatest challenge in redeveloping is acquiring the land to rebuild."
The proposal would require deft legal maneuvering and could be controversial, largely because the Constitution severely restricts the government's ability to control private property. But New Orleans is attempting to recover from a catastrophe, St. Julien said -- one that will require extraordinary steps.
St. Julien cautioned that the program would not be a "silver bullet," but he said it could be a crucial tool, among a spectrum of public initiatives, to recover the housing stock in New Orleans, repopulate the city and find housing for civil servants who make the city work.
"You are not going to rebuild New Orleans unless you are able to get government access to private property," he said Saturday. "If government does not solve that problem, everything else is just talk. It is foolish to believe otherwise."
Usufruct is a centuries-old legal concept that gives a person the right to use and profit from property that belongs to someone else.
