n 2006, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) began acquiring quarterly extracts of U.S. Postal Service (USPS) data and publishing this data as a possible indicator of blight and vacancy for cities nationwide. In this report, addresses coded as “no–stat” in the HUD data are used as proxies for blighted housing units in New Orleans because a parcel–by–parcel census of all properties in New Orleans is not available. (HUD data description available at:
http://www.huduser.org/portal/datasets/usps.html)