re: Looks like maybe a shooting or something at Sherwood Acres on Coursey Boulevard.

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It’s the life cycle of apartments. They often turn to trash and sink the whole surrounding area. It’s why the future of Katy is not as bright as it was just ten years ago. Too many apartment complexes have sprung up. At the moment they’re fine. They won’t stay that was.

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That’s not true across the board. There are plenty of properties who have property owners and property management that seeks to constantly keep the property competitive with the properties they compete with, and are looking at things long term, then there are the property owners and management that sees the property as a short term investment to be milked and so the outside is not cared for, and maintenance is more like bandaids and the bare minimum is in place rather than updating and playing the long game, because when they have finished milking it for all it’s worth, they are going to dump it and move on to another unsuspecting property.

Some however are behind the eight ball and doing their best but it’s a real uphill battle to bring it back to life because of many factors, not the least of which is a poor economy, a poor target base, poor reputation, age and neglect, but even more so an overly saturated market that keeps robbing Peter to pay Paul, and that’s asking the impossible, so in order to maintain a profitable occupancy to operate efficiently has to lower rent, lower qualifications, and bandaid maintenance rather than invest for the future.

I will agree with you though, as previously stated, and I believe the worst of all factors is that Baton Rouge, along with other places, have simply become greedy and overbuilt, and there’s a very real price that comes with that, and you are seeing it in many places around town, not the least of which is Blvd de Province, Sherwood Forrest, and Tigerland to name some of the more familiar places around town that are really suffering right now, except for a few saving graces. Some of the absolute worst though have come around the LSU area, and the fault is not just in investors, but in the City, and also LSU that saw the money being made in off campus properties springing up all over the place, and sought to get a piece of that pie, by after they were built, deciding that freshmen must live on campus, and then building their own money makers that put the hurt on the off campus facilities and lower occupancy as a result trying to vie for a limited market because LSU enrollment isn’t growing but the number of complexes catering to it are, and that will not serve anyone long term.

These are not healthy ways to go for a community that wants to remain a viable area to live in for years to come. It’s what locusts do when they destroy a field and move on to another field down the road to do the same without thought one to the field they just destroyed. We have to change our mindset as people, reinvest in existing properties, re-use properties, and invest in the long game rather than the short one. That’s going to take people to first recognize what hasn’t worked, and then change the way we look at our community.