NEW ORLEANS (WGNO) — A dangerous place in New Orleans, the scene of several murders, is now gone!

The city is taking the rarely used approach, to fight blight and crime, called an “emergency abatement.”

It’s when the city identifies a property that a neighborhood would be better off without. The property today was the abandoned Paradise carwash on Olive Street in Gert town.

On January 4th of this year, a 59-year-old man was bludgeoned to death at the car wash– a location police have long recognized as a crime hot spot.

Tyrell Morris, head of the Violent Crime Reduction Task Force said that one of NOPD’s captains “asked us to really take a look because she believed that it was a major contributor to violent crime in this particular neighborhood.”

While abatement on this property meant demolition, Morris said that is generally a last resort, and locations aren’t arbitrarily chosen.

“We are collecting these addresses from many different sources. We’re getting recommendations from the police department, we’re letting data drive those decisions. We’re also asking the public to engage at nola.gov/violencetaskforce. You can submit information to us, but it’s not because one person says it should happen, its going to happen that way. There’s a judicial process, there’s due process to protect property owners to make sure that this is the most appropriate action and today is,” said Morris.

According to Thomas Mulligan, Deputy CAO for New Orleans, the cost of the demolitions is not paid by taxpayers, but by the owner of the location, after a city hearing.

Those wishing to report a trouble spot can do so at nola.gov/violencetaskforce.

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