Erasing blight starts with land

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, but it can’t expropriate unless the council grants that power.
• Act 456 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 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 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.