Fruit use: eminent domain in New Orleans.

• Author: Welch, Matt

THE UNUSUAL term usufruct comes from the Latin words usus and fructus, meaning "use" and "fruit." Napoleon converted the use of other people's figurative fruit into a legal concept, by which an owner of a property could sell or lease his right to profit from it to a second party. You can still find usufruct in the legal codes of most everywhere the emperor once cast his shadow, from France to Poland to Louisiana.

Now two affordable-housing advocates in New Orleans want to revive usufruct in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, so that--in theory, anyway--the 50,000 to 1,000 water-damaged properties in the area can be quickly rehabilitated by the state. According to tentative plans sketched by New Orleans Finance Authority Executive Director Mtumishi St. Julien and bond lawyer Wayne Neveu, homeowners who lacked money for repairs could sign the job over to the government, which would clean it up, rent it out to an "essential worker" (cop, firefighter, etc.), use the proceeds to pay the mortgage, and then in three or five years hit the owners with a bill in exchange for resuming the use of their fruits.

"You are not going to rebuild New Orleans unless you are able to get government access to private property" St. Julien told the Los Angeles Times in October. "If government does not solve that problem...