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# Erasing blight starts with land
- URL: https://www.redeyebr.com/erasing-blight-starts-with-land/
- Published: 2026-10-18T23:55:59.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-18T23:55:59.000Z
- Description: Blighted tracts in Baton Rouge sit idle while financing tools wait for property.
- Author: JR Ball

Baton Rouge has thousands of abandoned and tax-delinquent properties. Exactly the kind of properties cities across the country use to breathe new life into traditionally underserved communities.

Yet, here, a unique legal hurdle and the Metro Council’s decades-long unwillingness to act keep many of those tracts in the blight category, rather than as new homes for residents to purchase or rent.

**Why it matters:** There are wide-ranging options to pump residential investment dollars into North Baton Rouge, but few, if any, work financially on a large scale without available land.

**The land problem:** Turning blight into housing means condemning property, expropriating it, rehabbing it and getting it back into use—and Baton Rouge keeps stalling at the first two.

- The Metro Council has long been reluctant to condemn and expropriate blighted property.
- Louisiana law protects owners and heirs of tax-delinquent property so strongly that clearing title on a low-value lot can cost more than it’s worth.
- Build Baton Rouge, the parish’s redevelopment authority, can buy tax-delinquent property and run an expedited quiet-title process under [state law](https://www.legis.la.gov/legis/Law.aspx?d=452710&ref=redeyebr.com), but it can’t expropriate unless the council grants that power.
- [Act 456](https://www.theadvocate.com/baton%5Frouge/news/sid-edwards-detroit-trip-baton-rouge-blight-fight/article%5F38a443c0-a306-4bf6-9db0-2e202c935fe6.html?ref=redeyebr.com) aimed to allow the blight court to condemn property rather than the council, but council members argued in January that the plan of government makes it unenforceable.

**The tension:** North Baton Rouge council members have understandable reasons to hesitate before taking a constituent’s property, yet those same districts keep asking for investment.

- Nicer housing, whether to buy or rent, can’t be built on land nobody can acquire.
- The Metro Council tends to favor spreading money across districts, but cities that have made progress on blight often concentrated limited dollars in a few neighborhoods.

**The tool:** Debt-service coverage ratio (DSCR) loans qualify an investor based on the rent a property can earn, not on the borrower’s paycheck.

- Investors typically fix up a vacant home with short-term debt, then refinance into a 30-year loan paid by the rent.
- They’re already used in Baton Rouge, but on a small scale.
- Lenders write them in cities well beyond Baltimore, including Memphis and Indianapolis.
- The record is mixed: real success in some neighborhoods and real controversy in others.

**The fit:** On paper, the pieces for a Baton Rouge version already exist.

- Build Baton Rouge can acquire tax-delinquent property, clear title and sell it with strings attached.
- Those strings can include requiring buyers to start improvements within a reasonable time and barring resale until the work is done.
- A rehabbed home can then be rented, with a DSCR loan paying off the construction debt, or sold to an owner-occupant, in which case the Capital Area Finance Authority’s down-payment assistance for homebuyers comes into play.
- Many DSCR lenders set minimum loan sizes that can exceed the cost of a modest North Baton Rouge home, so a lender willing to write small loans would be important.

**The big picture:** Baltimore shows the loans can work at scale—and how they can go wrong.

- Vacant properties there are down 30% since 2019, and former housing commissioner Michael Braverman credits private investment with most of it, *The Wall Street Journal* reported.
- In 2025, a group of New York investors allegedly used [inflated valuations](https://www.citybiz.co/article/917183/rental-income-mortgages-help-revive-baltimores-vacant-homes-but-fraud-threatens-lending/?ref=redeyebr.com) to pull cash out of hundreds of vacant homes, and some lenders have since pulled back from Baltimore and Philadelphia.

**Public trust:** Baltimore isn’t the only place where blight efforts have drawn scrutiny.

- A former Metro Council member and his district’s blight outreach contractor were [indicted](https://www.theadvocate.com/baton%5Frouge/news/baton-rouge-council-debates-changes-to-blight-program-amid-criminal-corruption-case/article%5F89300d22-2cf8-4dc4-8051-c2e50f043a61.html?ref=redeyebr.com) in August on conspiracy to commit bribery charges, and investigators say the case involves kickbacks tied to blight contracts.
- Any future plan needs built-in accountability and oversight measures to boost public trust.

**What’s next:** Both the Capital Area Finance Authority and Build Baton Rouge are searching for new leaders, and better coordination between the two is a goal.

- CAFA finances homeownership and public projects across nine parishes.
- The Baton Rouge Area Foundation is working with those two agencies and the city-parish on a plan for focused redevelopment.

**Notable quotable:** “There’s an effort underway to use these tools and bring public and private philanthropic resources to create focused redevelopment in specific neighborhoods of Baton Rouge.” —**Chris Meyer**, president and CEO, BRAF

**The bottom line:** The need to invest in North Baton Rouge is real—and agencies can coordinate all they want—but without land, the results will be limited.