Getting ‘Tacked’
Getting “tacked” is just about as fun as it sounds. Stories abound about Katrina evacuees returning to their New Orleans apartments last fall only to discover an eviction notice on their door and their belongings on the street. Such strategies didn’t work for long; Big Easy lawyers soon got all evictions in Orleans and Jefferson parishes stayed.
While such legal help is a well-meaning effort that is intended to protect the residents who encountered hell and high water while evacuating New Orleans, is is also exacerbating the city’s current housing scarcity. Without the ability to evict an absentee or a squatting resident, even temporarily, it’s very difficult for a landlord to make a hurricane-ravaged apartment livable again. “I can’t even get in there to fix up the unit,” Lynd says, speaking about his Laurel Gardens property. “You can’t rebuild a unit with the guy living there.”
Most cases aren’t as challenging as the situation facing Lynd, where (non-paying) residents are still living in a seriously damaged property, preventing him from either collecting rent or getting an insurance check to rebuild. Instead, landlords are dealing with possessions and furniture abandoned by their former residents when the storm hit. “If you have someone’s personal property, you couldn’t move it out without some kind of eviction procedure or by enactment the abandonment clause,” says Theodore Fatsis, an apartment owner who owns 24 units in Metarie.
Fatsis wanted to move quickly after the storm to enact the abandonment clause so that he could move his residents’ moldy personal items and begin rebuilding. But bureaucracy intervened. “The justice of the peace wasn’t up and running for three or four weeks after the hurricane,” Fatsis says. “If you’re dealing with mold remediation, a month is a long time for that stuff to be cooped up. Instead of ripping four feet of sheetrock, all of sudden you had to rip right eight feet” because of the delay in starting the restoration work.
David Abbenante, director of property management for Historic Restoration, a New Orleans-based owner and manager that handles more than 2,800 apartments and condos, took a systematic approach to evictions. “We set up a call-in line for residents and posted the numbers to contact via our Web site,” Abbenante says. “We then posted a ‘disposal of personal items’ form on the site as well. We asked residents to come in and retrieve their personal belongings from the damaged units.”
The company got 100 percent cooperation from residents at two of the three properties where evictions were necessary. Most personal property was destroyed by mold or taken by looters, causing many residents to approve disposal.
At the fourth, a 126-unit low-income housing community, 46 residents still had not gotten in touch with the property manager as of press time. “We gave a final notice as of February 28 and we will now start the eviction proceedings on the units to prepare for the remediation and rebuild of the property,” Abbenante says. “We have been very reluctant to take this step but we are now at a point where … we need to get moving.”
He is doing his best to approach the situation delicately. “We will do a picture inventory or all items and if possible, try to salvage anything that may be personal to the individual and have the civil sheriff dispose of the rest during the eviction proceeding.”
Lynd plans to put his residents’ items in storage once his insurance money comes through. “We will scoop them up, tag them to the unit number, and put them in a drop ship container during construction,” he says. “In the end, we will turn it over to authorities as unclaimed property.”
