New Orleans Has a Plan for 6,500 Adjudicated Properties. It Needs One for the Families Who Held Them.

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New Orleans Has a Plan for 6,500 Adjudicated Properties. It Needs One for the Families Who Held Them.

The city’s new task force can clear titles and return blighted lots to commerce. Whether it returns them to the families who held them through Katrina is still an open question.

By Kim M. Braud | June 2026

On Thursday, June 11, Mayor Helena Moreno stood on a lot overrun by tall grass on Choctaw Street in the Lower 9th Ward and announced New Orleans’ newest attempt at an old problem. The announcement followed an executive order Moreno signed May 21, creating a task force to develop new policies for resolving tax and title issues on adjudicated properties.

The scale of the problem is not small. Citywide, the mayor’s office counts 6,500 adjudicated properties, 5,700 of them vacant lots, with more than 3,800 adjudicated for five years or longer. In the Lower 9th Ward alone there are 792 adjudicated properties, 768 of them empty, making up roughly ten percent of everything in the neighborhood.

The pilot starts small by design. It will target 15 to 25 vacant lots in the Lower 9th Ward and identify five to eight residential buildings in Hoffman Triangle and Central City for rehabilitation by smaller local developers. The Office of Community Development, the Law Department, and the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority are all at the table. The goal is a process that works on a small pool of properties first, then scales.

Why so many of these titles never cleared

The obstacles are not abstract. City officials acknowledge that some properties involve succession issues, while others carry old debts, and each one requires individual attention, sometimes working through multiple third-party tax sale interests and litigation just to acquire title.

Succession issues are heirs’ property. After Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans in 2005, families whose ancestors held land without formal legal title, or with title split across generations of unrecorded inheritance, found their claims jeopardized when they tried to qualify for government aid or insurance payouts. Heir property is a form of collective ownership created by intestate succession, and for decades it has been a leading cause of land loss for Black families specifically.

Clearing a title only protects a family if the family is still the one holding it.

“Property is passed along generationally,” - Jonathan Reynolds, heirs’ property staff attorney at Louisiana Appleseed Center for Law and Justice

The gap the pilot doesn’t close

Here is the part that should worry New Orleanians watching this unfold. In the city’s last major adjudicated property push, it returned 770 properties to commerce and brought in $14.5 million through its auction program. Only 89 of those properties were redeemed by the homeowners themselves, who paid back $2.8 million in delinquent taxes to keep what was already theirs. The rest went to outside bidders.

That pattern is by design. The city’s tax sale and adjudicated property auctions run through CivicSource, and the system was built around investors paying off delinquent taxes, interest, and fees to win a certificate or a title, not around forgiving or restructuring those charges for the people who fell behind. Original owners get a narrow redemption window to repay the investor, plus a five percent penalty and monthly interest, before the property is gone for good. That window exists to recover someone else’s investment. It was never built to wipe the debt clean for an heir.

That ratio matters. A title-clearing process built to move properties back into commerce, full stop, treats a cleared title as success regardless of who ends up holding it. It does not distinguish between a displaced Lower 9th Ward family finally getting clear title to land their grandparents owned, and an out-of-state investor picking up the same lot at auction once the legal tangle is gone.

Nothing in the public record on this task force yet sets out a different standard for properties tied up in heirs’ property versus properties that are simply abandoned.

The system underneath this is already buckling

The auction platform the city has leaned on for years to administer these sales is in serious trouble. CivicSource’s own attorney has told reporters the company is effectively shuttered. The City of New Orleans alleges CivicSource stopped forwarding sale proceeds and now owes the city nearly $200,000. CivicSource has countersued, claiming the city owes it $1.8 million in advanced costs. An Orleans Parish judge has ordered a court-appointed audit of the company’s transactions.

The fallout reaches beyond New Orleans. Sedgwick County, Kansas, filed a theft report and won a $1.3 million judgment against CivicSource over a separate sale. St. Bernard Parish cut ties with the company in May. Local investors who paid tens of thousands of dollars at last fall’s auction say they still don’t have clear title to what they bought.

None of this should slow the task force down. It is a reason not to build the heirs-first piece of this pilot on the same investor-recovery model, or the same vendor, that is currently unraveling in court.

What an heirs-first track could look like

New Orleans already has some of the legal scaffolding for this. Act 81 lets heir property owners file a Heirship Affidavit to get clear title to homes they live in, for estates valued under $125,000, cutting legal fees and filing costs significantly. Louisiana Appleseed and Southeast Louisiana Legal Services have used a similar small succession affidavit process to clear 34 titles across two parishes, and a related outreach campaign led to roughly 100 wills and 150 successions that opened the door to clear title.

What’s missing is forgiveness. Starting January 1, 2026, Act 557 moved Louisiana from a fractional-ownership tax sale system to a tax lien certificate system, intended to simplify titles and speed adjudicated property back to the tax rolls. That new framework still requires paying off the full accumulated debt to redeem a property, debt that, for a family displaced by Katrina, can represent twenty years of penalties and interest stacked on top of taxes nobody was in a position to pay while rebuilding a life in Houston or Baton Rouge. It restructures how the debt gets collected. It does not ask whether the debt should be collected from this group of owners at all.

A heirs-first pilot inside this task force would work in two parts. The first is financial and legal together. Verified heirs would have delinquent taxes, interest, penalties, and code enforcement fines waived outright, not capped or restructured, so the property comes to them free and clear instead of carrying decades of someone else’s unpaid debt. Appleseed’s existing clinic model would pair every succession-flagged property with free legal support, so heirs can complete a full succession through probate and walk away with clear title in their own names, not just an affidavit that gets them partway there.

The second is practical, and it is what keeps a full waiver from reading as a giveaway. A verified heir’s claim should come with the same requirement the city already expects of any developer: proof of funds or a financing commitment to build a residential or commercial structure consistent with the parcel’s zoning. That is not a barrier to keeping the land in the family. It is what makes an heirs-first program defensible as public policy. It answers the obvious rebuttal before anyone has to ask it: that wiping the debt clean without a path to development just recreates the blight problem under a different owner’s name.

A deed without a plan to build is just another vacant lot with a different owner.

Louisiana Appleseed has also pushed for the state to adopt the Uniform Partition of Heirs’ Property Act, which would stop forced partition sales from breaking up family land in the first place. Folding that advocacy into this pilot would give the task force a model that already has a track record.

There is a name for what this could become. A decade ago, Mayor Mitch Landrieu toured the country telling displaced New Orleanians, “y’all can come home.” The invitation was real, but it never came with property terms attached. A heirs-first track that waives the debt and hands over clear title, conditioned on a real plan to build, would give a Returning Resident initiative something that earlier outreach never had: a deed, not just an invitation.

What New Orleans should do

New Orleans has built targeted affordability tools before. The Landrieu-era soft-second program offered forgivable loans of up to $65,000 to moderate-income first-time buyers in storm-damaged areas before the funding ran dry. The model exists. It just hasn’t been pointed at this problem.

I’m calling on Mayor Moreno, the City Council, and the Adjudicated Property Task Force to build an heirs-first track into this pilot before it scales, and to make it the property backbone of a Returning Resident initiative. That means waiving delinquent taxes, interest, penalties, and code enforcement fines outright for verified Katrina-displaced heirs, not capping them, pairing every succession-flagged property with free legal support to complete a full succession, and requiring proof of funds or a financing commitment to build according to the parcel’s zoning before any title transfers, the same standard already expected of outside developers. Verified heirs who meet that standard should have first right to their own land, ahead of any third-party sale and ahead of a vendor relationship that is currently falling apart in court. The task force has the legal tools, the partners, and the public mandate to do this. What it needs now is the standard that says clearing a title is not the same as clearing a family out, and a deed without a plan helps no one.

Kim M. Braud is a strategist, writer, and founder working in the areas of economic power, cultural narrative, and community leadership. With expansive experience across financial services, entrepreneurship, and nonprofit leadership, her writing explores who controls systems, who benefits from them, and who gets left out. Her work centers on economic mobility, institutional accountability, and the stories we inherit, and the ones we choose to dismantle.