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When the federal government gave the East Baton Rouge Parish Housing Authority $18.6 million to tear down old homes and replace them with single-family dwellings in Old South Baton Rouge, the project sparked hopes for other new investments in the area and helped spur a comprehensive planning effort led by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation and the Center for Planning Excellence.

But developers haven’t responded to the completed plan with the same enthusiasm that followed similar efforts downtown. One of the biggest problems, according to Mark Goodson of CPEX, is clouded property titles. Many properties were passed down through multiple generations by default, without the successions being officially recorded, resulting in dozens—even hundreds—of ownership interests in some cases. A developer could purchase a lot for $5,000, then spend $10,000 over a year to clear the title.

“So if you’re talking about trying to assemble a critical mass of properties to do a significant development, that’s just too much of an undertaking for the private sector to really do on its own,” Goodson says.

The East Baton Rouge Redevelopment Authority, which met for the first time in April, seeks to facilitate the return of some of those vacant or blighted properties throughout the parish to productive use, hopefully helping to revitalize some of the parish’s most downtrodden neighborhoods in the process.

Pending legislation would allow the authority, a public entity, to acquire the properties, clear the titles and move them back into commerce. But it’s not going to remake the city overnight.

“We need to manage expectations to a degree here,” says John Noland, co-owner of All Star Automotive [he’s selling his interest to partner John McKay in a deal scheduled to close at the end of this month and will become chairman emeritus] and chair of the authority’s board.

“We’re going to have to feel our way along here until we know what we’re doing. The people whose neighborhoods are distressed don’t have any trust in somebody that looks like me.” Building awareness and trust over time will be key, he believes.

Other cities have long had indigenous community development corporations—some with hundreds of staffers—overseeing redevelopment of distressed neighborhoods. Noland says Baton Rouge has had several over the last 15 years, which had a hand in building perhaps 1,000 homes, but they were all too small and too poorly funded to do anything on a scale that would really make a difference.

Getting a grip on the scale of the problem is job one. The parish has about 3,300 properties that are not tax-current; if you add in every lot that is vacant or blighted, the number could be as high as 12,000 according to estimates, Noland says. The city-parish often ends up taking over many of those properties, and many could eventually be transferred to the authority.

The authority has a five-member board but no staff and no budget at the moment, although Mayor Kip Holden has pledged $500,000 in federal community development block grant money. CPEX, which until recently has been working pro-bono, will be paid $91,240 for its services over the next six months. Part of its charge is creating a tool that ranks the various properties based on where they stand in the adjudication process, proximity to other blighted lots and other factors; the idea is to find the low-hanging fruit that could quickly be assembled into larger tracts for redevelopment.

“Our goal is not to change single lots at a time, but to change neighborhoods,” says John Spain, vice president of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation.

The authority was originally created by legislation passed last year. House Bills 1108 and 337, now pending, would further define its role; both appeared to be sailing toward passage, Spain says, and either would provide ample basis for what the authority is trying to accomplish. The authority might just buy property, clean it up and sell it to a developer, or the authority might form partnerships on certain projects. In either case, he says, it might eventually generate enough money to be self-sufficient, although it will need public money to get started.

“One of the most important pitfalls to be avoided is to think that a redevelopment authority is a cure for all of the social and economic problems of a city, or that it can solve multiple problems simultaneously,” says Frank Alexander, a law professor at Emory University who works with the Project on Affordable Housing and Community Development in Atlanta.

Every community is different, and the authority’s board will have to decide over the next several months what this one needs most. Should the authority focus on homes, or commercial development? Should it concentrate on certain neighborhoods? Is it more important to create affordable housing, or eliminate blight? If you try to do everything at once, you will likely fail at all of it, Alexander says.

Experts will argue that, when it comes to revitalizing depressed areas, facilitating home ownership should take precedent over commercial development. But perhaps more important for a fledgling redevelopment body early on is having a successful project of some sort.

“It is important for a redevelopment authority to demonstrate that it can do something and do it well pretty quickly,” in order to inspire public confidence, Alexander says. But at the same time, it will have to strike a careful balance.

“You’ve got to be very careful not to create false or unrealistic expectations,” he says. “Some things will take many years. But at the same time, they can begin to work and work hard over the next 12 months.”