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thecorridor Southwest Louisiana/LAFAYETTE/BATON ROUGE/NORTHSHORE
Across the tracks
Strategy to focus on lifting Covington
neighborhood >> by Sara Bongiorni
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The Baton Rouge Area Foundation’s effort to
revitalize Old South Baton Rouge is serving
as a model for a similar effort to bring new
life to a little-known pocket of poverty in the city
of Covington.
The West 30s neighborhood lies just blocks
from Covington’s artsy downtown and local courthouse.
Million-dollar homes stand perhaps a mile
away. But the roughly 85-block West 30s area—
which gets its name from the numbered streets
that run through the mostly residential neighborhood—offers
a legacy that is much different from
Covington’s high-profile charm.
Violence and poverty pervade the West 30s,
where the lives of its mostly African-American residents
got tougher still when Hurricane Katrina
battered an area where most residents rent deteriorating
homes owned by absentee landlords.
Holes in roofs, some covered by blue tarps, still dot
the neighborhood more than three years after the
storm.
“People don’t realize that a few blocks north
of charming downtown Covington, you have real
poverty,” says Frank Saxton, director of community
development for the Northshore Community
Foundation. He attributes the neighborhood’s decline
to decades of “disinterest and disinvestment.”
Life in the West 30s became harder after Katrina,
Baton Rouge Area Foundation