Survey under way

• By JEREMY HARPER
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Jan 13, 2009 - Page: 1B - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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A local organization is photographing, rating and mapping all 171,000-plus parcels in East Baton Rouge Parish to aid redevelopment of thousands of pieces of blighted and abandoned property.

The East Baton Rouge Parish Redevelopment Authority, which was created in 2007 by the state and first started meeting in March, has commissioned the project.

The redevelopment authority is banking on the so-called “property evaluation tool” to help it carry out its mission of combating urban blight, revitalizing neighborhoods and developing affordable housing.

Once assembled, the computer-based tool will allow detailed searches of blighted and adjudicated property parishwide in a vastly more advanced manner than the basic tax records available today allow, said John Spain, executive vice president of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation.

For example, Spain said, the redevelopment authority could, through the tool, focus its efforts on houses that are falling down or could target others that are in violation of local codes.

He said the redevelopment authority also wants to use the tool to identify and group multiple pieces of property for larger redevelopment projects.

“When you go into a neighborhood, what you’d want to do is to be able to group a number of (properties) together so you could change a block instead of one lot here and another lot five blocks away,” Spain said.

The tool will also help the authority and city-parish estimate exactly how many blighted and abandoned properties exist parishwide.

Of the 171,442 property lots in the parish, there are an estimated 4,000 adjudicated parcels, according to the redevelopment authority’s estimates. Adjudicated properties are those taken by the city-parish through a legal process for nonpayment of taxes.

Less clear are the number of other blighted properties that don’t fall into the adjudicated category but could eventually be redeveloped.

But before the property information can be combined into a vast computer database, it must be assembled one piece at a time by humans in the field.

The redevelopment authority asked the Center for Planning Excellence, an offshoot of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, to collect the data and build the property tool.

To do that, teams of two surveyors, many of them LSU students, use a car, a laptop with a global positioning system antenna and a digital camera.