Leafy Oak trees on one side of deserted Madrid Street in New Orleans cast an eerie, flickering shadow over the other. Minutes away on Wuerpel Street, the weeds in some overgrown lawns scrape the bottoms of discolored roof gutters.

Nearly four years after Hurricane Katrina, a drive along these streets shows  that home abandonment continues to be a major problem for the city.

“We drove through here, and it looked like a bomb hit. It really looked bad,” said Sandy Kelly, who, with her son Jason and husband, Phillip, is working to renovate and sell homes in the partially abandoned area north of the Gentilly neighborhood.

The family plans to stop redeveloping soon. Thieves often search abandoned neighborhoods for signs of redevelopment – new appliances and tools – costing them thousands in stolen supplies. Other houses in the area remain  abandoned, and lots still sit overgrown and empty. The neighborhood still looks like a shell of what it once was because other landowners just haven’t returned.

“I never made any profit off of any of these,” said Kelly’s son, Jason Johnson, as he took a break from renovating a home he plans to live in. Until widespread redevelopment happens here, his next-door neighbors will be two empty,  unkempt lots.

According to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, the percentage of homes receiving no mail for 90 days or more – a U.S. Postal Service benchmark for abandonment – was 34 percent in 2008; as of May 2009 it has dropped to 31 percent, or 65,888 units.

There are nearly 47,000 vacant homes and buildings in the city, according to the center. Out of a total 65,888 abandoned buildings, the city has acquired 12,000 permits for demolition, and 7,000 of the homes are in livable conditions.

The outlook for blight in New Orleans is expected to improve as more public-amenities projects and other repopulation initiatives lure prospective residents. Pontchartrain Park redevelopment, complete with a golf course and renovated homes, is one of the city’s latest projects. Also, the city is buying property in abandoned areas and turning it over to redevelopment agencies.

Part of the problem hampering repopulation, city officials and redevelopers say, are “fence riders” who still technically own their abandoned properties but won’t maintain, renovate or sell them because they have little financial incentive to do so. This is what creates a domino effect leading to a high concentration of abandoned buildings in certain areas, according to New Orleans Recovery Authority (NORA), a city redevelopment agency.

Some have said code inspections are still failing to catch these absentee landlords.

Ommeed Sathe, real estate director at NORA,  likened code inspections in abandoned neighborhoods to parking tickets on broken-down cars. “It doesn’t work,” he said. “They’re just going to hold that piece of land forever.”

 Tina Marquardt, operations director at the nonprofit Beacon of Hope Resource Center, said that as the city starts to improve efforts in housing-code enforcement, fence riders will face court dates and fines if they don’t address the eroding conditions of their properties.

Court appearances are especially likely for people who accepted state money – Road Home funding – and haven’t repaired their properties.

“There was a covenant that they had to renovate their homes within three years if they accepted that money,” Marquardt said. If the agreement is broken, homeowners could face reimbursement penalties of up to $150,000. “Those fence riders may be getting off that fence real soon,” she said, grinning.

Property rights laws were strengthened in 2006 through an amendment to the state’s constitution, giving landowners the ability to retain ownership of abandoned lots. This ultimately hurts city dwellers, said New Orleans City Councilwoman Stacy Head.

“It prohibits the government from taking and transferring properties to third parties except in very, very limited circumstances, and we need to do that in New Orleans,” she said. adding that property laws applying to rural Louisiana towns should not impact redevelopment efforts in the urban and partially abandoned city.

“That’s limited the city’s ability to get properties back into commerce,” Head said.

“It takes three years and a lot of blood sweat and tears – and money to get properties into commerce,” she said, adding that in tax sales in most other states, the landowner acquires foreclosed or abandoned properties after 18 months.

A method NORA began using last spring to acquire property is eminent domain, when the government can sue housing-code violators out of their property. The process works on a neighborhood level with the agency, Sathe said, but at the scale of the abandonment issue in New Orleans, the costly legal process is impractical in his view.

“We’ve got something like 1,500 imminent domain lawsuits in progress at the moment; that’s probably the world’s record,” Sathe said, “And it’s a drop in the bucket.”

Eminent domain, Sathe said, acquires enough land to create an upward trend in repopulation and development and does enough to scare other landowners into maintaining their properties – or risk losing them to the city if they will not maintain them.

Marquardt said, “I don’t think anyone, or any one state, could service the size of this disaster.” Because of that, Beacon of Hope volunteers use GIS – Geographic Information Systems – software to help the city pinpoint which lots are abandoned, are being renovated or are now livable in area neighborhoods.

The information is then funneled through the “Lot Next Door” program, enabling homeowners to see which nearby homes are available for purchase and renovation.

Marquardt, from  Beacon of Hope, said civic engagement by residents in abandoned areas could assist city and state agencies trying to assess abandonment and rebuild.

“It’s not that they’re not doing the same for all areas, it’s a matter of what’s coming from the bottom up,” Marquardt said.

Johnson continues to work on his soon-to-be home, located near a school that is still under construction. He hopes its completion brings residents to the area before land values in the area bottom out.

“What’s ever going to happen to them?” Johnson asked of the deserted properties. “Am I going to live across from an empty lot for 20 years?”