Evicted residents feel swept aside

Section: SoundOFF

Richard Rainey

The notice, recalled sisters Julia Samuels and Oneida Jack, came from a neatly dressed woman flanked by a police detail.

She had walked among the strewn debris along Eisenhower Avenue in Metairie, a weather-worn elbow of a road between Airline Drive and Mike Miley Playground. In her hand was a thin packet of stapled papers. The top sheet, adorned with the seal of Jefferson Parish, contained just a few lines, plus a short phrase that the sisters said gave them a gut-punch feeling.

For more than a decade, the Samuels family had cobbled a life among the ramshackle fourplexes that slouch together in various states of decay. The two women lived with their mother, Louise Samuels, and another sister in a first-floor apartment at 521 Eisenhower. Louise Samuels, 84, relied on Social Security payments and worked as a gardener on Houma Boulevard. Oneida Jack, 63, did janitorial work around the parish. Julia Samuels, 59, a former drug addict, helped out where she could.
STAFF PHOTO BY JOHN McCUSKEROneida Jack and her mother, Louise Samuels, move out of their Eisenhower Avenue home Friday. The family has suffered much since Hurricane Katrina, including the deaths of two relatives. "This is going to take our mama away from us," Jack said of their move. "She's just sick from all this."

On Oct. 30, the woman in business attire approached the family. She handed them the papers. With dates marked in bold type, the packet gave them 30 days to vacate the premises. Jefferson Parish had bought the property. Their month of reprieve ended Friday.

"I think it's cruel, very cruel," Julia Samuels said.

22 families face eviction

Similar missives eventually will reach 22 families living on the east side of Eisenhower, now that the parish acquired seven more properties there since June. The neighborhood, according to parish plans, will be razed and annexed to the playground nearby. The residents must find their own way to new homes.

Though much ado has been granted the parish's effort to upgrade the obviously moldering neighborhood, especially after Hurricane Katrina, little attention has fallen on the families of middling incomes caught in the sweeping attack on blight.

Katrina took much from the two sisters. Eight days after the storm, a brother died of cirrhosis. A few weeks later, bone cancer took their father. They now fear what the eviction will do to their mother.

"This is going to take our mama away from us," Jack said as her voice cracked and the tears came. "She's just sick from all this."

Oneida Jack moved from Atlanta in 1998 to be with her mother and ailing father. Eisenhower Avenue, she found back then, was a quiet hollow of post-World War II housing set up for low-income families. But over the years, a steady confluence of drugs, poverty and violence began staking claim there.

Katrina delivered the neighborhood its likely deathblow. Many apartments that were occupied two years ago stand gaping today. Some have blown-out windows and no front doors, rendering them flotsam for roaches. Drugs, weapons and mayhem burgeoned. As recently as September, a 24-year-old woman was found shot to death outside her home.

"It wasn't bad like this before," Jack said. "After the storm, everything just went haywire."

Enter the government.

Code enforcers gear up

Code enforcement officials have been answering an ever-louder, postdiluvian hue to eliminate blighted neighborhoods. Teams of inspectors have swept through derelict neighborhoods, citing violators and tagging abandoned vehicles.

The Code Enforcement Department now has 18 investigators and plans to hire eight more. In the 2008 budget, $1.1 million is dedicated to continuing the effort.

Parish officials had targeted the Eisenhower properties for years, and a blueprint for action coalesced in early 2005. After razing 10 properties before Katrina hit on Aug. 29, designers drew up plans to meld the moribund street into a recreation complex along a continual strip of green space bookended by Mike Miley Playground and LaSalle Park.

Katrina halted the effort for a time. But since June, the parish has bought seven more complexes along the east side of Eisenhower, including the Samuels' building, and plans to accrue the rest in the near future.

"We're moving forward on all of them, whether we have to go to court or can settle," said Nicole Tomba, assistant parish attorney.

The plans, however, contain no clause for families paying rent in the once privately owned apartments. In its quest to weed out an entrenched criminal culture and absent property owners, the government left the Samuels to fend for themselves, as the family has done for more than a decade on Eisenhower.

"They let the good suffer with the bad," Julia Samuels said.

"It's just sad that these landlords don't take care of their property, and it's the tenants that suffer," said Sara McMorris Marcello, a New Orleans Legal Assistance Corp. advocate who took up the case of the Samuels family.

Parish Councilman Elton Lagasse, whose district includes the Eisenhower neighborhood, put the onus on the former landlords to relocate their tenants. "They should have been the ones that help those families relocate," he said.

Charles Anderson, former owner of the Samuels' complex, did not return a call for comment.

No extension, Lagasse says

Lagasse also ruled out offering extensions to families, either for more time to find alternative housing or to wait out the holidays. The parish, as the new landlord, would be chiefly to blame should anything happen to the property while people live there, he said.

"God forbid somebody gets hurt or something burns. We would be responsible," Lagasse said.

As Louise Samuels rested in a back bedroom, her daughters spoke from amid the porcelain cats and cloth dolls they have collected over the years, a Halloween mask, a pendulum clock silenced minutes before 10 and cardboard boxes, some already starting to fill with items to be moved.

The sisters believe less in luck than providence. Last week they found a new place to live. "If you believe in God, then you know that was for us," Julia Samuels said.

The new apartment -- a three-bedroom unit in Kenner's Susan Park subdivision -- is not without its price. The family will pay $950 a month for it: $300 more than their place on Eisenhower, where rent had already risen twice after Katrina.

Louise Samuels receives $629 a month from Social Security, so she continues to work, said her daughters, who also contribute what they can.

McMorris Marcello, the family's legal advocate, said they had exhausted all avenues to glean financial help from the parish. Now they hope to tap into the $600,000 that Charles Anderson received for the forced sale of three Eisenhower properties to the parish. If unsuccessful, the family said, they will turn to their usual source for comfort.

"We'll be all right by the help of the Lord," Oneida Jack said.