Conference Held to Address Blight

A broad coalition of civic leaders, city planners and subject matter experts convened today with guidance from the Center for Planning Excellence (CPEX) to put the thorny topic of “blight” front and center on the agenda.

A sense of urgency and promise pervaded the full-day symposium, “Reinvesting in Louisiana: Identifying and Combating the Root Causes of Blight,” where academic and legal theories combined with reporting from the front lines to reveal the wide scope of the problem and, perhaps for the first time, the shape of its possible solutions.

LaMATS and the Louisiana Municipal Association have long shared the concerns of communities statewide about the high costs—both in human and financial terms—of our abandoned and neglected places and the wider social ills they imply.

Today we took a big step forward in the long journey and hard work a cure will require.

Stay tuned...