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RedditHere's how we identified more than 11,000 empty, rentable homes in New Orleans:
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Homeless in New Orleans
Lizzy Ratner: The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has turned New Orleans into a tragic Tale of Two Cities.
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Lawyers for the Poor Muzzled in Subprime Mess
Laura K. Abel: Civil legal aid attorneys could have sounded the alarm years before the subprime scandal began destroying the lives of urban poor--but Congress wouldn't let them.
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Waiting for Godot in a Wasteland
Billy Sothern: The most devastated neighborhood in America makes an ideal backdrop for a morally ambiguous play about abandonment.
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Malcolm Suber: Good for New Orleans
City & County-Level Campaigns & Elections
Adolph Reed Jr.: A longtime activist, running in a special City Council election, is just what New Orleans needs.
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New Orleans Is Us
Billy Sothern: If the American people continue to avert their eyes from the slow death of an abandoned city, their communities may soon be next to fail.
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Silent Witness
Ari Kelman: A batch of new books on Hurricane Katrina investigate who is to blame for the tragedy.
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Locked Up in New Orleans
Robin Templeton: In response to a crime wave, police are imprisoning a record number of nonviolent offenders.
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Regime-Quakes in Burma and China
Naomi Klein: Nothing terrifies a repressive regime more than a natural disaster.
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Obama, Being Called a Muslim Is Not a Smear
Naomi Klein: He should denounce the attacks themselves as racist propaganda.
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Disowned by the Ownership Society
Naomi Klein: Bush turns out to be the undertaker of the free market's false promises to ordinary Americans.
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Zapatista Code Red
Naomi Klein: Ten years after the massacre of indigenous people in Chiapas, Zapatistas are reading signs that the Mexican government is poised for another wave of repression.
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Guns Beat Green: The Market Has Spoken
Naomi Klein: If you're looking for a sure bet in the new growth market, sell solar and buy surveillance. Forget wind, buy weapons.
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Latin America's Shock Resistance
Naomi Klein: Recent events in the region show how societies can recover from extreme capitalism.
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Rapture Rescue 911: Disaster Response for the Chosen
Naomi Klein: Gone are the days of equal protection. Intense natural disasters like the California wildfires are being met with a new model: privatized disaster response.
At least six of New Orleans' twelve districts have neighborhoods that fall within these zip codes. The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center provides the latest Census data for each of the city's seventy-three neighborhoods. Looking only at those that fall within the zip codes deemed habitable by the mayor, we calculated each neighborhood's number of vacant housing units by multiplying that neighborhood's total number of housing units by its vacancy rate:
| Available Housing Units by Neighborhood | |
| Neighborhood | Vacant Housing Units |
| Central Business District | 252 |
| French Quarter | 1,736 |
| Uptown/Carrollton | 2,383 |
| Algiers | 2,713 |
| New Aurora/ English Turn | 115 |
| Central City/Garden District | 4,418 |
Adding them all up equals 11,617 vacant housing units in New Orleans' dry zones. When we include neighboring Jefferson Parish to the west of the city, the total jumps to 23,267.
Some neighborhoods fall within more than one zip code area. In those cases where a neighborhood included on the Mayor's list also has a Zip Code that is not, that neighborhood was excluded in its entirety.
The number of available homes in the New Orleans area may therefore be higher than we have estimated. One exception was made with the Central City neighborhood in the Central/Garden District.
This neighborhood shares four zip codes, one of which was not on the Mayor's list. But this zone represents about one-quarter of the area, and its inclusion is more than offset by the many other vacant homes in those other half-flooded, half-dry neighborhoods that we have left out of our total.
