New Orleans' Squandered Heritage website makes Preservation Online

See "Spotlight on New Orleans: Can a Blog Stop a Bulldozer?" from Preservation Online. From the article:

Gadbois and Lentz were both blogging in New Orleans after the storm, documenting the fits and starts of the recovery. That's when Gadbois noticed that some buildings in her Northwest Carrolton neighborhood were being torn down, yet had little or no visible damage.

The incentive to demolish, Gadbois found out, is strong. After all, FEMA has been picking up the tab for post-Katrina demolition. It's a much-needed service, but many homeowners have evidently been using the FEMA program to get rid of buildings they wanted to dispose of even before the flood.

"People are using Katrina as a cover to do whatever they wanted to do," Gadbois says. "There was a lot of opportunistic demolition."

Gadbois says that teardowns have been abetted by general confusion over the permitting process, a lack of transparency on the part of the city, and a sort of widespread hysteria about black mold and rot.

So Gadbois launched another Web log dedicated to drawing attention to spurious demolitions, particularly those in historic neighborhoods. Lentz, who had been raising alarums about demolitions on her blog, joined forces. The new effort, which went online last January, was named "Squandered Heritage," a nod to the Chicago Tribune's 2003 series on historic preservation in that city.

Click here to visit Squandered Heritage.

(This is something I helped a wee bit with in the beginning.)

Index Keywords: historic-preservation