By Bob Butler, Fellow, G.W. Williams Center for Independent Journalism, and Jessica Williams, The Lens staff writer
Each day, after wrapping up work as a streetcar operator, Kisa Holmes drives by to check on the house she bought in the Upper 9th Ward just weeks before Hurricane Katrina – a house that now sits empty, gutted and deteriorating because she can’t afford to fix it.
A rusty water line is visible on the home’s brick exterior, about 5 feet from the ground. The second floor’s siding is gone, ripped off by hurricane winds, Holmes said. The front door is missing, and a once-secure iron gate is rusting. Thieves have made their way in three times, she said.
Before making the first mortgage payment, Holmes, her husband and their five children fled 90 miles to Kentwood to escape Katrina. Like many others, she thought she’d be home in a couple of months.
She was fully insured, including flood coverage, and believed that she would soon have the money to repair the house. But she was unprepared for the push from her bank to use her insurance money to pay off her mortgage, with which she complied, thinking it was in her best interest. Instead, it made the Holmes family the free-and-clear owners of a nearly worthless piece of property. Worse, that decision hampered the family’s ability to take full advantage of key federal disaster recovery money.
So after her workday visit to the shell of a house, Kisa Holmes heads to another part of the city, where she and her family divide time between the homes of her two sisters.
Though more complicated than most, Holmes’ story is just one of many behind the more than 40,000 blighted homes across the city, despite concerted and growing anti-blight efforts.
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