Building Big Easy

Surviving Gustav

2008-09-16T16:28:00.003-05:00

Better late than never, I always say.

The Kinch family rode the storm out at my parents house near Baton Rouge. Florida would have been a better choice.

Nonetheless, everyone came through it with a few nicks and scrapes but OK.

You can see the damage done to my parents neighborhood here.

Ferrous Bueller's Day Off

2008-08-28T23:15:00.006-05:00

The City of Slidell has passed an ordinance banning the use of metal cladding all new building within the city limits.

Brick, stone, stucco and various other materials - but not metal - will be the standard for building exteriors in Slidell from this point forward, the City Council agreed this week.

The council voted 6-0 Tuesday to ban new metal construction.

Officials have said they want to minimize the presence of metal buildings in the city to keep it from becoming too industrial-looking.
In addition, residents have said at meetings where the city's master plan has been discussed that they want to improve the look along the city's main thoroughfares, and that means fewer metal buildings. The change to the zoning code calls for the entire exterior of buildings in commercial districts to be covered in brick, stone, architectural block, stucco, glass, wood, fiber-cement siding or vinyl siding, though vinyl siding would not be permitted for more than 25 percent of the total exterior walls.

The first question I have is, what should industrial buildings look like. My second question is; is the city council totally deranged? Don't answer that.

But seriously folks, they want to ban metal cladding for new buildings but allow vinyl siding? Yeech! I was hoping to have something more substantial to say about this, but that would be like having a serious discussion about Beavis and Butthead.

I'm Still Here

2008-08-28T22:53:00.003-05:00

To all my loyal readers out there, this blog has not ceased. Due the professional and personal demands made of me I have been unable to devote the the time and effort that I would like to make this blog what I would like it to be.

Hopefully in the near future more attention can be put into this blog.

Day Late And Dollar $hort

2007-05-02T12:54:00.000-05:00

According to some, Governor Kathleen Blanco's Road Home Program is going broke.

If the Road Home keeps paying out homeowner grants at the current rate -- and all the remaining applicants qualify for compensation -- the state aid program could be more than $3 billion short, state officials said.

"There's no question we're going to run out of money," said Sam Jones, Gov. Kathleen Blanco's liaison for the federally financed Road Home.

The problem is twofold:
-- For the first 10,000 grants, the program paid out nearly $750 million. That left about 120,000 applicants in the pipeline as of last week. If Road Home grants continue to average $75,000 per closing, the state is on track to spend $9.75 billion. Based on awards calculated for 68,000 applicants so far, the total payout could be even higher, more than $10 billion. The state received $10.4 billion in block grants from Congress, but the Louisiana Recovery Authority budgeted only $7.5 billion of that for the homeowner program.

-- The $7.5 billion the state budgeted is really only $6.3 billion because, at least for now, $1.14 billion the state was counting on getting from the Federal Emergency Management Agency's hazard mitigation grants is not yet released. FEMA has cited legal issues as the holdup on releasing the money, and Louisiana officials have complained about the delay for months.

A shortfall could be easy to understand because it is difficult to accurately forecast the award amounts and the exact number of applicants. What makes this most distressing is the unexpected way in which it came to light, mainly due to Governor Blanco's own statements.

Blanco responded to a letter from Jindal late Tuesday by accusing him of not supporting all of her efforts to increase federal money to Louisiana and for not acknowledging that the state got short shrift from last year's Republican Congress when compared with Republican-run Mississippi.

But Louisiana did get an additional $4.2 billion in block grants from Congress last July when state officials argued Louisiana's initial share of $6.2 billion was not enough. When the money came through, Blanco said at a news conference, "We have all the funding we need to run our full program."

Can you say, "Hey buddy, can you spare a dime."

You're Hired

2007-04-13T22:40:00.000-05:00

The New Orleans City Council voted unanimously to sell city property located on Poydras St. to Donald Trump to build his Trump International Hotel & Tower.

If you've got an extra $300,000 you've been looking to invest, you may want to bid on a 3,500-square-foot piece of land in downtown New Orleans.

But you might have to outbid Donald Trump to get it.

The City Council has authorized the sale of a small chunk of city-owned land that is part of the site of the planned 70-story Trump International Hotel & Tower.

The 1.6 million-square-foot tower, estimated to cost about $400 million, would fill most of a largely vacant block. It would be 716 feet high, plus a 126-foot spire, and would contain 734 luxury condominium and hotel units and a 715-space garage.

Developers have said they hope to break ground this summer on what would be Louisiana's tallest building. Construction is expected to take 28 months, putting completion in late 2009.

At its April 5 meeting, the council gave unanimous approval to selling its piece of the site, a 106-by-33-foot plot in a block bounded by Poydras, Camp, Natchez and Magazine streets. The minimum price is $300,000, with 10 percent due in cash immediately. The city reserves the right to reject any or all bids.

The city also retains a "right of first refusal and option to purchase" the property for 10 years or until a building "assessed for ad valorem tax purposes" at not less than $50 million is built on the site.

In other news at the council meeting, a major local developer, HRI Properties, withdrew its application for a conditional-use permit for an $85 million, 10-story luxury condominium and apartment building in the Warehouse District.

HRI, the company led by Pres Kabacoff, wanted to build a 357,000-square-foot building with 221 apartments on the lower five floors, 105 condos on the upper five floors and a 509-space parking garage. The project would have included most of the block bounded by Andrew Higgins Drive and Constance, Poeyfarre and Annunciation streets.

Most of the 2-acre site is now a parking lot, but plans called for demolishing a small Pelican Ice & Cold Storage building at Andrew Higgins and Annunciation. The building would have lent its name to the new project, to be called the IceHouse Residences.

When it presented its plans to the City Planning Commission last year, HRI said it hoped to start construction by June, with the garage to be completed within a year and the residential building within 18 months.

The project needed a conditional-use permit and several other city approvals, including an 18-foot waiver to the normal 100-foot height limit.

The Planning Commission endorsed the project in December despite opposition from several residents of another building that HRI manages, the Cotton Mill condo building across the street.

Tara Hernandez, an HRI executive, said this week that the company has dropped the IceHouse project because it "no longer has site control." Richard Cahn, who owns the site, became concerned about repeated delays in getting the project under way, Hernandez said.

She said HRI might try to revive the project someday if it can regain control of the site.

Generally speaking I'm in favor development/redevelopment downtown and don't necessarily think that the Donald's project is a bad thing. However, overdevelopment is always a risk. The Trump International Hotel & Tower is a very large development and if the rooms/units can't be filled, a decaying tower will change the CBD from a shining beacon for business and commerce to a reminder to everyone that New Orleans is a dying city.

But I'm an optimist. Donald Trump didn't get where he is by investing in losing propositions.

A Former Carpetbaggers View

2007-04-10T12:51:00.000-05:00

Tom Bethell has penned an article in The American magazine about the progress of rebuilding in New Orleans a former resident. Rather than comment on it, I prefer to highlight certain passages that I think are to the point of our current rebuilding process.

On employment:

On the subject of New Orleans, [Tommy Lemann] was cautious and judicious, sometimes insisting that he not be quoted. There’s a labor shortage, he said, and this is possibly the city’s most serious problem. Many positions are unfilled, and shop windows all over the city have “Help Wanted” signs. New workers need housing, but there is also a housing shortage. To get housing, you need a job. So which comes first, the chicken or the egg? I was to hear others mention the same apparent conundrum.

Activity at the Port of New Orleans is back up to pre-Katrina levels, and law firms “are doing pretty well from what I hear,” Tommy Lemann said. “So much business is coming out of Katrina.” Tulane University had a lot of damage, and freshman enrollment fell. But it has been sustained at the professional schools. According to the indispensable Katrina Index, published by Brookings, Tulane started the 2006–07 school year with four-fifths the number of students it had before Katrina. “It would be adverse if we couldn’t get the young professionals to stay,” he said.
Americans got a televised taste of that culture at the convention center after the storm. As some Orleanians pointed out, the scenes were probably not so different from those that prevail on any other day—minus the dreadful shortage of food and water—in the worst parts of the city’s housing projects. Katrina drove many of the poor to cities (possibly as many as 100,000 to Houston ) with a stronger work ethic and a different attitude toward welfare. In October, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in its final post-Katrina report, said that the unemployment rate among displaced evacuees was 17.9 percent, down from 34.7 percent in March; by contrast, the rate among return evacuees had actually risen, from 5.3 percent to 7 percent.

What no one says in public, but is widely conceded in private, is that, while tragic in many ways, the storm’s displacement of families may, in fact, encourage greater independence and better lives for the refugees. In New Orleans, many of them had become inured to state support and its perverse incentives.

On housing:

I had already read plenty about the flooding of the Lower Ninth Ward, in the part of the city east of the French Quarter, so I wondered if he could recommend some other, less advertised destination in the Tour of Ruin that is on every visiting journalist’s itinerary. Tommy Lemann suggested Metairie Club Gardens, “the most affluent flooded area of town.” Submerged under five feet of water, it is the only place where he has seen abandoned mansions. The owners in some cases are up in years, and don’t want to rebuild, he said, or they have no mortgages and are rich enough to move elsewhere. Or they worry that the area will flood again.

On population:

The population of the city, about 450,000 pre-Katrina, is now estimated at around 200,000. New Orleans may now be the second-largest city in Louisiana (Baton Rouge is probably first). The labor force in the New Orleans metropolitan area, which also includes suburban Jefferson Parish, has dropped from 640,000 before Katrina to 438,000 last October, according to Brookings. In the latest U.S. Census estimate, Louisiana had lost five percent of its population, a quarter-million people, mostly to Texas and Georgia.

New Orleans probably has a smaller population today than it had in 1880, when, with 216,000 people, it was the tenth-largest city in the United States, just behind San Francisco and ahead of Cleveland and Detroit. An article in The Times-Picayune—a transformed newspaper since the 1970s, with copious and excellent post-Katrina coverage—reported before Christmas that 84,000 residents have moved to Atlanta. Many went by car (unlike Houston, to which refugees were herded in buses), and “significant numbers” are doing well. “They consider themselves Georgians and say so.” It seems likely that many will not return.

The racial composition of the city has changed since the storm. Because black areas suffered more destruction and because many blacks lacked the means to resettle in New Orleans after Katrina, the African-American share of the population of the city, according to a survey commissioned by state agencies last summer, has fallen from 67 percent to about 46 percent. By income, Orleans Parish, which is contiguous with the city, was the eighth-poorest county in America before the storm, and New Orleans over the years has maintained an entrenched culture of poverty and entitlement, epitomized by its vast public-housing projects.

On commerce:

Next, I contacted Jeannette Hardy, a veteran journalist who, years ago, was the editor of The Courier, the alternative weekly where I published my first articles. Ginny later became editor of New Orleans, the city magazine, and then joined The Times-Picayune. She drove me uptown to a coffee shop on Magazine Street. Between the Mississippi and St. Charles Avenue, Magazine Street is well located, and it is thriving. The neighborhood is a swath of cafés, bakeries, restaurants, antique stores, and clothing boutiques that runs five miles. Lately called the “isle of denial” because it was so little affected by Katrina (though it suffered serious wind damage), the area is likely to be central to the city’s recovery in the years ahead.

“This town is traumatized and everyone in it, including me,” Hardy said as we sat down to coffee. Katrina’s aftermath was “so much bigger than one poor little city can deal with—a poor, divided city with different cultural values.” People are paying mortgages on houses that don’t exist anymore for fear of ruining their credit ratings, she said. “New Orleans needs Washington. We need a Marshall Plan. We did it for Germany. Why not New Orleans?”

On "the Mexicans":

Hardy’s roofer moved his whole family to the city, she said, and electricians, plumbers, and painters are doing well. “A new class of entrepreneurs in the building trade is making a great contribution.” She admires the Hispanics who have come pouring in. In December, newspapers reported an immigrant “baby boom,” almost all Latino. Two healthcare units that saw over 1,200 pregnant women in 2006 said that virtually all were Hispanic. “Before the storm, only 2 percent were Hispanic,” the head nurse in Metairie said. “Now about 96 percent are.”

According to the Louisiana health and population Survey, the number of Latinos living in households in Orleans and Jefferson Parishes has increased by about 20 percent since 2004, even as the total population of the two parishes has fallen by 25 percent.

On restaurants:

Although tourism has lagged, conventions are beginning to return, and, according to the Brookings study, 89 percent of the hotels have reopened, as well as nearly all the well-known restaurants, such as Galatoire’s, Antoine’s, and Brennan’s, and the best relative newcomers, such as Emeril’s and Herbsaint. A friend was in town shortly after the gala reopening of Galatoire’s on New Year’s Day 2006 and said it was the same as ever, with local socialites and artists spending entire Friday afternoons drinking Myer’s Rum and soda and dining on trout amandine and oysters en brochette. Antoine’s, the most famous restaurant in the city, which opened in 1840, reopened just four months after Katrina. Since then, however, it has lost about $5,000 a day, according to a report in The Chicago Tribune. Commander’s Palace, in the Garden District, did not reopen until November, more than a year after the hurricane.

On Nagin:

The mayor of New Orleans, C. Ray Nagin, concluded that he could not prevent people from spending their own money to rebuild their own homes—probably a wise judgment, politically and economically, although The Washington Post has criticized the “helter-skelter return of residents.” Likewise, The New York Times reported in August that City Hall “has settled back into its habitual easygoing rhythms; a well-placed insider there reported, with alarm, no sense of urgency among its officials.” But was inactivity so alarming? The good news is that it indicated that nothing too authoritarian was in the works.

On Couhig:

The leading Republican candidate in the mayor’s race was Rob Couhig, a lawyer with offices not far from the Superdome and City Hall. He came in fourth and threw his support to Nagin in the final round, declaring that the Landrieu clan had failed the city. One morning, I went to see Couhig, who told me that his office building at 1100 Poydras—just down the street from Mother’s Restaurant, famous for its Ferdi poor boy sandwiches—is full, and his firm is looking for more space.

About $25 billion in federal money will be spent in New Orleans in the next five years, he said. “The money is already in place.” He thinks that the fortunes of the city will depend more on the port, the universities, and a revival of the medical community (now much reduced) than on tourism.

“Our biggest need today is people,” he said. “We need fifty thousand people. There are employment opportunities for everyone from accountants to zookeepers.” But he is concerned that the powers-that-be have misdirected their talent search. Governor Blanco, for example, in a recent session of the state legislature, allocated hundreds of millions of dollars of state funds to attract a new German-owned steel mill with 3,000 jobs.

“But we don’t need jobs; we need people,” Couhig said.

On education:

I came away from the two schools impressed at the turnaround. Katrina has put one of the nation’s most retrograde school systems in the vanguard of reform. Currently, a significant majority of New Orleans public schools are charters, and that condition—different from any other large district in America—is likely to continue. A recent report estimates that 31 charter schools, enrolling 16,000 students, will be operating in the 2007–08 academic year, compared with 17 conventional public schools, enrolling 9,000 students.

As to whether charter schools can make a permanent difference, it is too early to say. Many of the students come from backgrounds that are hostile to learning. Can a relaxation of bureaucratic rules and the introduction of competition overcome that disadvantage?

Summary:

The question is whether the aftermath of Katrina—filled with both bureaucratic foul-ups and individual enthusiasm, hard work, and perseverance—has at last dispelled the inculcated passivity and victimhood that have been especially strong in New Orleans.

Looking back, I was reminded of something that Tripp Friedler had said. A familiar metaphor occurred to him as we spoke, and he applied it to New Orleans. It’s the story of the frog dropped into water that is being heated slowly. It doesn’t notice, fails to react, and dies. Turn the heat up suddenly, however, and the frog jumps out. In New Orleans, the deterioration has been going on for decades, and, on the whole, the city’s leadership, too absorbed both by Mardi Gras balls and racial politics, refused to acknowledge it. Then came Katrina, abruptly turning up the heat.

A change for the better could no longer be avoided. My impression, after a week in the city, is that it has begun.

Drop Anchor

2007-04-07T18:51:00.000-05:00

An LSU professor has proposed that we should look into a system developed by a Dutch architect as way to mitigate the flooding in SE Louisiana.

Elizabeth English, who is affiliated with the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, hopes to borrow an idea from the Dutch, who use "buoyant foundations" in some flood-prone communities to reduce flood damage.

In effect, the system works like a floating dock. When flooding occurs, the house is lifted above the water by flotation blocks beneath the home. The house settles to ground level when the flooding recedes. The concept, she said, is designed especially for wood-frame homes, such as the shotguns common in New Orleans. It would not work, at least as now conceived, for brick or concrete slab homes.
"I thought this could work in New Orleans," English said. "If the Dutch can do it, we should be able to do it in Louisiana."

A less sophisticated version has been used for years along some waterways in South Louisiana, she said.

The concept is relatively simple.

The flotation blocks, made of expanded polystyrene, commonly known as Styrofoam, are held together by steel frames and attached to the underside of a house, according to a description of her proposal. Four vertical guidance poles are attached not far from the corners of the house.

When flooding occurs, the flotation blocks lift the house.

Collars are attached around the poles to ensure that the house doesn't go anywhere but up when the water rises and down when it falls, English said. The homes would be strengthened with steel channels attached to the bottom beams to ensure they are strong enough to withstand being lifted and dropped.

But the concept is not without its hurdles.

Hilary Inyang, director of the Global Institute for Energy and Environmental Systems at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, said English's proposal is a "more sophisticated version" of what many countries in flood-prone communities have used for decades.

"There are some practical difficulties with that concept, such as what you do about utilities that are generally tied in one place," Inyang said. "You'd have to make them more flexible. And you'd have to make sure that with these new foundations that you don't make these buildings more vulnerable to other environmental stresses, such as wind.
"So you'd want this done experimentally at first before you do it wholesale."

In her proposal, English talks about using "self-sealing breakaway connections for utility lines, or long, coiled umbilical lines that would allow electrical and telephone lines to move away from a home when it rises during a flood. Plumbing and sewage lines also can be designed to break away as needed, she said.

She estimated that building and installing the foundation would cost about $20,000. She conceded the figure is "very preliminary" based on estimates for the cost of materials and installation and experience building floating foundations along some Louisiana bayous.

But the difference between the Dutch designs and what Ms. English is proposing is that the Dutch intend their floating homes to be built over existing waterways whereas our homes would be built on dry land and float on the water when a flood does occur.

A simpler, and less expensive solution would be to merely raise existing houses or build new ones higher.

However, this does have some promise in areas where houses are built over water as the Dutch do. These would primarily be camps. And currently, there is no urgent need to rebuild them.

Hey Brother Can You $pare a Million

2007-04-05T12:17:00.000-05:00

New Orleans is requesting that the state pitch in several million dollars for repaving many of the city's roads that were damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

In addition to the $1.1 billion in federal and local money that New Orleans officials hope to pump into their new recovery plan, City Hall will ask the state Legislature to earmark $47 million for capital projects in seven of the 17 target zones identified last week as hot spots for government spending.

The largest chunk of money -- $19.2 million -- would go to rehabbing streets, sidewalks and lighting around tourist hubs such as the French Quarter and the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, according to a priority list provided by the city.

The wish list also includes money for civic assets key to reviving two of the zones: Joe Brown Park in eastern New Orleans and the Gernon Brown Community Center in Lakeview. A complete overhaul of Harrison Avenue in Lakeview also is on the docket, along with the repaving of four major roads that criss-cross the target zones and, according to city officials, serve as key evacuation arteries.
But the push for state dollars won't stop there.

City officials say they will request $52.3 million to repave 11 additional roads that could be critical in moving residents out during an evacuation.

The city also will support a $100 million request by an Algiers development agency for a new headquarters at the "federal city" complex, a pre-Katrina project that would consolidate military and government offices at the Naval Support Activity along the Mississippi River.

Cats' New Crib

2007-04-02T11:50:00.000-05:00

The Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance is looking for a new scene from its current pad at the University of Southern California and will move to Loyola University in New Orleans.

One of the jazz world's foremost institutions -- an organization dedicated to developing first-rate musicians who are teachers as well as performers -- is moving to New Orleans from Los Angeles in an effort to keep jazz alive and thriving in the city where it was born.

The Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance, whose instructors have included some of the genre's top artists, is scheduled to announce its relocation today at a news conference at Loyola University, which will be its new home.

The move from the University of Southern California is the focal point of the institute's four-year initiative, "Commitment to New Orleans," designed to reinforce the importance of music to the city's post-Katrina comeback by collaborating on programs with other colleges, setting up school- and community-level jazz programs, providing work for local musicians and persuading performers who have lived elsewhere since the storm to return home.

Crazy man.

Baby's First Steps

2007-03-31T23:05:00.000-05:00

Mid-City may the home of New Orleans' largest retail development.

A Georgia development company has been quietly working to assemble a vast swath of Mid-City, including the Lindy Boggs Medical Center, to create a nearly contiguous 20-acre site for 1.2 million square feet of retail space for national chains that until now have been unable to find a home inside the city.

The site being assembled by Victory Real Estate Investments LLC is huge, covering more than half a square mile from Jefferson Davis Parkway to Carrollton Avenue and from Toulouse to Bienville streets.

A second phase being discussed would involve an additional 9 acres on the lake side of North Carrollton, across the street from Sav-A-Center. Victory owns the Sav-A-Center and the former Winn-Dixie store that was converted into a small Home Depot last year.
The project has been well below the radar, with few city officials aware of it aside from Councilwoman Shelley Midura. Midura has been briefed on the project and is working closely with the Mid-City Neighborhood Organization, which has been playing a behind-the-scenes watchdog role on the development.

Many New Orleanean's have been reluctant to embrace national retail chains locating in the city because of the suburban nature of their developments and its incompatibility with the urban fabric of New Orleans.

But if the developers are willing to be flexible in their designs, they may be greeted with open arms.

"We don't want a suburban-style development plopped in the middle of an urban area," association member Janet Ward Pease said.

Jennifer Weishaupt, chairwoman of the association's newly formed economic development committee, said the association became aware of a potential Home Depot or Wal-Mart Supercenter proposed for the Bohn Ford vicinity in November 2005. In January 2006, it discovered the developer was Victory and expressed concerns over the project. It began meeting with Victory President Alton Darby and Vice President Kent Cost about their plans.
She said the association was blunt in telling the executives this go-round that if they "even mention Wal-Mart," the group wasn't going to meet with them about the plans for the 20-acre parcel. The company then showed association members its plans and asked the association to keep the information confidential.

Victory has asked the association to develop a list of what neighbors must have in the development and other things they'd like to see, Weishaupt said. The group met Thursday to begin working on the list.

The importance of this development is that it may be a baby step toward the New Urbanism concept of cities being walkable. Although not truly walkable for everyone in Mid-City, it will be an immense improvement for residents now not to have to drive to neighboring parishes to do their shopping. With some forward thinking, this could spawn other, smaller retail developments scattered throughout the area along with schools, medical clinics and parks could be the genesis of the vision of what New Urbanists have been dreaming of.

Wild Wild West

2007-03-29T12:39:00.000-05:00

New Orleans' recovery czar is proposing seventeen recovery areas that will receive money for redevelopment/rebuilding.

Dr. Edward Blakely, Executive Director of Recovery Management for the City of New Orleans, today announced the first 17 targeted recovery zones that will spur redevelopment and accelerate our recovery. The zones will be built around public assets in key business corridors in an effort to generate further private investment from developers. "These recovery zones represent a critical component of our rebuilding, "said Mayor C. Ray Nagin. "We will continue to leverage our limited resources to accelerate our recovery. Our citizens will benefit from the higher quality of life that will result."

Target areas are consistent with the development approaches citizens suggested in earlier redevelopment plans, such as the Unified New Orleans Plan, the Lambert Plan and the Bring New Orleans Back Commission plan. The city will provide loans and other incentives to developers interested in investing in key locations within the zones. The zones are generally high visibility sites, with sufficient land and other assets. They also have a high potential to attract investors and possess adequate resources to catalyze development such as schools and libraries.

"The development zones will spur activity from investors," said Blakely. "When one area starts to do well, investors will want to invest nearby. This will allow the city to redevelop wisely and will help residents make smart choices about where to rebuild.

The zones take three formats:

Rebuild areas have experienced severe destruction of physical structures and social networks. These areas will require major rebuilding, or significant public and private investment in order to recover.

Redevelop areas are places where some recovery components and resources are already present. They have a high potential for attracting investment and acting as a catalyst for further redevelopment and recovery of the affected community.

Renew areas include specific projects that require relatively modest public intervention in order to supplement work already underway by the private and nonprofit sector.

Each development zone is approximately one-half mile in diameter, although the area can vary slightly. The first zones are:

Rebuild

1. New Orleans East Plaza
2. Lower Ninth Ward

Redevelop

1. Carrollton Avenue at Interstate 10
2. Harrison Avenue (Canal Boulevard to City Park)
3. Gentilly Boulevard at Elysian Fields
4. St. Bernard/ AP Touro at North Claiborne Avenue
5. Broad Street at Lafitte Greenway/Treme
6. South Claiborne Avenue at Toledano

Renew

1. Canal Street (Downtown)
2. Broadmoor (R. Keller Center and Library)
3. Tulane Avenue at Jeff Davis (Comiskey Park)
4. O.C. Halley Corridor
5. Bayou Road/Broad Street Cultural Corridor (Market Building)
6. St. Roch Street (Market and neutral ground)
7. Freret Street (Farmers Market)
8. R.E. Lee at Paris Avenue (Lake Terrace Center improvements)
9. Alcee Fortier Street (Street Beautification)

In addition to the recovery areas, the City plans to invest in projects throughout New Orleans. These include park improvements, street and traffic signals and other programs designed to spur investment and enhance the quality of life.

Dr. Blakely described the process as the wild wild west where pioneers put down stakes and people build around it.

Let's Make A Deal

2007-03-14T16:26:00.000-05:00

After months of debate, a compromise has been proposed to dismantle St. Frances Cabrini Church to make way for a historic Lower 9th Ward Catholic school destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, a school official said Tuesday.

The draft memorandum of agreement was circulated late Monday by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has been trying to balance a move to preserve the storm-damaged Gentilly church, built in the 1960s and celebrated for its modern design, against desires for a successful school in a neighborhood struggling to rebound post-Katrina.

Bill Chauvin, chairman of Holy Cross School's governing board, said the draft indicates that the church will be removed to make way for the Holy Cross campus: a middle school, high school, administration buildings and a sports complex. According to the draft, the church's stained glass, altar and baptistery will be saved, he said. And the Holy Cross governing board will spend about $15,000 to hire a crane operator to remove the large cross from the top of the church, he said.

Where the church's altar is now will be the space where the church is commemorated, Chauvin said. Ideas include a garden with a statue of St. Frances Cabrini or a garden that includes the church's large cross, he said.

Robin Brou-Hatheway, a member of Friends of Cabrini, which has opposed demolition of the church, has a different view of the draft agreement.

"This is not the last word," she said. "There's a lot more to do and I'm hopeful that Cabrini Church will remain at the site."

Representatives of the school, neighborhood groups and state and federal officials are scheduled to meet Friday to sort out the final language for the agreement, Chauvin said, and mitigation details will be hammered out after that meeting.

Although some neighborhood representatives and Friends of Cabrini are invited to attend the gathering Friday, only the Louisiana State Historic Preservation Office, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, the Governor's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, Holy Cross School's governing board and the Archdiocese of New Orleans are required to execute the memorandum of agreement, Chauvin said.

A new Holy Cross School is expected to be completed in January 2009, Chauvin said. Until then, students in grades five through 12 will be housed at the Paris Avenue site in temporary facilities, he said.

Holy Cross' 17-acre campus on the Mississippi River, just downriver from the Industrial Canal, soaked in as much as 8 feet of floodwater after Hurricane Katrina.

Initially, the Jefferson Parish School Board tried to lure Holy Cross to a site in Jefferson Parish.

But in October, the governing board of Holy Cross voted to move the school from the flood-damaged Lower 9th Ward site it had occupied since 1879 to an 18-acre site in the 5500 block of Paris Avenue occupied in recent decades by St. Frances Cabrini Church and School and the adjoining Redeemer-Seton High School. The move was welcomed by some, including the Archdiocese of New Orleans and many neighborhood residents hoping to breathe life back into their community. Others, however, including some architects, decried any plan to dismantle the church, calling it historically significant.

Under federal law, FEMA must consider whether actions involving its money will adversely affect historical structures, such as the church.

Should this proposal be accepted, a vital part of the rebuilding of Gentilly can finally proceed.

Go Your Own Way

2007-03-13T12:34:00.000-05:00

The Veterans Administration will probably decide to move forward with building their new VA hospital without the state.

BATON ROUGE -- In a move that could scuttle a long-planned collaboration with Louisiana State University, federal Veterans Affairs Department officials said Monday that they will look for an alternative to the downtown New Orleans site that has been identified as the location for a new hospital complex.

The potential change of plans, prompted by recent delays in state financing caused by the debate over the future of Louisiana health care, is scheduled to be announced this morning at a congressional hearing. It comes after more than a year of planning by the VA and LSU to develop a 37-acre medical campus.

Although both LSU and the VA say they remain committed to the project, which would consist of two separate hospitals that share common features such as parking, cafeteria and laundry facilities, the planning process remains clouded by questions of what the region's health-care system should be like in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Unfortunately, the state is still clueless.

"It concerns LSU that something has happened which is causing the VA to look elsewhere," LSU System spokesman Charles Zewe said.

C'mon. The reason is obvious. Since the state is still unable to decide what the nature of the future of its Charity healthcare system, the VA is not willing to wait for it to make up its mind.

But this is not necessarily bad news for New Orleans. Although the federal government's land acquisition for land will be more difficult without the state's involvement, it is not impossible and will have one of two consequences:

Force the state to get off the pot and move forward with rebuilding the Charity Hospital.
Speed up the process of rebuilding which the new hospital will be a major part of.

Unfortunately, the governor seems to be no closer to making up her mind.

A state legislative committee has agreed to provide $74 million in federal block-grant financing for land acquisition and architectural design, but the money still needs approval by the full Legislature and U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson.

Another $226 million in federal money would be made available once LSU produces a detailed business plan for the new hospital, and the rest of the project, which could cost up to $950 million, would be financed mainly with state-issued revenue bonds.
Blanco said the VA's wavering adds to the urgency for the Legislature to approve the financing.

"This only underscores the need to move forward and fund this project -- the VA realizes the critical need and is acting to meet it, with or without us," Blanco said.

Gov. Blanco needs to read the previous paragraph. The state gets no money till a business plan is submitted, but she continues to wave the tin cup first as if to say 'give me the money first, then I'll tell you what I plan on doing with it'.

Katrina Marina

2007-03-12T14:32:00.000-05:00

South Shore Harbor, heavily damaged by Hurricane Katrina will be slowly returning to life.

In January the marina's landlord, the Orleans Levee District, launched a massive salvage operation that has fished nearly 100 boats and 550 tons of debris from the harbor floor. With that effort winding down, levee district officials say they hope to begin rebuilding by month's end, with full restoration scheduled for late next year.

Before the storm, the sprawling, 80-acre complex in eastern New Orleans was a cash cow for the district. The $4.6 million a year in lease payments and gambling fees from a floating casino docked there and more than $500,000 in slip fees from boat owners constituted more than 20 percent of the agency's operating budget.

But by listening to the news media, one would think that there would be no need for a marina, what with the city being destroyed and all.

But...

...with demand for dock space at an all-time high in the metropolitan New Orleans area, officials hope that an improved marina will bump rental revenue from close to 500 boat slips as high as $900,000.

"Once the repair work is completed, we feel like we'll have a state-of-the-art facility," said Louis Capo, the district's managing director. "All the piers will be rebuilt. We'll have new electrical and plumbing systems and new lighting. I think we'll have no problem filling all the spaces."

Capo said his optimism is fueled by a waiting list of more than 100 boat owners looking to lease dock space inside the little-damaged Orleans Marina at West End, also owned and operated by the levee district. Adding to the pressure is the slow recovery of the adjacent city-owned Municipal Yacht Harbor, which remains out of commission.

For those reasons, Capo said he expects South Shore Harbor's occupancy rate to jump quickly to 100 percent, from 90 percent pre-Katrina. The levee district plans to maintain annual slip rentals at their prestorm rates, which ranged from about $1,600 to $6,400.

Plus, plans are already underway for repairs to be made.

The first step in the rehabilitation project will be the 26 covered boat slips on the marina's northwest corner.
Capo said a request for construction bids should go out in the next week or two. The timetable calls for work to start by June and the first tenants to move in by October.

A much larger project to restore the infrastructure that can accommodate more than 450 boat slips is not likely to start until late summer. While that work is expected to take more than a year, Capo said, the levee district hopes to open the marina in phases in an effort to address the needs of boaters and to begin generating money for the cash-strapped agency.

I only hope that this recovery doesn't turn into a three-hour tour, a three-hour tour.

Code Talkers

2007-03-05T22:54:00.000-06:00

Louisiana will get a grant from FEMA to upgrade its existing building codes.

After Katrina, the state passed tougher building codes to ensure future structures will be more resilient to hurricanes. Local governments must have implemented the new statewide building code by Jan. 1.
"It was very important to us that we support the building code officials and fire marshals as they get their arms around these new codes," said Tim Coulon, LRA board member. "It will take a lot of work, but we believe it is worth the extra effort to keep our families safe."
Local building code enforcement officials will be offered training so they can implement the revised code. Also, resources will be provided to jurisdictions to assist in the establishment of code offices.

In 2005 the state upgraded its building code but not entirely. Prior to Katrina, the state had adopted IBC 2000. After Katrina it upgraded to enforce only the portions of the code that deals with wind resistance. Currently, IBC 2006 has been released. Hopefully the state (and its municipalities) will adopt that code in its entirety.

Culture Of Lazzaiz Faire

2007-03-05T16:31:00.000-06:00

Newswise.com posts an article that contends the failure of the levees in New Orleans were a matter of politics as well as engineering.

Newswise — As an engineer, Thomas O'Rourke can explain why the levees in New Orleans failed during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. But the real causes of the disaster are historical and political, he says. And we should not just build new protections for the Big Easy, but make all our communities "resilient" and better prepared to deal with catastrophe.
O'Rourke, the Thomas R. Briggs Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell, is an expert on the effects of natural disasters on infrastructure and a member of a National Academy of Engineering (NAE) team studying the effects of Hurricane Katrina. He reported some of his findings on Feb. 16 in a lecture at Cornell, "Hurricane Katrina: Geosystems in Crisis," a civil infrastructure seminar supported by the Charles L. Crandall Fund.
The first seeds of the disaster, O'Rourke reported, were planted over 200 years ago with the systematic building of longer and taller levees along the Mississippi River. The result was that less sediment was deposited at the mouth of the Mississippi, and wetlands that might have absorbed storm surges from the ocean were not created. After Hurricane Betsy flooded the city in 1965, Congress appropriated money to upgrade the levees to resist a one-in-a-hundred-year-hurricane -- a Category 3 storm like Betsy with 6 to 9 foot storm surges. Katrina was labeled Category 3 based on wind speed, but it was equivalent in pressure and surge to a Category 5 storm with surges 18 feet and higher at New Orleans and up to 30 feet along the coast in Mississippi.
"When I gave talks in Europe, people were amazed that we only planned for a hundred-year storm," O'Rourke reported. "Many said they planned for 1,000-year storms. The Dutch design for one-in-10,000-year events."
As soon as levees are built, O'Rourke pointed out, they become "wasting assets" as they sink into soft and compressible soil. He added that levee and flood wall systems are paid for by the federal government but must then be maintained locally, sometimes causing local governments to resist more effective designs that require higher maintenance costs. Instead of building flood gates at the head of the New Orleans drainage canals, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, under local political pressure, built "I-walls" by driving sheet piling into existing levees, and many of these failed during Hurricane Katrina, O'Rourke explained.
Levees along the city's London Avenue Canal were built on sandy soil, allowing water to seep under them and exert pressure that heaved and cracked the soil on the community side. In other locations water flowing over the top scoured out the levee soil, creating massive openings for the invasion of storm water. Meanwhile, large pipes designed to drain rainwater into Lake Pontchartrain worked in reverse, allowing water to back up from the rising lake into the center city. Pumps that were supposed to take water out of the city sat idle with no electricity to run them.
The resulting disaster caused $82 billion in direct damage but far more in damage to the local and national economy, as it disrupted the country's primary oil production, refining and transport facilities.
The event changed the policy of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from a post-9/11 focus on protecting critical infrastructure to developing "resilient communities." O'Rourke said that "resilience" includes public education about risks, adequate leadership, sustained funding to maintain infrastructure after it is built, and planning that prepares communities to improvise and deal with the unexpected.
In repeated visits to New Orleans to fulfill his NAE responsibilities, O'Rourke said he experienced déjà vu, recalling the devastation he had seen in the aftermath of the 1988 Armenia earthquake, the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, and the Kocaeli earthquake of 1999 in Turkey.
"How often," he concluded, "do we have to experience the tyranny of déjà vu and repeat the cycle of destruction, rethinking, forgetting and more destruction?"

Bob The Builder Takes A Ride On The Banana Boat

2007-03-05T16:14:00.000-06:00

Andrés Duany pens an article proposing an idea that certain areas of New Orleans be exempt for current building codes in order to maintain the Caribbean lifestyle present in pre-Katrina New Orleans.

It was possible to sustain the unique culture of New Orleans because housing costs were minimal, liberating people from debt. One did not have to work a great deal to get by. There was the possibility of leisure. There was time to create the fabulously complex Creole dishes that simmer forever; there was time to practice music, to play it live rather than from recordings, and to listen to it. There was time to make costumes and to parade; there was time to party and to tell stories; there was time to spend all day marking the passing of friends. One way to leisure time is to have a low financial carry. With a little work, a little help from the government, and a little help from family and friends, life could be good! This is a typically Caribbean social contract: not one to be understood as laziness or poverty—but as a way of life.

This ease, which has been so misunderstood in the national scrutiny following the hurricane, is the Caribbean way. It is a lifestyle choice, and there is nothing intrinsically wrong with it. In fact, it is the envy of some of us who work all our lives to attain the condition of leisure only after retirement. It is this way of living that will disappear. Even with the federal funds for housing, there is little chance that new or renovated houses will be owned without debt. It is too expensive to build now. The higher standards of the new International Building Code are superb but also very expensive. There must be an alternative or there will be very few “paid-off” houses. Everyone will have a mortgage that will need to be sustained by hard work—and this will undermine the culture of New Orleans.

What can be done? Somehow the building culture that created the original New Orleans must be reinstated. The hurdle of drawings, permitting, contractors, inspections—the professionalism of it all—eliminates self-building. Somehow there must be a process whereupon people can build simple, functional houses for themselves, either by themselves or by barter with professionals. There must be free house designs that can be built in small stages and that do not require an architect, complicated permits, or inspections; there must be common-sense technical standards. Without this there will be the pall of debt for everyone. And debt in the Caribbean doesn’t mean just owing money—it is the elimination of the culture that arises from leisure.

To start I would recommend an experimental “opt-out zone”: areas where one “contracts out” of the current American system, which consists of the nanny state raising standards to the point where it is so costly and complicated to build that only the state can provide affordable housing—solving a problem that it created in the first place.

However it may sound, this proposal is not so odd. Until recently this was the way that built America from the Atlantic to the Pacific. For three centuries Americans built for themselves. They built well enough, so long as it was theirs. Individual responsibility could be trusted. We must return to this as an option. Of course, this is not for everybody. There are plenty of people in New Orleans who follow the conventional American eight-hour workday. But the culture of this city does not flow from them; they may provide the backbone of New Orleans but not its heart.

It's true that many homes were built in ways not meeting current building codes building them the same does not equate to building inexpensively. Unfortunately, people will still need a mortgage. Asking people to live in housing that is both structurally unsound and energy inefficient does a disservice to both the homeowner and the other residents of the city.

Y'all Come Back Now, Y'hear

2007-03-01T12:19:00.000-06:00

New Orleans is currently hosting the 2007 HiMSS Convention and visitors are pleasantly surprised by the status of the city.

Ronald Shamlaty Jr. traveled to New Orleans this week by way of the Biloxi airport. As he moved westward in his rental car from Mississippi to Slidell to eastern New Orleans, he was arrested by the devastation that suddenly came into view from the interstate.

"As we went over the bridges," Shamlaty said, referring to the Twin Spans, "we noticed apartment complexes just destroyed, their windows all boarded up. What really got us -- we got that frog-in-the-throat thing -- was seeing all the trailers still there a year and a half later."

Shamlaty said he didn't know what to expect from New Orleans when he came to town this week for the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society's annual convention, which brought 24,600 visitors to the city.
What he found was two different worlds compressed into one city: a perimeter of devastation encircling neighborhoods like the French Quarter and the Warehouse District that survived Hurricane Katrina largely unscathed. For him, the divide between the city's tourist playground and its other neighborhoods was surreal.

"The French Quarter is almost like a mirage," Shamlaty said. "What we are seeing here is not what is going on elsewhere in the city."

The two different worlds most aptly describes the city as it stands now. But the lead of the story is that visitors can be our best ambassadors to the rest of the world. People need to know that the city is not as the media likes to portray it. The Lower Ninth Ward makes for good copy but that is not the entire city. The fact that I'm currently blogging from the CBD, walking distance from the Convention Center, should tell you something about the state of our city.

Oh Lift Me A Home...

2007-02-23T11:31:00.000-06:00

Grad students from MIT and Oxfam America have collaborated to created what they refer to as the Lift House.

Designed to Last The design for the house reflects both the local style and the need for the structure to withstand the assault of howling winds and hurricane flooding.

"They look like they belong down here," said Peg Case, TRAC's executive director. "We took great care in making sure MIT understood that outside is important." People in the south do much of their living outdoors on their decks.

"I assume this house will be here and that won't," added local architect E.A. Angelloz, standing on the site of the new house and pointing at its neighbor, a low-to-the-ground bungalow of indeterminate age. "Another thing people don't take into account is shifting debris. By being up, you avoid the debris. The stuff will move underneath it as opposed to through it."

And the piling foundation, designed by local engineer Joseph Kowle, will ensure that the house stays put when all that water and debris does slop by.

Materials specified for the Lift House include a cladding of Hardie Boarda (sp) fiber board impregnated with cement that is water proof and won't dent when projectiles come hurtling at it. A broad deck that wraps around the house and a roof with a generous overhang provide plenty of outdoor living space and a comfortable amount of shade.

"We're very sensitive to making sure we don't waste energy," said Goethert, who directs MIT's Special Interest Group in Urban Settlement, or SIGUS. The house will be well-insulated, well-ventilated, and made from durable materials constructed in a way that will help them last, he said. That overhanging roof, for instance, not only protects people from the sun, but it will protect the exterior walls from heavy downpours.

Some of the ideas incorporated in the design are indigenous to the area, said student Zachary Lamb, such as the large volume of attic space. The cushion of air inside serves as a natural insulator helping to keep the house below it cool.

Elevating houses was once more commonly practiced in the region than it is now, Lamb added, noting that many of the area's older houses were built off the ground. When slab foundations became the new hot thing half a century ago, Louisianans started to build them, too, setting aside their more sensible traditionsand paying the price.

Lifting it Later MIT's original idea was to build the Lift House on the ground where teams of volunteers could work on it easily, and then hoist the completed structure onto its pilings. Affordability is one of the key objectives of the design, and, to achieve that, construction will depend heavily on volunteer labor. Goethert also points out that building the house on the ground and lifting it later is safer for everyone who might work on it.

But with this first prototype, TRAC plans to hire professional builders who traditionally work from the pilings up. Volunteers will be recruited later to help finish the interiors.

Fortunately, this is not Modernists fantasy trip.

Last January, when Fugate visited Dulac, Louisiana, a poor bayou community in Terrebonne Parish, he was struck by how precarious the setting was for homes—low, muddy, and not far from the wind-whipped waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
“It’s a beautiful but not a gentle landscape,” said Fugate.
The students’ objective was to design a bayou home that would neither flood nor get blown away. They had to take into account the corrosive salt water, soggy ground, and winds tearing across the flatlands at hurricane speed—all the while remembering the admonition that “weirdness” could sink even the best of ideas.
Coupled with that warning was the students’ recognition that regardless of how hard they studied the place, they would never know it as well as the locals. When Fugate suggested that carpeting would make a good floor cover for a house lifted high above flood waters, he found himself corrected: In the muddy bayou, shoes caked with muck are a fact of life. Better to install easy-to-clean tiling than carpets.
“It’s a two-way learning street,”said Fugate.

The motto that the customer is always right will serve these vendors well and help ensure that flood-resistant housing takes root. Trying to create advanced housing concepts in a vacuum and then telling people they must adopt their ideas to survive is a quick path to failure.

Marcus Welby, MD v. ER?

2007-02-22T12:27:00.000-06:00

Gov. Blanco and Sen. Vitter have come to an agreement of the nature of the future of public health care in Louisiana.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco and U.S. Sen. David Vitter agreed Wednesday on a plan to give Louisiana State University $74 million to buy land and hire architects for a new teaching hospital in downtown New Orleans.
The announcement serves to restart a process that stalled unexpectedly last week when the state House of Representatives rejected a plan to direct $300 million in federal money to the hospital project. But it leaves unresolved the deep divisions between state and federal policymakers over the broader question of how to overhaul the state's health-care system.

Calling the hospital a "vital part of our state's recovery" from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Blanco said LSU will get another $226 million in federal Community Development Block Grant money after it completes a business plan detailing how the hospital would operate.
"This state-of-the-art teaching and research facility will play a significant role in our efforts to redesign Louisiana's health care system," Blanco said.

There are two basic issues at work here:

1. Funding buildings versus people - One camp in this debate wants to rebuild the old Charity Hospital and dispense health care to the poor at those facilities. The other camp proposes the entire health care system in Louisiana be revamped.

LSU officials said the question of whether to build a hospital should not be tied to the broader health care redesign.

"They are two separate debates," said LSU System President William Jenkins, who said a final decision on the hospital is needed soon to reduce the threat of physicians and researchers leaving the New Orleans area.

"There is growing angst among that group . . . about what the future holds," Jenkins said.

With Charity and University hospital decimated by flood damage, state officials set aside the $300 million in block-grant financing for a single replacement hospital last year. But there has been disagreement over how big the hospital should be and whether it can survive financially if health care spending is reshuffled.

2. Its the size that matters - Even once the configuration of the health care system has been determined, the size of the hospital still remains. The state can either construct a single, large general hospital, or it can go with a smaller hospital with several clinics scattered about the city to dispense health care services at locations closer to the customers.

Wednesday's agreement also does not address the size or scope of the proposed hospital, which has been of great concern to the private hospitals that would likely be competing for patients.

After saying for months that they had hoped to build a 350-bed hospital at a cost of about $650 million, university officials unveiled a preliminary business plan late last year that called for 417 beds at a cost of $950 million.

The Louisiana Hospital Association, the Metropolitan Hospital Council of New Orleans and the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana are among the groups arguing that the hospital doesn't need to be that large or expensive.

State Sen. Joe McPherson, D-Woodworth, who heads the Senate Health and Welfare Committee, said the size of the hospital should be decided by professional consultants, not politicians.

"I don't think a congressman or a legislator or an insurance salesman should be dictating what kind of new hospital should be built," McPherson said. "That's a job for experts in the design and engineering field on the advice of expert consultants."

McPherson predicted the Legislature will move forward with a new hospital regardless of whether the federal government agrees to provide the seed money.

"If they take the federal money off the table we'll still be building a new hospital," McPherson said.

At least there is a debate going on in this state about this matter. Unfortunately the discussion revolves around moving forward versus the status quo. That means there always a chance the status quo wins.

Start Me Up

2007-02-22T08:47:00.000-06:00

Entergy has plans in the works to replace its existing generator in New Orleans East with a new generator in St. Charles Parish.

Hurricane Katrina downed power lines, flooded substations and even killed Entergy's backup generator at the Patterson Plant in eastern New Orleans.

Except for one power plant at Waterford in Taft that remained up during and after the storm, the regional power grid could have gone dark even longer than it did.

Now, Entergy is planning to replace its flooded backup generator at Patterson with a new "black start" unit at the St. Charles Parish site that will be called Waterford 4.
In the event of a future major catastrophe in which all of Entergy's power plants go down, the 33 megawatt diesel-powered unit would be used to power up Waterford 1 or 2, which in turn would supply power to the grid to bring up other power plants.

Power plants "don't have an ignition switch," said Mike Twomey, vice president of regulatory affairs for Entergy Louisiana. "They have to have electricity from another source."

The $10 million purchase and installation of the generator should be complete in October. If approved by the Louisiana Public Service Commission, costs for the backup will be passed onto Entergy Louisiana customers, adding up to 10 cents a month to a typical customer's bill, Twomey said.

Entergy decided that repairing or replacing the black start unit at Patterson was not an option and chose Waterford as a better site because it is less vulnerable to flooding and hurricanes, according to company documents filed with the PSC.

Since Katrina, Entergy's customers in southern Louisiana have been without a local backup source of power. If a Katrina-like storm wiped out the region's power, Entergy would have to rely on power brought in over transmission lines from outside the area to restart the local grid.

"It's not the preferred alternative," Twomey said of such a backup plan. "It's not as reliable in the event transmission lines are damaged."

No one at Entergy could recall ever using the black start unit that was located at Patterson, said Chanel Lagarde, an Entergy spokesman.

Entergy already has purchased and received the used $3.2 million generator. Because of the high demand for emergency power, especially in the Middle East, similar new generators cost $16 million, according to Entergy's filings with the PSC.

The generator will be located in existing facilities on the Waterford site in Taft. Twomey said that in the future Entergy might consider using the generator to meet peak electricity demand, but that would require approvals from the PSC and from the state Department of Environmental Quality.

Entergy has asked the PSC to rule within 120 days on whether it can recover its costs for the generator by charging customers.

It's Not The Size That Matters...

2007-02-19T12:50:00.000-06:00

Its what you do with it.

Slowly, old American cities that have been in a downward population spiral for a half-century or more are reinventing themselves as, well, smaller cities. They're starting to adopt — many, like Richmond, do it unknowingly — tenets of the burgeoning, European-born "Shrinking Cities" movement. The idea: If cities can grow in a smart way, they can also shrink smartly.

"Everybody's talking about smart growth, but nobody is talking about smart decline," says Terry Schwarz, senior planner at Kent State University's Urban Design Center of Northeast Ohio. The center runs the Shrinking Cities Institute in Cleveland, a city that has lost more than half its population since 1950. "There's nothing that says that a city that has fewer people in it has to be a bad place."

New Orleans has been in a steady population decline for the past 30 plus years. This decline was instantaneously accelerated on August 29, 2005. Hopefully, Katrina will also speed up the process planning for the decline as others cities have done. Now that everyone is in agreement of what has happened, we need to look forward and decide on where we go from hear. Others cities offer insight into how this can be not only managed, but can improve the city.

It's a startling admission in a nation that has always equated growth with success. Cities are downsizing by returning abandoned neighborhoods to nature and pulling the plug on expensive services to unpopulated areas. Some have stopped pumping water, running sewer lines and repaving roads in depopulated neighborhoods. They're turning decimated areas into parks, wildlife refuges or bike trails. They're tearing down homes no one is living in and concentrating development where people want to move.

Richmond's acclaimed Neighborhoods in Bloom program targets six areas. Public funds are pouring in and private money has started to follow. The city wants to grow, but it's not waiting for a population boom, says Greg Wingfield, president and CEO of Greater Richmond Partnership Inc., an economic development marketing group. "We don't as a region aspire to be the next Atlanta or the next Charlotte," he says. "It's about quality. It's not about growing for the sake of growing."

As I've stated in an earlier post, the City of New Orleans needs to look into unincorporating the city east of the Industrial Canal (with the exception of the Lower Ninth Ward and Holy Cross) among other things.

New Orleans should simply unincorporate most or all of New Orleans East. Bayou Sauvage Wildlife Refuge has no business being inside the city limits. Those living in New Orleans East will not like being unincorporated at first, but it simply means that the parish will take over those services that the city currently provide. In other words, be more like Jefferson Parish.
If you want to convert neighborhoods back to wetland, don't be impatient about deciding where they should be. Recovery will be long term so let's plan long term. City officials certainly can wait to see which area make a substantial recovery. We may find some areas with few residents. If those residents decide they don't like living in "ghosts towns", the government coud offer to buy them out. Homeowners might be happy with this arrangement. If the government tried to force people out of their homes, they will be asking for nothing but trouble.
Some City Council members will not take kindly to having their district being eliminated and will likely put up a fight to maintain the status quo. A city-parish form of government might be a good comprise to get some council members on board.

This approach might be described as "slash-and-burn" but the reality is that if a city is to shrink, it needs to shrink. Fortunately, other cities have managed this in a softer manner.

"European cities are grappling with how you deal with shrinking cities more forthrightly than we are," says John Accordino, urban and regional planning professor at Virginia Commonwealth University here. "(U.S. cities) are still trying to figure out how do we get our piece of the metro growth."

Youngstown, Ohio, is an exception. It has fully embraced its shrinkage. The population, now about 83,000, is less than half what it was when the steel industry collapsed in the 1970s.

"You look at the facts and come up with solutions," chief planner Anthony Kobak says. "The first step the city has come to terms with is being a small city."

Youngstown approved a 2010 plan. The goal: "A safe, clean, enjoyable, sustainable, attractive city," Kobak says.

The city long was better known for gritty steel mills than green space. Now that the mills are gone, there is plenty of space. With the help of a grant, Youngstown preserved 260 acres. It's targeting neighborhoods and redesigning them with the help of residents who stayed.

The city may let homeowners buy abandoned lots next door to create gardens. It's considering relaxing zoning rules to allow small horse farms or apple orchards. It's offering incentives for people to move out of abandoned areas.

"If you had three or four square blocks that at one time had 40 homes per block and now have maybe five homes total, we could relocate those people across the street and convert the vacant area into a large city park," Kobak says.Residents would live be living across from a park rather than being surrounded by decrepit homes and lots overgrown with weeds.

"If we're looking to preserve an area for green space, we may offer that person relocation money rather than rehab money," Kobak says.

Other cities may be less enthusiastic about shrinking but they're adjusting, nevertheless:

• St. Louis is reviewing abandoned commercial areas to determine if they're still needed. "We had a lot more people here," says Rollin Stanley, director of St. Louis' planning and urban design agency. "We had a lot more need for commercial strips. That need isn't here today."

The historic Gaslight Square area once teemed with nightclubs, theaters, bistros and art galleries. It was abandoned for more than 20 years. The city recently converted some parts to row houses and single-family homes.

"We have to rethink where we house people," Stanley says.Converting declining commercial areas to trendy residential housing has helped. Family incomes citywide increased 13.7% from 2004 to 2005, he says."We're rethinking land use allocation to meet the needs of the population we're going to see," he says. We're not shrinking. We're rethinking."

• Detroit spreads across 139 square miles and has almost a million fewer people than it did in 1950. Until now, revitalization efforts have focused on the 3-square-mile downtown.

This month, Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick announced an initiative in partnership with philanthropies, business, civic leaders and faith-based organizations that will target six neighborhoods that make up less than 10% of the city. "Some neighborhoods don't need to be addressed right away," says Matt Allen, the mayor's press secretary.

In February, the city will focus on parks and recreational facilities, most of them developed from 1920 to 1958, when the city boomed. When people left, many facilities were barely used. "People don't walk five miles to go swim in an 80-year-old pool," Allen says. "It costs a heck of a lot of money to run an 80-year-old boiler."

The city already has closed 14 recreational facilities and built state-of-the-art centers in the northeast, where there is the highest concentration of families with children, and in the southwest, where the Hispanic population exploded.

So far, city leaders have refused to address this issue. It may be that they are reluctant to move forward on this this issue due to the uncertaincy of the rate of repopulation. It's hard to plan for the future when you don't have any idea of what the future will be. Much of the cause of that is due to lack of leadership in Baton Rouge where the Governor Kathleen Blanco Road Home Program is handing out checks like molases in January and no one wants to address the insurance crisis.

However, others have addressed this issue and hopefully a public dialog can begin soon. With or without the politicians.

Trash Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

2007-02-19T12:17:00.000-06:00

The French Quarter is finally being cleaned the way New Orleanians have been begging for years. And for that we can thank the guys who actually pick-up the trash.

The light-blue garbage can was full, but Cornelius Washington twirled it across the pavement like a 70-pound ballerina. From his gloves, the can danced to the back of a garbage truck at the edge of Canal Street, where Washington's younger colleague "T," Torreyon Davis, waited.

Davis reached out with one hand, flipped the can into the air upside down and tapped it against the truck, spilling its contents into the truck's big metal jaws. Then he flicked the empty can back to Washington.

The performance earned hoots from a group of college kids standing nearby, draped in flashing beads. "Did you see those garbage men?" said one, punching his friend on the arm. Washington raised a gloved hand in acknowledgment, then ran alongside the moving truck and hopped on.
Washington, who has ridden garbage trucks in New Orleans for 15 years, said that those kids must have lived a deprived childhood, one that didn't include garbage workers hefting cans across the street. Over the past few decades, many cities have moved to automated garbage collection, using trucks with metal arms that reach out to grab plastic trash bins. In those places, there's no need for hoppers, the guys who ride the back of the truck.

Other cities may still hire hoppers, but to Washington they seem lackluster. "They got a textbook thing," Washington said. "They stop the truck. They step off the truck. They pick up the can. They dump it. Then they put the can back down in that one spot."

But in New Orleans, where street crews have always prided themselves on their choreography, a new city garbage contractor is earning plaudits for its work. The best place to view these shows and the result of them is the French Quarter, where SDT Waste and Debris Service crews have been collecting garbage twice a day, seven days a week, since Jan. 1.

Almost overnight, French Quarter residents -- historically, not an easy bunch to please -- began raving about the tidiness of the Quarter. To some, however, SDT's first big test is Mardi Gras. Can they handle streets crammed with drunks, huge piles of garbage and sidewalks scattered with parade detritus? Will their work suffer?

Perhaps the people of SDT Waste and Debris Service can go down to Tulane and Broad to show the DA how to clean up the streets.

Breaking Away

2007-02-12T15:50:00.000-06:00

East Baton Rouge Parish has recently completed the Mississippi River Levee Bicycle Path from downtown Baton Rouge to the LSU campus. Some would like to extend it all the way to New Orleans.

A recently completed stretch of paved bike path that runs atop the Mississippi River levee from downtown Baton Rouge to LSU soon could be extended all the way to New Orleans.
The proposed levee bike path would run an estimated 110 miles and cost an estimated $33 million.
The first step is to complete a $250,000 master plan that could qualify the project for federal funds likely to cover 80 percent of construction costs. The other 20 percent would come from local and state sources.
Pete Newkirk, public works director for the city-parish government, said he plans to ask the Metro Council Wednesday to chip in $12,500 to help fund the $250,000 study.
Bruce Wickert, an experienced cyclist who the heads the local Metropolitan Planning Organization's Bicycle and Pedestrian Committee, said a bike path has already been constructed from Audubon Park in New Orleans north almost to Norco.
Wickert said that if the proposed Mississippi River Levee Bike Path becomes a reality, it will likely be used in segments for recreational purposes.
"But you could travel the whole 110 miles about six hours at a moderate pace of about 17 mph," Wickert said.

East Baton Rouge and Jefferson Parishes are now in the breakaway, the state needs to suck wheels and catch up to get the project going.

Catch A Wave And Your Sittin' On Top Of The World

2007-02-12T09:03:00.000-06:00

Unfortunately flood victims in south Louisiana are finding out that raising their homes is no day at the beach. Insurance companies are making it a cruncher and some may be headed for a wipe out.

Even before the storm, Fitzpatrick's Lakeview Drive house was shoulder-height off the ground.

To make it as resilient as possible against any future storms, Fitzpatrick is rebuilding with rebar and concrete pilings, and he is raising the house another two to three feet, as required by the new flood advisory maps from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to maintain flood insurance coverage. When he's done, the house will be eight to nine feet off the ground.
But Fitzpatrick is encountering opposition from an unlikely source: his insurance company. Allstate told him he's ineligible for homeowners insurance if he raises his home.

"I'm actually rebuilding higher than it was before, but now they're saying, 'We have a rule that if it's four feet above the ground, you've got to get the state plan, the Citizens plan, and it's always been that way,' " a dumbfounded Fitzpatrick said. "I said, 'Ya'll never had a problem with this before.' Of course the home has to be elevated: I'm trying to protect it from the storm surge."

In short, Fitzpatrick is trapped in a post-Katrina insurance conundrum that could affect thousands of people in south Louisiana if other insurance companies have rules similar to those at Allstate. Fitzpatrick is required to elevate his home to maintain flood insurance coverage, but if he elevates he won't be able to maintain a private homeowners insurance policy.

Allstate's excuse seems bogus to me.

Fitzpatrick said his Allstate agent told him that the rule started in 2000 because of concerns that if a house is too high off the ground, people might fall off of railings or try to barbecue under the house and catch the place on fire.

Current building codes require that decks/balcony's over 30" above grade be constructed with a minimum 42" high guardrail sufficient to resist at least 200 pounds lateral force. Besides, I don't believe homeowners insurance covers falls. I would imagine that is covered by ones' medical insurance.

Nonetheless, people in Lakeview are raising their homes and not bailing out. Awesome! My guess is that these people don't use dweebs for their insurance. Kowabunga!

Wrecking Krewe

2007-02-09T09:48:00.000-06:00

The Lake Forest Plaza Mall is finally meeting the wrecking ball. After being closed for the past year and a half and empty (except for a couple of stores) for several years prior, developers are now finding use for the existing site.

The Plaza's owners have closed their deal with Lowe's, and demolition of the entire mall -- with the exception of the closed 12-screen Grand Theatre -- is already under way. The Lowe's store is slated to open by the end of 2007, perhaps even by the fall, Lowe's Regional Vice President Debbie Hobbs-Singletary said. She also confirmed that the Lowe's on Elysian Fields Avenue has become the best-performing site in the 1,375-store chain.

Doing business as Lake Forest Plaza LLC, mall owners Ashton Ryan and Gowri Kailas said they are using a loan to pay for the demolition of the 1.1 million-square-foot damaged and vacant mall, but said they weren't allowed to identify the lender.

A Lowe's corporate spokeswoman Monday declined to discuss financing for the project, as did a regional manager Tuesday.

Lowe's has committed to building its $18.5 million store, and discussions are ongoing with other unidentified retailers that could occupy sites in the new complex, including an electronics chain, a discount retailer, and an unidentified department store. The plan sets aside 225,000 square feet for a discount retailer and 100,000 square feet for a department store.

In addition, about 600,000 square feet of retail or office space will be distributed among nearly two dozen buildings on the site. One parking garage will even have townhouses atop it. A second phase eventually would add even more retail outlets in front of the department store and wrap retail space around two other parking garages.

But this promises to be more than just your average strip mall.

Kailas said plans for the new complex are based on concepts of noted "new urbanist" architect Andres Duany, who has been active in neighborhood planning in the post-Hurricane Katrina recovery.

Whatever the final result is, I think it bodes well that corporations are investing capital in this part of the city.

However, don't be surprised if this deal falls into the pothole.

But a controversial financing mechanism called tax-increment financing, or TIF, might complicate the deal. Under the TIF, part of the future sales taxes generated at Lowe's and the other stores in the new complex would be used to cover the costs of developing much of the planned retail space. Legislation passed in 2003 created a special financing district to help pay for the site's redevelopment by drawing 4 cents of the sales tax for economic development purposes. Kailas said the TIF money is needed for infrastructure improvements and to build 600,000 square feet of retail, office and other construction that will round out the development.

Nagin said the TIF is an option, but he was noncommittal to its use other than to say that "right now this is a self-sustaining project" with all private financing.

TIFs have been highly controversial, and unless they are structured according to legal precedent established by the Louisiana Supreme Court, they also can be difficult to accomplish.

U-Haul; We Bawl

2007-02-08T15:11:00.000-06:00

Fed up with the pace of recovery (or lack thereof), many New Orleans residents are pulling up stakes and gettin' outta Dodge.

A year and a half after Hurricane Katrina, an alarming number of residents are leaving or seriously thinking of getting out for good.

They have become fed up with the violence, the bureaucracy, the political finger-pointing, the sluggish rebuilding and the doubts about the safety of the levees.

"The mayor says, `Come back home. Every area should come back.' For what?" said Genevieve Bellow, who rebuilt her home in heavily damaged eastern New Orleans but has been unable to get anything done about the trash and abandoned apartment buildings in her neighborhood and may leave town. "I have no confidence in anything or anybody."

A survey released in November found that 32 percent of city residents polled may leave within two years. University of New Orleans political scientist Susan Howell, who did the survey, said more will give up if the recovery does not pick up speed.

In fact, figures from the nation's top three moving companies suggest more people left the area than moved into it last year.

"People are in a state of limbo. They're asking, `Is it worth it for me to stay? Is it worth it to invest?' If you don't feel safe, from crime or the levees, and you see destruction every day when you drive, it becomes discouraging," Howell said.

If there is an exodus, it could mean more than just a shrunken New Orleans. It could mean a poorer city, financially and culturally, and a more desperate one, too, since the people likely to leave are the most highly educated and younger.

Mayor Ray Nagin and Gov. Kathleen Blanco have urged residents to return under rebuilding plans with names like Bring New Orleans Back and Road Home. The mayor has warned that the recovery will take a decade and has urged people not to give up hope.

But New Orleans' population appears to have plateaued at about half the pre-storm level of 455,000, well short of Nagin's prediction of 300,000 by the end of 2006. And in many ways, it is a meaner city than it was before the hurricane.

In a related story, the Road Home Program continues to hand out checks at a snails pace.

Coast To (the) Coast

2007-02-07T10:17:00.000-06:00

The Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority has released its revised master plan for coastal restoration.

A revised state coastal protection and restoration master plan unveiled Tuesday moves a proposed pair of major Mississippi River diversions to a location closer to the mouth of the river, as Plaquemines Parish officials and residents had requested.

Presented in Baton Rouge at a meeting of the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, the master plan also for the first time outlined a list of flood protection and coastal-restoration projects to be financed by $523 million in offshore oil lease payments.

A summary of the projects are as follows:

Divert Mississippi River water at Violet to replenish wetlands along the MR-GO and in easternmost New Orleans.
Pump treated wastewater to create marsh, including cypress forest, in the wetlands between the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway and the 40-Arpent Canal in St. Bernard Parish.
Pump sediment through a pipeline from the Mississippi River to rebuild wetlands in Jefferson, Plaquemines and Lafourche parishes.
Protect the Lake Borgne shoreline and create marsh along its northern shore to strengthen part of the fragile eastern New Orleans land bridge that separates that lake from Lake Pontchartrain.
Rebuild the southern edge of East Grand Terre Island, just east of Grand Isle in Plaquemines Parish.
Divert fresh water from the Mississippi into the Blind River in St. James Parish to reduce damage to wetlands and cypress swamp.
Protect the shoreline and rebuild wetlands along the east bank of Bayou Rigolettes in Jefferson Parish with dedicated dredging.
Remove a floodgate at Bayou Lamoque on the Mississippi River that will turn the project into a freshwater diversion, building wetlands in California Bay in eastern Plaquemines
Parish.
Begin the planning process for redesigning the bottom of the Mississippi River to allow major diversions to create new delta.
Begin building a lock on the Houma Navigation Channel that will both protect inland areas from storm surge and provide a channel for freshwater to wetland restoration areas.
Protect the northwestern shoreline of Lake Salvador.
Buy easements and take other measures to protect coastal forests, mostly cypress, on private property.

How Slow Can You Go?

2007-02-06T21:23:00.000-06:00

The Road Home Program keeps promising to speed the process up, but the results are still unimpressive.

BATON ROUGE — The Road Home program continues to struggle to unspool money in the $7.5-billion homeowner aid program.
With 105,739 applications received to date and 74,571 appointments scheduled or held, officials say they are primed to increase the payout pace.
Benefits have been calculated 34,779 homeowners, which means they can agree to accept the money being offered, but just 532 homeowners have done so, including just 141 in the past week of the 19-week program. That's an average of 28 homeowners being paid per week

At this rate it'll take approximately 314 years to dole out all the money. Maybe I'll enter my pet snail in the next marathon and see who finishes first.

Flying High

2007-02-05T17:43:00.000-06:00

A Houston base airline will begin non-stop flight from Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport.

ExpressJet is the first new airline carrier to bring flight service to New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina struck on Aug. 29, 2005.

The airline will bring back daily nonstop flights to Kansas City, Mo.; Birmingham; Jacksonville, Fla., and the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina. Service from New Orleans to those cities had not been available since before Katrina.

ExpressJet will also offer nonstop service to Austin and San Antonio.

A spokeswoman for ExpressJet said today that the cities were selected based on market research showing a business demand for daily flight service to those cities, as well as a need for residents who were scattered to those cities by Hurricane Katrina to come back to New Orleans regularly.

“All of these cities are very important to New Orleans doing well,” said Dan Packer, chairman of the New Orleans Aviation Board.

Tourism officials said the new flights are great news for New Orleans’ struggling tourism industry, which before Katrina was responsible for $210 million, or 35 percent, of the city’s operating budget, according to the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention & Visitors Bureau.

“We hope to help you rebuild your town,” ExpressJet spokeswoman Karen Miles told city, airport and tourism officials at a news conference today.

Sean Hunter, New Orleans Interim Director of Aviation, said receiving a new carrier, six new destinations and 12 additional flights per day are significant steps toward returning to pre-Katrina levels of air service.

It will restore flight service to about 75 percent of pre-Katrina levels, and restore the number of destinations to about 90 percent of pre-Katrina levels, Hunter said.

Adam Smith, Call Your Editor

2007-02-05T16:15:00.000-06:00

It's said that people in Louisiana do things a little different. Why even the laws of supply and demand don't always apply.

NEW ORLEANS - John Schaff, a New Orleans real estate agent, recently advised a property owner to lower the asking price of a condominium at 3915 St. Charles Ave. by $20,000.
Before Hurricane Katrina, the 1,000-square-foot condo would have sold for the original asking price of $329,000 — but not these days, Schaff said.
The growing condo glut in New Orleans has experts predicting prices will fall and developers will have to target a less-affluent market.
In Uptown and the Warehouse District, 349 condos were for sale from October through Tuesday, Schaff said. That’s a 112 percent increase over the 165 condos for sale during the same period in 2005 and 2006, and a 92 percent increase over the 181 for sale during the same period in 2004 and 2005.
“There are a lot of units on the market. You’re going to see asking prices start to come down more,” said Shaun Talbot, vice president of Talbot Realty Group.
Talbot described the downtown condo market as soft.
Fewer units are selling.
Condo sales are down from pre-Katrina levels, according to the New Orleans Metropolitan Association of Realtors.
In January, 50 condos sold in all of Orleans Parish, down from 88 last January and 81 in January 2005. Only January 2004 had fewer sales with 30.
“We’ve have a lot of people looking and not really acting,” Talbot said. “They know there are a lot of units on the market. But there doesn’t seem to be that same sense of urgency (as immediately after Katrina).”
Average selling prices are rising, according to NOMAR.
In January, the average price of a condo sold in Orleans Parish was $268,216, up 5 percent from $254,954 in January 2006, up 30 percent from $206,534 in January 2005 and up 12 percent from $239,310 in January 2004.
“It’s by no means a depressed market in terms of price. But you’re not going to see the incredible double-digit increases on a year-to-year basis that we’ve seen in the past.” Talbot said.
Six months from now, condos might command higher prices, Schaff said. But not now.
So, some developers are turning their attention to a lower price range in hopes of attracting buyers. New Orleans native James Huger is one.
Construction is wrapping up Huger’s $4-million Charlotte Commons, a three-story, 24-unit project on Carondelet Street one block off St. Charles Avenue near Louisiana Avenue.
Huger is selling condos for $197,000 to $325,000. They consist of a dozen 1,250-square-foot two-bedroom, two-bathroom units and a dozen, 875-square-foot two-bedroom, one-bathroom units. They all have wood floors and granite countertops. Some have views of downtown.
“We’re after the people who can’t afford the traditional Warehouse (District) stuff, who want something new, good location and secure parking. We try to price things a little bit under the market,” he said.
Huger calls his project the “canary in the cave” because the market’s absorption of the condos will show how much demand there really is for housing, he said.
“We’re just rolling the dice that we can sell them,” he said.
It’s too soon to tell how much demand there will be for Huger’s condos, which he plans to finish this month. Huger held his first open house Jan. 20.
“In a way he’s right. If there is that much demand for housing and he’s got a product that’s reasonably priced in an area that’s OK, not fantastic ... then that tells us that the market is not that strong,” Talbot said.
One thing going against Huger’s project, Talbot and others say, is that it’s on the “wrong side” of St. Charles Avenue because it is not on the river side.
But if Huger prices the condos right, they “should sell,” Talbot said.
“I think we’ve brought a product to the market at a price point that no one else is bringing to the market, certainly not for new construction,” said Larry Patterson of G&H Construction & Restoration, which is building Huger’s condos.
John Rareshide, a New Orleans developer, said the New Orleans condo market is healthy for units priced around $200,000.
“It’s a price point. That’s what’s selling right now,” he said.
Rareshide recently sold five, 425-square-foot, one-bedroom condos for $135,000 each at 1200-1210 Austerlitz St. The units were renovated, he said.
He also developed 12 condos at 3308 Prytania St. Those units hit the market roughly two weeks ago. Rareshide is selling the 531-square-foot, one-bedroom, one-bathroom condos for $179,000.

My own analysis of this is that those who could afford the pricy condos in the Warehouse District have already bought into the market. Those with a smaller budget, till now, have been left out. Whether or not they will buy into that market remains to be seen.

In the meantime, people are still waiting for their LRA money to rebuild the own homes.

So Sue Me

2007-02-02T20:25:00.000-06:00

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers probably thought they were being glib when they claimed that they couldn't be sued. Well a Federal Judge says otherwise.

Residents of the three areas flooded worst by Hurricane Katrina can sue the Army Corps of Engineers over claims that a poorly designed navigation channel caused catastrophic flooding during Hurricane Katrina, a federal judge ruled Friday.
The Corps and federal government had argued they were immune from claims that the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet caused the damage to the Lower 9th Ward, eastern New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish.

But U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval refused to throw out a suit claiming that floods in those areas were caused by defects the Corps had known about for decades. There is no way to tell at this point that every decision about the waterway commonly called the "Mr. Go" were based in "social, economic or political policy," which would exempt them from lawsuits, Duval wrote.

Corps officials were not immediately available for comment.

I think speechless would would be more apropos.

At issue is a navigation channel built in the 1950s as a shortcut between the Gulf of Mexico and New Orleans.

The channel has widened and allowed salt water to creep into interior marshes and lakes, killing swamp forests and marshlands. Scientists have repeatedly called it one of the worst environmental problems in the nation, and called for it to be closed.

Residents and scientists had long warned that the broad channel acted as a conduit for storm surge from hurricanes. The plaintiffs argued that storm surge roared up through the channel and overwhelmed the levees protecting their homes.

The Corps says the channel did no such thing, and that the storm surge was so high that the channel did little to increase the level of flooding.

The Corps has been reluctant to close the channel, arguing that it still served navigational needs. Shippers have also lobbied the agency to keep it open. Since Katrina, however, the Corps has said plugging the Mr. Go makes sense based on economic considerations, not concerns over flooding.

Duvall said plaintiffs should get a hearing at least about three allegations:

--The Corps failed to ask the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries about their worries about the canal's alignment and its effect on wetlands, and to present those concerns to Congress.

--The number of decisions made in building and maintaining the canal and whether the record shows they were based in policy.

--Whether some decisions were not based in policy, and whether those failed to meet standard engineering practices.

Remember, these are the same people who said that the levees in New Orleans failed because they were overtopped and continued to say that until long after engineers proved conclusively that the levees failed because they were substandard.Discovery in this trial will be very interesting.

Unified New Orlean$ Plan

2007-01-31T12:58:00.001-06:00

The Unified New Orleans Plan has been released to the public. The Times-Picayune give some background information.

Architects of the Unified New Orleans Plan said Tuesday that their agenda for citywide recovery will cost $14 billion during the next decade, requiring large infusions of government and private money to pay for homeowner incentives, major infrastructure repairs and economic development projects.

"At the end of the day, we're going to have a much better city than we had pre-Katrina, should this plan be implemented," said Troy Henry, a coordinator of the citywide planning effort, the outgrowth of months of public hearings.

It remains to be seen how city leaders, who are giving tentative backing to the unified plan, will fare as they try to persuade Congress, foundations and private investors to put money into the varied rebuilding ideas. Some of the $14 billion -- the exact amount isn't known -- is already available to the city through storm recovery programs, such as the FEMA program that pays to repair or replace public infrastructure damaged by the disaster.
Core features of the broad plan include incentive grant programs that would help city residents elevate their homes, rebuild slab homes using more traditional building styles and help residents relocate from flood-prone, mostly abandoned neighborhoods to more viable ones on higher ground. Those programs alone would cost more than $4 billion in coming years and would supplement any grants already available through the state's Road Home program.

Among dozens of other projects, the plan calls for spending more than $800 million to renovate or build schools and nearly $10 million to add a network of police substations. It also says $2.2 billion should be spent during the next decade on "ongoing replacement of all major and minor city streets."

In its budgetary scale, the recovery plan nearly doubles the amount of federal grant money reserved for the Road Home program, much-criticized because of processing delays.

What is striking about the basics of this plan is practicality of its proposals.

Initiatives for people to raise their homes. ($1.2 billion over five years)
Repair, renovate and rebuild schools. ($831 million over five years)
Rehab and rebuild 5.000 low-income housing units. ($650 million over five years)
Develop network of police stations. ($9.7 million over five years)
Streamline blighted housing and "lot next door" programs. ($1.1 million over five years)

That adds up to $14 billion my friends. That means, in order to make this happen, additional grants from the Congress will be needed. And this does not count the money needed to implement the individual neighborhood plans which promise to be more of the things we expect from city planning such as bicycle/walking paths (sidewalks), parks, neighborhoods schools, more street lighting, zoning modifications and improved infrastructure. None of these plans involve anything that can be superfluous or trivial. Most of them involve infrastructure and services that taxpayers pay for anyway.

But what is striking about this plan is the lack of grandiosity of other plans. This is what will make the plan much more feasible. Lets hope so.

Planning Status

2007-01-29T15:34:00.000-06:00

Mayor Ray Nagin comments on the status of the Unified New Orleans Plan. Click on the link to listen in.

Keeping Track

2007-01-29T15:08:00.000-06:00

The Brookings Institution has been keeping track of the status of the recovery of New Orleans.

This months summary has been released with some somewhat positive stats.

Housing

• Housing construction continues to increase, indicated by the fact that new residential housing
permits exceeded pre-Katrina levels in both October and November for the first time since the storm.
• Home demolitions continue to trend upward: 649 additional homes were torn down over the last
month, bringing the total number of demolitions in the metropolitan area to over 4,200 houses.
• The number of residential properties for sale dropped slighted over the holidays, particularly in the
hurricane-affected parishes. This tightening of the market could signal strengthening of real estate prices.

Economy

• One more hotel reopened in New Orleans this past month. Now fully 90% of all hotels in the city are
back in business.
• Traffic at the Louis Armstrong International Airport continued to tick upward in October and
November as nearly 300,000 passengers both arrived and departed in each of those two months.
• Louisiana unemployment claims trended slightly upward in the last four weeks of 2006.
• Recently released figures for the first quarter of 2006 substantiate what is well known locally – that
average weekly wages have increased since the storm in many sectors. Average weekly wages have
jumped across almost all sectors including accommodations & food services, construction, educational
services, finance and insurance, utilities, and public administration. But wages have remained stagnant or
fallen in a few categories such as agriculture, and arts & entertainment.

Thats the good news. Now the bad:

Infrastructure

• Infrastructure recovery is largely at a standstill with only one new school opened in December, no new
hospitals, no new libraries, and only one new child-care center in New Orleans.
• The level of public transit service has remained unchanged for the last twelve months. Just 49% of all
public transportation routes and 17 percent of buses are in operation.

What can we conclude from this? By the looks of things, the private sector is out pacing the public sector. As for the ramifications, I'll leave that to the reader.

Getting Results...Not

2007-01-26T08:32:00.000-06:00

That is all.

Screw-Up, Move Up.

2007-01-25T16:51:00.000-06:00

As the old saying in government goes, "screw-up, move up". New Orleans is want to prove that old maxim true.

If you've ever asked yourself, as you've watched the post-Katrina morass of incompetence and violence that has engulfed New Orleans, whether that city has suffered enough, you have your answer. And that answer is "no."
N'awlins, get ready for...the magical world of Lee P. Brown!
Brown, who was Atlanta's public-safety commissioner during a famously inept serial-murder investigation, who was New York's police commissioner during the ineptly handled Crown Heights riots, who was Houston mayor while the HPD crime lab was run...eptly? Guess again!...has been hired to solve New Orleans' massive violent-crime problem.
If his time here is any indication, Brown will implement a two-pronged attack. He will a) bore everyone to death, using content-less, cliché-filled, charisma-free speeches to put criminals into a stupor; and b) take a lot of taxpayer-funded out-of-town trips. We're sure Rome and London need to be studied closely for tips on how to stop Ninth Ward gangbangers.
Brown told the Louisiana Weekly that "there is no silver bullet that is going to say that this is going to be done tomorrow...Working together, you can get the job done."
We're kind of surprised Brown didn't mention making New Orleans "a world-class city," but it's still early.
New Orleans seems to be slightly underwhelmed by the announcement.
"I haven't a clue if this guy is going to do any good. I hope he does," said Spud McConnell, popular talk-show host at the city's WWL-AM. "Lord knows we've had enough people come over here, get a big paycheck for giving their opinion and then walking away."
CB Forgotston, a blogger who closely follows the crime wave at www.forgotston.com, also is skeptical. "In Louisiana, [it's not] that we lack plans...We don't need any more plans, frankly. I think what we lack in New Orleans is implementation and common sense," he says.
Forgotston, a lawyer and community activist, doesn't seem blown away by the dynamism that is Lee P. Brown: "He's going to take six months to study it, 'maximum.' And, you know, maximum always becomes a minimum. So my point is: How many people are going to die between now and the next six months, while we're waiting on a plan?"
We don't know, CB. But we do know that now when it happens, Lee Brown will be there with a platitude to make everything seem better.

Too bad The Three Stooges are deceased, I think I found a job for them. Just forget about the Governor's office. That job is taken.

D'day Mate

2007-01-25T08:59:00.000-06:00

Australia wants more trade with the U.S. and has plans for New Orleans to be one of its hubs.

NEW ORLEANS — The Australian Trade Commission, the Australian Government’s export facilitation agency, is opening a trade center in New Orleans.
The center will help Australian exporters enter foreign markets, including the United States.
The center is looking for a district manager to run the office in the World Trade Center. The manager would report to the Australian consul-general and trade commissioner based in Atlanta. The district manager would work the region of Louisiana and Mississippi with emphasis on the Gulf Coast.
Marketing expertise, contacts and trade information is required along with a working knowledge of market conditions, customer relationships and import and distributor contacts with emphasis on projects related to the reconstruction and revitalization in the areas of modular housing, infrastructure and industrial products.

Thats Beaut! I'd like to start with some dinki di amber fluid.

Your Heart Says Yes, Yes, Yes. But Your Mind Says No, No, No.

2007-01-22T17:05:00.000-06:00

New Orleanians seem to be in favor of the Unified N.O. Plan but have reservations about how to implement it.

The responses that audience members provided by way of computerized keypads suggested that most have little faith in traditional government bureaucracies' ability to carry out the behemoth task of rebuilding.

For instance, residents were asked whether the final UNOP plan ought to give high priority to creating a program of voluntary incentives to encourage residents to live near one another, along with a separate program to strengthen enforcement of blighted-property laws.
Though they generally supported the ideas, the residents also questioned the "integrity of the political process" needed to bring the plans to fruition and noted that the city did not have a good system to eradicate blight before Hurricane Katrina.

"There's billions of dollars coming into this city, and there's nobody to hold them accountable. We need to hold them to the fire," said Robert Dees, whose Algiers home was ruined by Katrina's winds. "On paper, everything looks good, but what about implementing it? And what about accountability?"

Given the atrocious track record of the LRA's Road Home Program, people down here are rightfully skeptical of local and state government implementing any kind of plan. Maybe this is a wake-up call for residents finally take control of their state and city and put people in charge who will do something about their community and not their cronies.

Tug-O-War

2007-01-22T16:34:00.000-06:00

There is friction between two groups for which I have sympathy for both, the homeowners and the preservationists.

The often-contentious relationship between historic preservationists and private homeowners has flared up here in recent weeks, as activists determined to save the city's distinct architecture face off against Hurricane Katrina victims who can't afford to repair architecturally significant homes — and need a place to live.

On one side are Laureen Lentz and Karen Gadbois, who say it is their "duty" to safeguard the architecture that distinguishes New Orleans: The eclectic mix of ground-hugging Creole cottages with steeply pitched roofs; low-slung, horizontal Arts and Crafts bungalows; ornately trimmed narrow, rectangular "shotgun" houses.

On the other side are homeowners like Rosilyn Anderson and Linda Ireland, who want to demolish their Katrina-ravaged homes and replace them with new modular structures.

In the middle is the city government, which decides what is saved and what can go. The decisions could lead to a lingering landscape of blight.

It's a question of preservation for the long-term good versus immediate need in the short term, said Richard Campanella, a geographer at Tulane University who has been studying building trends in the city since Hurricane Katrina destroyed more than 123,000 properties here.

"I fully understand and appreciate the predicament," Campanella said, but his support is fully behind preservation. "Our incredible inventory of distinctive, historic, well-built structures … form integral parts of expansive neighborhoods.

"This is an extremely valuable resource that should be preserved. This is money in the bank for New Orleans. When you tear down, it's like a gap in a smile, a tear in a fabric."

Both parties have an important role to play in the rebuilding of New Orleans and both are correct in their stance.

The homeowners, often with finite resources, are stuck between the cost of renovation versus the cost of building anew. Often they find that new construction is cheaper than renovation. Any architect will tell them the same thing.

The preservationists have charged themselves with protecting an architectural legacy that has largely made New Orleans what it is and hopefully will continue to be.

Rather than spending their time at loggerheads, the preservations might better spend their resources exploring ways to mitigate homeowners cost of renovation. I'm no tax attorney but I do know there are tax credits available for renovating historic homes. If that is not enough, they should look to lobbying Congress grants/credits/rebates etc... the help sweeten the pot for renovation to be much more fiscally viable for homeowners.

Beware What You Ask For...

2007-01-18T15:18:00.000-06:00

The city of Vancouver's city planners wanted more people living downtown. The problem is, more people are living downtown.

When Simon Lim, president of the Holborn Group, bought a one-block building site in downtown Vancouver last summer, he had plans for a hotel and a commercial and condominium complex. But a few months later, city planners proposed rezoning the site, which is known as the Bay Parkade. The change would require Mr. Lim to double the amount of commercial space, with priority given to a new office tower.

“I have to admit when I first caught wind of this policy change, I wasn’t exactly a happy puppy,” said Mr. Lim, who is developing another downtown hotel-condo project, called Vancouver’s Turn. “I suspect there is some profit in developing commercial, but it is significantly more profitable to build residential.”
Over the last 15 years, downtown Vancouver has become a leader in North America’s urban housing renaissance. Under Vancouver’s “living first” policy, which was adopted 20 years ago, the downtown population has increased to 80,000 from 40,000, out of a total city population of 600,000. By 2030, planners expect 120,000 people to live in the city’s shimmering glass skyscrapers, which overlook the snowcapped North Shore mountains, English Bay and Coal Harbour.
But now, city officials and businesses are concerned that downtown Vancouver may become a victim of its own success, and that residential development will encroach on jobs and office space. Officials put a moratorium on new housing near the business district two years ago, after allowing two condo towers — one called Living Shangri-La — in what was supposed to be a commercial-only zone.

New Orleans is currently seeing a similar trend with more residents moving away from lower, flooded neighborhoods to the high ground, specifically downtown, the Warehouse District and parts of Uptown.

While people moving Uptown is not a problem as it is primarily residential. However, New Orleans' city planners need to beware not to push this too hard. Downtown and the Warehouse District have been historically businesses. Residential condos are a recent phenomenon. The goal of many of these city planners is to create mixed use developments so that people don't have to go very for for work or shopping. That is part of the appeal of living downtown. Otherwise we will end up with suburbia in the middle of downtown.

Red Handed

2007-01-18T14:26:00.000-06:00

John Blutarsky at The Third Battle of New Orleans relates the story of an architectural thief getting away with his crimes and names names.

Murder is one thing, but this is unaccetptable.

Neighbors

2007-01-17T13:35:00.000-06:00

I wonder if this story is related to my previous post.

Clean As A Whistling Dixie Beer

2007-01-17T12:52:00.000-06:00

Last month I posted about the City Council pending rejection of the city's contract for trash collection in the French Quarter, CBD and Warehouse District. Well the contract has been approved and implemented and so far, if this article is accurate, most people appear to be happy with the results.

Just last month, French Quarter denizen Louis Sahuc was among the most vocal critics of the city's new trash-collection contract for the Quarter and the Central Business District, one of three new garbage deals that riled up residents across town for their hefty price tags and newfangled service enhancements that many derided as over the top.

But days into the contract's seven-year term, Sahuc is so impressed with the result that he has agreed to appear in a TV commercial for SDT Waste & Debris, the Chalmette-based contractor whose work in four downtown neighborhoods has left them tidier than many residents recall ever seeing.

That is not to say that the current arrangement does not have its critics, mainly with the requirement that residents us large refuse containers provided free by SDT.

Meanwhile, residents of the French Quarter and Central Business District have won a key concession from City Hall: After weeks of objections, at least some of them will not have to use the plastic trash bins that are designed to be lifted by mechanized arms on new garbage trucks.

Residents of those neighborhoods who say that the wheeled bins would be too big to store on their small lots or inside their apartments will be able to ask City Hall for an exemption from the cart requirement. Those who get excused will be allowed to put out trash in three-ply black garbage bags without facing fines.

Residents who don't get the dispensation will have to use the 32-gallon trash bins designated for downtown areas. Residents of most other neighborhoods will have to use 96-gallon bins.

Sanitation Director Veronica White said requests should be submitted by mail and will be evaluated on a "case-by-case basis." In a letter to French Quarter residents, she said exemptions will be approved for "residents who are disabled" or in cases where "the infrastructure does not allow for the storage of the roll cart."

Whatever the merit of the critics, I'm sure these issues will get ironed out over time. The time for trash talk is over and the time for picking it up is upon us.

"Damn the torpedoes, Full speed ahead!"

2007-01-15T12:51:00.000-06:00

The National WWII Museum (formally National D-Day Museum) is moving forward with its plans for a $300 million expansion.

After Hurricane Katrina, many people expected the National World War II Museum to abandon the ambitious expansion program it announced three years ago, its president said last week.

The museum's board of trustees felt differently, museum President Gordon "Nick" Mueller told the New Orleans City Planning Commission.
"This museum is about the American spirit, and we thought we had to display a little bit of that spirit," Mueller said.

"Things were tough during World War II, too," he added.

As a result, even before fundraising is complete, the museum is ready to begin demolishing several buildings in the 1000 block of Magazine Street and constructing the first phase of an expansion that, once complete, will quadruple its size and help attract as many as 750,000 to 1 million visitors a year, three to four times as many as it was drawing before Katrina.

Officials hope to put the work out to bid by March or April.

From the WWII Museum website:

Voorsanger Architects, PC of New York City was chosen as the architectural design firm and Gallagher & Associates of Bethesda, Maryland, as the exhibition design firm in a design competition for the Museum’s capital expansion. Bart Voorsanger has gained wide recognition for projects in Europe, Japan and the United States on museums, universities and airport architecture. Recent projects include the Asia Society Museum, the master plan for the University of Virginia and the renovation of Terminal B at Newark Liberty International Airport. Gallagher is a full-service design firm with expertise in museum planning and exhibition design. The firm has worked with the Smithsonian Institution, the International Spy Museum and the Newark Museum. The firm is currently designing the Visitors Center for the American Cemetery at Omaha Beach in Normandy. Mathes Brierre of New Orleans has been selected by Voorsanger as the local architect of record for the project. The firm has been involved with many New Orleans projects such as the Aquarium of the Americas, the Place St. Charles office building and New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts.

Images courtesy Voorsanger Architects

The location of the WWII Museum is ripe for development as it stands between the heart of the Arts District and the CBD which is a popular viewing location for Mardi Gras parades. As is typical for so many of the neighborhoods of New Orleans, there lies seams between neighborhoods that often get neglected by commerce and development.

The D-Day Museum brought a little life to an area that was dominated by empty buildings and machine shops. While much of that area still remains so, the expansion will hopefully be the kick-in-the-can that will spur further revitalization in a long dormant part of the city.

With that said, there are some preservation issues that must be addressed.

The museum's expansion plans have come before city agencies recently in two phases. First was a request for permission to demolish most of the buildings in the 1000 block of Magazine, plus two buildings on Andrew Higgins and two on Poeyfarre Street.

Although the expansion site is just outside the officially designated Warehouse Local Historic District, the staff of the city's Historic District Landmarks Commission evaluated all the buildings in question, rating three of "major architectural importance" and others of "architectural or historical significance," though in some cases compromised by later alterations.

Museum officials plan to retain or reconstruct all or parts of four buildings, at 1031, 1037, 1041 and 1043 Magazine, but to demolish a large building at 1005-11 Magazine that the Landmarks Commission rated of major importance. The Department of Safety and Permits said that building is "in a dangerous and hazardous condition," and the Landmarks Commission staff agreed that it is in such bad shape that demolition is warranted.
Neither the commission nor local preservation groups objected to any of the other proposed demolitions, and the requests sailed through the City Planning Commission and the City Council with no debate.

While I'm not intimately familiar with the building slated for demolition, my impression of those buildings as a whole, is that there is not much character inherent in them to warrant their preservation in lieu of the overall need for revitalization of the city.

Preservation in New Orleans is necessary for us to maintain the old world atmosphere as it exists, but sometimes that atmosphere needs to be sacrificed in order to move forward.

On The Air, er, Internet

2007-01-15T12:35:00.000-06:00

NOLA.com is now broadcasting its own internet radio featuring local artists and music.

Constrained By Reality

2007-01-08T17:24:00.000-06:00

Some are criticizing Hurricane Katrina victims for rebuilding their homes without raising their homes above potential flood waters.

After Katrina, teams of planners recommended that broad swaths of vulnerable neighborhoods be abandoned. Yet all areas of the city have at least some residents beginning to rebuild. With billions of dollars in federal relief for homeowners trickling in, more people are expected to follow.
Moreover, while new federal guidelines call for raising houses to reduce the damage of future floods, most returning homeowners do not have to comply or are finding ways around the costly requirement, according to city officials.
"It's terrifying: We're doing the same things we have in the past but expecting different results," said Robert G. Bea, a professor of civil engineering at the University of California at Berkeley and a former New Orleans resident who served as a member of the National Science Foundation panel that studied the city's levees.
"There are areas where it doesn't make any sense to rebuild -- they got 20 feet of water in Katrina," said Tom Murphy, a former Pittsburgh mayor who served on an Urban Land Institute panel for post-Katrina planning. "In those places, nature is talking to us, and we ought to be listening. I don't think we are."

But someone injects a little bit of reality into this debate.

Mike Centineo, the city's building chief, said, "Legally and morally, we're doing the right thing," but he acknowledged that most returning homeowners are not raising their houses to meet the new flood guidelines. "You wouldn't want to put people through more than they can endure. It's a catastrophe that happened. No one wants it to happen again. But they're just rebuilding as best they can."

People need to realize that we live in a world of constraints. Architects have to live with the force of gravity, building and zoning codes and pain-in-the-arse owners. All of which are hindrances to what we may actually want to do. Rebuilding a city is no different. Many have been critical of Mayor Ray Nagin for having a hands-off approach to the planning process. What they don't consider is that Mayor Nagin is a politician. And as such, he is limited in his power by the City Council who in turn are accountable to their constituents. Thus, none are prone to make decisions that will anger their voters. And telling some voters that they can't rebuild a home that they own is simply political suicide. Ergo, it won't happen.

So where do we go from here? Since most homes and businesses will not be built above the flood level, the government will have to provide the levee protection that we as taxpayers paid for already and are paying for again. For if the levees had been built properly, I wouldn't be doing the blog.

Swap Meet

2007-01-05T12:39:00.000-06:00

An aide to Mayor Nagin is floating a trial balloon that program could be instituted that would allow people or groups of people can swap their property in blighted areas of the city with properties in non blighted areas.

One possibility, said Ed Blakely, the city's new recovery czar: Let the city assemble vacant or blighted properties and offer them in swaps to homeowners -- preferably groups of neighbors -- who want to move out of sparsely populated neighborhoods and be closer to schools, shopping centers or other vital areas, while staying near their friends.

"What I'm suggesting here is not wide-eyed radicalism. It's been done before," Blakely said. "It works."
One idea among many: using the city's public land bank, the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, to allow neighbors along a nearly dead street to swap their properties for city-held lots in a more vital neighborhood of their own choosing.

I don't know how well this idea will go over with residents but at least it is a novel idea that avoids the heavy-hand of government compelling people to do or not do things they are unwilling to do.

The one hindrance the idea may face is that people have strong emotional ties to their neighborhoods. But, in many cases, it is because it is where their friends and family live. So this plan may not be totally without merit.

Ultimately the success or failure of this proposal will be determined by the residents of New Orleans, not some faceless bureaucrats in some far-away place. And that is how it should be.

Route 66

2006-12-20T08:52:00.000-06:00

Residents of Mid City probably feel like the citizens of Radiator Springs when the Mayor endorsed the Police Chief's recommendation to move the Endymion parade from its traditional Mid City route to Uptown due to safety and security concerns.

Mid-City residents cheered last week when six members of the New Orleans City Council said they favored letting the Krewe of Endymion parade on its traditional Mid-City route for Carnival 2007, rather than the Uptown route that it followed in 2006 and that Police Superintendent Warren Riley has said he wants it to follow again in 2007.

The residents' spirits fell this week when Mayor Ray Nagin said that as far as he is concerned, the Mid-City route is out of the question for next year.

Nagin said Monday that Endymion's procession, the largest of the Carnival season, will have to roll Uptown, like all of the city's other east bank parades, because it would be too dangerous to let it roll through what he depicted as an area of abandoned homes and buildings.
"It's not about money," Nagin said. He said Riley is concerned that he wouldn't have the resources to handle a serious crime along the Mid-City route on the same day that other parades will be marching Uptown.

But there appears to be a slim hope that Endymion could yet roll on the route it has followed almost every year since the 1960s.

Nagin said Tuesday he might change his mind if Riley tells him he no longer objects to the Mid-City route.

Mid City residents have a legitimate concern that their neighborhood will end up like Radiator Springs, forgotten. I think the Police Chief's concerns are legitimate also. However, I would also like to see Endymion roll in Mid City again.

So rather than continuing to fight to keep the 2007 route in Mid City, they should start fighting for 2008. As long as people don't forget about Endymion's tradition, it will roll in Mid City again.

Start Me Up

2006-12-19T12:28:00.000-06:00

One mile of the St. Charles streetcar from Canal Street to Lee Circle is up and running today. Only five more miles to go.

Tell Me Where People Want To Go So I May Lead Them There

2006-12-11T12:35:00.000-06:00

The Times-Picayune's art critic penned an article about the effort of Andrés Duany of DPZ and his efforts to recreate New Orleans one small piece at a time. Much of the article has been covered by this blog before so I wont belabor the point. Although one paragraph mentions something I think is important and should be discussed in more detail.

He dismissed showy, big-budget projects such as the "Reinventing the Crescent" plan as "silver bullet" solutions. New Orleans, he said, is historically addicted to them. The aquarium, Convention Center and world's fair were all silver bullets meant to save the struggling city. They were high-profile substitutes for more elemental changes to the municipal codes that, he believed, would have accomplished more over time. Duany puts great stock in municipal codes.

His objections, though, is tempered by the knowledge of what is really needed.

They were high-profile substitutes for more elemental changes to the municipal codes that, he believed, would have accomplished more over time. Duany puts great stock in municipal codes.

Taken independently he is correct. Taken as a whole he is wrong. New Orleans needs all these solutions. That is why I have consistently favored all of them even if it is with reservations.
All of the project Mr. Duany mentioned have improved the city though they have not solved all of the city's ills.

Bringing the city back will be a long-term and multifaceted slog through the cypress swamps. The journey will be hard, dirty and impossible without effective leadership. People like Andrés Duany are providing that leadership. But what makes his leadership so effective that he takes the effort to listen to the residents and brings them to where they wish to go.

MR-GO Gotta GoGo

2006-12-07T15:59:00.000-06:00

The Environmental Defense group has released calling for MR-GO to be closed by Congress.

The group Environmental Defense released a report urging Congress to take certain steps to control MRGO, called “Mr. Go.” It claims the channel costs taxpayers $11.8 million a year to maintain and degrades wetlands and cypress forests.

The report comes 10 days before the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is to present Congress with a plan to close MRGO to oceangoing ships, if not all water traffic.

“The community has been calling for the closure of MRGO for decades,” said Paul Harrison, coastal Louisiana project manager for Environmental Defense. “The next step is Congress’ part.”

Congress has directed $3.3 million to the corps to develop a closure plan. Also, the most recent congressional supplemental funding bill included $75 million for closure.
Among the report’s recommendations are:
Stop wetlands-killing saltwater intrusion by closing a hole cut through the Bayou la Loutre ridge by MRGO construction.
Build a vegetated buffer in front of the MRGO levee to disperse 95 percent of wave energy.
Reintroduce freshwater, sediment and nutrients to re-grow the central wetlands, cypress forests and Lake Borgne wetlands while pushing back saltwater.
Build four constrictions across MRGO to encourage the rest of the channel to fill in naturally and reduce the tendency of the channel to carry storm surge inland.

The entire report can be read here.

The Road Home-less Program

2006-12-06T12:30:00.000-06:00

Governor Kathleen Blanco's Road Home Program has been taking criticism from all directions due to the slooooowwww pace of distributing checks to flooded homeowners. Now, City Business has take up the task of tracking the rate of progress (or lack thereof) the the Road Home Program in making people whole.

Since last week, almost 2,000 homeowners have made their selections and mailed back their Benefit Option Letters to The Road Home. Since last week, almost 2,000 homeowners have made
However, just 56 of 85,256 applpicants have been paid. The average claim being paid totals $51,452.
Homeowners are marking their choices to stay in their homes, relocate to new homes in Louisiana or sell their homes and move out of state.
In November, The Road Home mailed more than 10,000 letters to homeowners, detailing their options and informing them of the award amounts for which they are eligible.
Upon receiving a homeowner’s letter, program officials are entering each homeowner’s response into the system and are compiling reports detailing the choices that homeowners are making. This information will be released as soon as it is available.
The Road Home is working to ensure that homeowners understand the content of their letters. Each homeowner who has received a letter will also receive a phone call from a program representative to answer any questions they may have about their awards or the closing process.
Some phone calls have already been made to applicants. Homeowners should carefully read the instructions contained within the letter when making their choice. Those homeowners with questions about their letters are encouraged to call The Road Home hotline at (888) ROAD-2-LA and choose prompt No. 6. Staffing at the call center is being increased on a daily basis to accommodate the expected influx of homeowner calls.

Since the program began sometime around early October, just 56 checks have been mailed. At that rate, all applicants should be made whole about 270 years from now. I understand that the wheels of government turn slowly, but this is ridiculous.

Sister Act

2006-12-05T09:59:00.000-06:00

The Servants of Mary, Ministers to the Sick have returned to their convent in Gentilly. I didn't know they were here before the storm but I'm glad to know they're back after the storm.

The Servants of Mary, Ministers to the Sick have called New Orleans home since 1914, spending nearly a century tending to the sick and dying in their time of greatest need. The devastation Katrina left behind threatened to permanently chase the 18 nuns from their beloved city.

"We never evacuated in our whole lives," said Mother Superior Silvia Juarez. "When we heard there was a mandatory evacuation, we decided we should think about leaving, but we only had two cars available to us and we couldn’t fit 18 sisters in them. We decided some should go. That was a very difficult decision. Six sisters left and 12 stayed behind."
The nuns who stayed at the convent on 5001 Perlita St. were soon chased to the second floor by 5 feet of floodwater the day after the storm. They spent the next three days awaiting rescue.
They took in two elderly neighbors and three young men, providing them with food, water and shelter.
When a passing rescue boat spotted the nuns standing on the roof of the convent still wearing full white habits in the festering heat, the sisters insisted their neighbors be rescued first.
That boat returned with two others that ferried the nuns to safety as the last people rescued in Lakeview.
Fifteen months later, the Servants are back in their convent thanks to the hard work of volunteers from across the country and help from the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Louisiana and Shell Oil.

You can more about their ordeal here.

Turning Japanese

2006-12-04T23:55:00.000-06:00

Japan apparently has a simple yet novel way of protecting their cities from potential flooding.

The Arakawa spillway and other engineering improvements -- chiefly, a more modern system of levees and locks that manage water flowing from the Arakawa -- have drastically reduced river flooding in Tokyo. As in New Orleans, the levee system means the city depends on pumps to keep low areas from flooding after heavy rains, a battle the pumps don't always win. (The Tokyo government is upgrading its pumps to handle 2 inches of rain in an hour, roughly the amount for which New Orleans pumps are designed.)

nd as in New Orleans, other forms of flooding are possible: a typhoon that brings heavy rain, for instance, or a storm surge that tops levees and causes them to fail. Or, worse, an earthquake that ruptures levees and sends a tsunami through the breach. (The levee system in Tokyo includes roughly 60 miles of oceanfront breakwaters.)
To minimize those possibilities, the Japanese have been replacing the traditional levees along the Arakawa with what they refer to as "superlevees."

There's nothing gee-whiz about these ramparts, no high-tech gimmickry comparable to the computer-controlled storm gates and permeable levees deployed by the Dutch in their eternal struggle with the North Sea. Superlevees are actually no higher than the levees they replace; their effectiveness lies in their extraordinary width.

Rather than dropping back to grade level at the same steep pitch on both sides, a superlevee is severely asymmetrical, sloping down gradually on its backside for a distance of perhaps several blocks. The goal, one the Japanese believe they have achieved, is a breach-proof levee.

Imagine a Mississippi River levee that doesn't stop shy of the river road but continues all the way across Tchoupitoulas Street to Annunciation, and you get a sense of how seriously the Japanese have taken the responsibility to mitigate flooding.

Unfortunately Japanese doesn't translate well into Creole. While these "superlevees" may be practical in more recently developed or undeveloped areas of a city, how do proponents of "superlevees" in New Orleans propose that we build such a levee without destroying the MOST historic parts of the city. This most surely a case if cutting off one's nose despite its face.

However, the "superlevee" idea is not totally without merit in southeast Louisiana. There are many miles of levees that exist in undeveloped areas. The problem is that it is not that important to protect marshland from storm surge. One advantage to the "superlevee" is that it creates land that is high and dry and is ripe for development.

The problem with this scenario is the the Corps of Engineers is not too keen on people building anything in their levees. Besides, most earthen levees held up well during the onslaught that was Hurricane Katrina. It was the smaller, I-wall levees that failed during the storm. The Japanese don't seem to have an answer to that problem.

Takin' Out Da' Trash

2006-12-01T10:18:00.000-06:00

The New Orleans City Council is set to vote for or against the city's contract for trash collection in the French Quarter, CBD and Wharehouse District.

The mayor's office chose SDT to handle around-the-clock trash pickup and street cleaning in the French Quarter, Central Business District and Warehouse District.

The article delves into the intricacies of the bidding process and the additional costs but what I'm sure most residents want to really know. To what extent will trash collection occur in these neighborhoods?

If the contract calls for the winning bidder to ensure that trash is collected on at least a daily basis and includes street and sidewalk cleaning, this is a good thing. One of the things that has limited progress in the city and hindered our recovery are the piles of garbage and debris in the street. No one likes to see a dirty city. And New Orleans is dirty. Visitors to the French Quarter have for years complained about the trash but have largely fallen on deaf ears. Now their complaints have gotten louder. Piggybacked with French Quarter business owners complaints about lack of business, politicians started listening.

If this is a good contract we may finally see a French Quarter in all its pristine beauty.

Bye-Bye Birdie

2006-11-30T10:42:00.000-06:00

Hurricane season has officially ended. Only six months to go till next years hurricane season begins.

We can hardly wait.

Snake Oil Salesmen

2006-11-30T08:47:00.000-06:00

John Massengale has another post regarding the arrogance of our elite architects propose that they know what is best for New Orleans despite the wishes of New Orleaneans. Marianne Cusato writes about her encounter with one of these architects (academically speaking).

Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY hosted a symposium this weekend on rebuilding and the future of New Orleans. The speakers included the winner of Brad Pitt's Global Green Competition, representatives from Acorn Housing, several others involved with planning efforts and a few displaced residents who had relocated to this area.

I was on a panel with the winner of the Global Green Competition, Matthew Berman from Workshop/APD. I presented the Katrina Cottages as well as a house I designed at the UDA Treme/LaFitte charrette. In my talk I discussed the feedback we'd received from the residents of Treme/LaFitte. We heard from them that they liked the look of the Shotguns, but wanted the plans be adapted to modern living and they had to be practical and affordable.

After we each presented our work we had a Q&A with the audience. The members of the audience that were from New Orleans, passionately attacked the "award winning" Global Green design. They were outraged that this project had been selected. They were upset that it had no resemblance to the existing neighborhood, either with the architecture or the plan. One woman stood up and explained to the architect that the "Historic" buildings weren't old and out dated. They were REALLY well designed, NOT because of the balustrades, brackets and architectural details, but because of the tall ceilings, cross ventilation and the materials. She was great because she elevated the conversation away from style to practical common sense.

The residents in the room were disgusted that modern designs were being imposed on them. The architect admitted that the residents that he had spoken to didn't like the modern designs, but that didn't stop him from proceeding with his work. It seemed more about his personal design exploration, rather than a project based in reality or any form of practicality. The amazing thing about the day was that no one in the room, NOLA residents or even the SLC students, were buying it - or cutting him any slack.

One resident pointed out that the architecture could either support or destroy a community. From the planning of where buildings go to the interior plans of where the kitchen is located. He went on to tell the architect of the GG Design that his building would destroy the community and probably cause people to kill themselves.

The professor at the school that was moderating our panel tried to let the guy off the hook by asking the audience if they could set aside the site plan, which he admitted was really bad, but looked only at the buildings, would they be happier with the designs, the room spontaneously yelled out NO.

Then he went on to try and talk about the theory and academic approach of the modern design, I interrupted and challenged that this was a real world problem not an academic experiment, that it was the wrong approach to ignore the existing context and the desires of the people. Instead we needed to listen to what people are asking for and through design, build communities. The room erupted in applause. The professor went on to dismiss me by saying "Well yes, that might be the populous view, but...."

We have so many struggles in the work we are doing down on the coast, politics at every level, but after a day like today, hearing the passion in the voices of these residents, it was so clear how important it is that we are down there and working so hard. The people want what we are doing.

I've said all along that the rebuilding of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast must have the involvement of its residents because they know what is best for their community and they know what works down here. That is why I have commended the work of Adreas Duany and his urban planning charettes in many small communities and New Orleans. Not because I'm an adherent of his style of architecture but because he offers his expertise to the residents to help them realize THEIR dreams of what their neighborhood/town should be, not what he thinks it should be. And when it comes right down to it, that is what all real architects do. We are not here to impose our vision of someones home should be like at roadside salesman urging passers by to try their elixir, its good for them. Somewhere along the line, these academic architects lost site of that, if they ever had it at all.

The Classicist Blog has more input on Marianne Cusato.

Take This Job And Shove It

2006-11-30T08:37:00.000-06:00

The commander of the Army Corps of Engineers New Orleans District is asking to be relieved of duty.

Col. Rich Wagenaar, who took the helm of the Army Corps of Engineers New Orleans District the month before Hurricane Katrina toppled the corps-built levee system in August 2005, has requested to step down as district commander and retire from the Army.

His absence will surely not be missed.

Fiddlers On The Rooftops

2006-11-29T20:16:00.000-06:00

Nero probably has a better reputation as a leader during times of disaster that many of our more notable architects in their (lack of) influence in the rebuilding. At least according to John Massengale at Veritas et Venustas. Unfortunately, these architects view themselves more as Pied Pipers.

The real heroes are the architects in the trenches doing the grunt of actually getting the renovations and repairs done without fanfare.
Those that are using the situation in New Orleans to promote themselves are only hindering our recovery and are leaches on society.

No Easy Way Out

2006-11-21T13:19:00.000-06:00

Photo by David Gregor via Squandered Heritage

FEMA has designated St. Francis Cabrina Catholic Church as a historic landmark.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has concluded that St. Frances Cabrini Catholic Church on Paris Avenue in Gentilly is historically significant, which could bring an effort to move the 147-year-old Holy Cross School there to a screeching halt.

In a Friday meeting, FEMA officials notified representatives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans and the school's board of directors of their decision, which they said would block use of FEMA grant dollars to pay a significant chunk of the $23 million cost of building a new school on the 17-acre Cabrini campus.

The FEMA decision was immediately attacked by Holy Cross officials and New Orleans City Council members, including Cynthia Hedge-Morrell, whose district includes the church and who was a parishioner of Cabrini.

But Holy Cross' objection the the church appears to be mostly aesthetic.

Chauvin said keeping the 1960s-era building on the campus would clash with plans to build a new Holy Cross that will reflect the 1800s architecture of the original school.

"That's not what Holy Cross is, not what our history is," he said.

However, Holy Cross has practical concerns as well.

And the church building has been described as a "money pit" by the archdiocese, Chauvin said, the result of long-deferred maintenance, inadequate heating and air-conditioning systems and a roof that has leaked since the church opened.

"How can we go to parents and say your tuition has to be this high because we had to add a component to pay for maintenance on this facility?" he said.

Unfortunately these types of problems are all too common in many of these modern buildings. But these may just be excuses by the owner as a third option has been proposed and rejected by Holy Cross.

(Stephen) Verderber said he has been unsuccessful in attempts to meet with Holy Cross officials to show them a site layout that would allow the church building to be used as part of the new school. He said the design would have little impact on the space school officials say is needed for football and baseball practice fields and for parking.

Maybe a fourth option is possible. Perhaps Holy Cross could apply to FEMA for a grant to make permanent repairs to the church in lieu of demolition. FEMA will probably reject this sort of compromise in that it might make all parties satisfied.

A Streetcar Names Rewire

2006-11-20T10:03:00.000-06:00

The RTA is saying that a portion of the St. Charles streetcar line will be operational sometime by Christmas. The portion of the line expected to be repaired will extend from Canal St. to Lee Circle. The complete line will be up and running in about another year.

Seymour D. Fair has more at The Third Battle of New Orleans.

Sore Thumb

2006-11-17T16:11:00.000-06:00

A politician once said that all politics is local. The same is true for good architecture. The redevelopment of the Jefferson Plaza Shopping Center is a good example of this axiom.

Conceptual renderings show a pair of curved glass-and-steel towers rising to points, with trees growing on rooftop terraces, fountains and pools on the grounds and intense lighting at the base of the structures, tapering toward the peaks. One tower might exceed 30 stories, far taller than any building for miles.
"It's going to be real dramatic lighting, along with dramatic water features," St. Raymond said.

The idea, however, is not receiving an entirely enthusiastic welcome in the neighborhood. Some nearby residents protest that it will exacerbate traffic problems, overshadow their houses and stick out, rather than stand out, among Old Jefferson's post-World War II wood frame houses.

So why is this design so unpopular? Seymour D. Fair offers his thoughts:

Architect Daniel Libeskind's above design was not what I had in mind--and I am not completely against multiple floored residential buildings at this site unlike many residents of the surrounding neighborhoods.

Daniel Libeskind is a great architect with soaring ideas for his designs, however like most starchitects, he is not in tune with the local vernacular and traditions. It is likely that the architectural firm was given a survey of the site along with some photos. With this information in hand, the design process begins. The architect may be able to come up with a design that will get noticed. But that is not always a good think. Severe birth defects get noticed too but no one wants one.

The developer and local residents would have been better served had a local architect been retained for the design. Perhaps the local architect's design wouldn't have been as radical but it probably would have been more contextual meaning more sensitive to the local environment and residents. This can't be done from a corner office in Manhattan.

River Of Dreams

2006-11-14T12:30:00.000-06:00

An earlier post related the agreement between the city and the Port of New Orleans to return part of the riverfront back to the citizens. Now five teams of designers have been chosen to plan the redevelopment.

Nine teams of architects and planners from New Orleans and cities around the world responded to a recent invitation to help plan the redevelopment of a 4.1-mile stretch of publicly owned land along the east bank riverfront.

Among them were at least two winners of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, considered the highest international honor in the field, and architects from London, New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Mexico City, Edinburgh and other cities.
Famous names such as Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid, Reiser + Umemoto, TEN Arquitectos and Chan Krieger Sieniewicz adorn the list of applicants to lead what Sean Cummings calls "reinventing the crescent" that gave the Crescent City its nickname.

(snip)

The foundation of the planning effort is a cooperative endeavor agreement recently agreed to by the city and the Port of New Orleans that spells out what east bank wharves the port will continue to need for maritime activities and what areas will be available for public, nonmaritime redevelopment.
Among other things, the agreement envisions "an uninterrupted and continuous linear green space or riverfront park" along the entire stretch between Jackson and Poland avenues, a "world-class performance venue" at the Louisa Street Wharf or another site, and a hotel and expanded cruise ship terminal at the Julia Street Wharf.
Other possibilities include more cruise ship terminals, hotels, parking garages, museums, an amphitheater, an opera house or a planetarium, according to the city-port document.

Rebirth on the batture

A major goal of the agreement is to expand the area of the riverfront, once devoted entirely to maritime uses, that is available for public use. City leaders have talked about "reclaiming the riverfront" since at least the 1970s, and the process already has resulted in French Quarter and Central Business District attractions such as the Moonwalk, Woldenberg Riverfront Park, the Aquarium of the Americas and the Riverwalk shopping mall.

And the finalists are:

Chan Krieger Sieniewicz (planning and urban design), Cambridge, Mass.; Hargreaves Associates (landscape architecture), Cambridge; TEN Arquitectos (architecture), New York; and Eskew + Dumez + Ripple (executive management and urban design), New Orleans.
EDAW (planning and landscape architecture), Alexandria, Va.; Frank Gehry (architecture and urban design), Los Angeles; and Marks Associates (landscape consultant), New Orleans.
Mathes Brierre Architects, New Orleans; HOK (planning), 23 offices worldwide; and Studio Daniel Libeskind (architecture), New York.
Reiser + Umemoto (architecture), New York; Olin Partnership (landscape architecture), Philadelphia; Studio Matrixx (architecture), New Orleans; and Alan Gordon (design consultant).
Zaha Hadid Architects, London; Trahan Architects, Baton Rouge; Billes Architecture, New Orleans; Bruce Mau Design, Toronto; and Gross Max Landscape Architects, Edinburgh.

This is a pretty heady group. What is more encouraging is the inclusion of local firms the all the design teams.

After reviewing the location map of the proposed revitalization, I have to ask the question, what will become of the existing wharves in the proposed development area? Don't get me wrong, the wharves are an eyesore and I will be glad to see them go but we cannot ignore economic contribution that the port provides for New Orleans. My guess is they will move either upstream of downstream of downtown New Orleans in either St. Bernard, Jefferson or maybe St. Charles Parish. Or will the Port simply reduce the number of wharves in the city.

The latter seems likely as the port now has more capacity than it needs. However lately, state and local officials have been making trips to Asia and the Persian Gulf to encourage more trade with Louisiana. In addition, Panamanian officials have been visiting Louisiana. This is possibly in conjunction with that country beginning to look at widening the Panama Canal to accommodate larger cargo ships traveling to and from the East/Gulf Coast and Asia. With New Orleans being the largest port in the region and the west coast ports at or near capacity, we are looking at the possibility that New Orleans will see a great up tick in shipping. I wonder if this is being taken into account when redeveloping the riverfront.

I'm not favoring more wharves versus less public access to the river but rather that future needs have to be taken into consideration during the design process.

So to quote Billy Joel:

In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
Through the jungle of doubt
To the river so deep
I know I'm searching for something
Something so undefined
That it can only be seen
By the eyes of the blind
In the middle of the night

A Victim Of Coicumstance

2006-10-30T16:27:00.000-06:00

[Curly is taking the oath]

Court Clerk: Take off your hat.

[Curly takes off his hat with his right hand]

Court Clerk: Raise your right hand.

[With his right hand, Curly puts his hat back on, and raises the hand]

Court Clerk: [gesturing to the book he is holding] Put your left hand here.

Judge: [to Curly] Take off you hat.

[Curly does so with his right hand]

Court Clerk: [to Curly] Raise your right hand.

[Curly puts his hat back on to raise the hand]

Court Clerk: [gesturing to the book he is holding] Now, put your left hand here.

Judge: [to Curly] Please, take off your hat.

[Curly does so with his right hand]

Court Clerk: [to Curly] Raise your right hand.

[Curly repeats the process]

Court Clerk: [gesturing to the book he is holding] Now, put your left hand here.

Judge: [to Curly] Will you please take off your hat?

[Curly does so with his right hand]

Court Clerk: [angrily, to Curly] Raise your RIGHT HAND.

[Curly repeats the process]

Court Clerk: [gesturing to the book he is holding] Now, put your left hand here.

Judge: [to Curly] Take off your hat.

[Curly takes off the hat and places it on his cane, which is in his right hand]

Court Clerk: [to Curly] Raise your right hand.

[Curly raises his cane with the hat on it]

Court Clerk: [taking the hat off the cane] Get rid of that hat.

[Curly takes the hat and puts it on the court clerk's head]

Curly: [with both hands on the book] Raise YOUR right hand.

[the court clerk does so, startles, takes the hat off, and places it under the book]

Court Clerk: Raise your right hand.

[Curly does so]

This scene from The Three Stooges "Disorder in the Court" is reminiscent of the kabuki dance between local courts, law enforcement, the district attorney and good government organizations. One of the problems with the justice system in New Orleans is the lack of open courts. Now the court system wont have that excuse rest on anymore.

For the first time since Hurricane Katrina, all 12 sections of Criminal District Court are back in operation today at the courthouse at 2700 Tulane Ave.

With the completion of most of the repairs of the courthouse’s storm damage, every section again has its own courtroom, so judges are no longer forced by lack of space to hear cases in weekly shifts of six. Since returning to New Orleans in early December, the judges have worked in shifts, first at U.S. District Court and, since early June, at the Tulane Avenue building.

Having all the judges back at work at the same time “will mean that at least we’ll be back up to the point of five or six jury trials in the same day,” Division E. Judge Calvin Johnson said before taking reporters inside the cavernous court building where huge temporary air conditioning ducts, in place as recently as Friday, had disappeared.

“It’s almost a miracle when you think in terms of what we’ve had to endure,” said Johnson, recalling how the judges and staffers, toting court records and computers, were evacuated from the flooded building by boat in early September and set up shop at Southern University in Baton Rouge.

Johnson said availablity of all the courtrooms is a giant step toward normalcy, but there are still some holes to be filled, among them a need for more people to serve on juries and more lawyers to represent indigent defendants.

Though I wouldn't hold my breath that New Orleans' crime problem will be solved anytime soon, if ever. The court system could end up being more like "Night Court" rather than "Perry Mason".

BOO!

2006-10-29T22:26:00.000-06:00

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina doesn't appear to have frightened off many of this Halloween's partiers by judging the brisk sales of costumes shops.

In the days leading up to Halloween before Hurricane Katrina, a security guard stood outside the door of Uptown Costume and Dancewear while lines of anxious customers stretched two blocks down Magazine Street waiting to be ushered inside.
“But rules are rules,” the guard would say. “Only 20 in at a time.”
Inside, the lucky few clutch bat wings and corsets and mini-dress nurse uniforms while waiting in an hour-long line to reach the register.
Employee Webbie Rhodes said when Halloween is over, Uptown Costume and Dancewear usually looks like most stores did following the storm — looted. This year is no different.
“People are just buying, buying, buying everything,” Rhodes said. “Pirates and wood fairies are big this year. And they’re buying corsets and can-can skirts up a storm. We do a lot of sexy versions of everything, from Snow White to Alice in Wonderland. Those are really big.”
Uptown Costume opened shortly before Halloween last year and the lines were out the door. This year’s pre-Halloween rush started three weeks ago and has been steady ever since.
“People wonder why the hell we do this in New Orleans and it amuses me,” Rhodes said. “Some people think we’d be hesitant to celebrate anything, but this is our industry, tourism, and if we didn’t do it they would say we were done down here. Yes, it is a party town and it keeps the bars open and the hotels going.”
As Halloween weekend nears, Rhodes expects the crowds to be the same size as they have for the past decade.

We may not have been prepared for this hurricane season. But I've got my costume already. Never let it be said that New Orleaneans will pass up an opportunity to have a good time.

Teacher's Dirty Look

2006-10-25T00:34:00.000-05:00

The Times-Picayune has been reading my blog.

As architect Michael O'Brien of Virginia Tech's Myers-Lawson School of Construction explains, economies of scale, standardization of design and assembly-line construction techniques were applied to high-volume home-building.
"In the 1950s and 1960s, slab-at-grade ranch-style construction in the city and along the low-lying Lakefront became the norm," said Richard Campanella, a geographer at Tulane University.

Suburban New Orleans, sunken though it was, broke with its past. It became a region dominated by slab-on-grade homes.

In the ensuing decades, local government, developers and eager home buyers sought to maintain the constantly shifting equilibrium that kept drainage improvements ahead of the spreading, slab-on-grade home-building.

Weather watch

It mostly worked. But there were spectacular, and increasingly frequent, exceptions.

Time would demonstrate that the inauguration of the slab-on-grade era coincided with a relative lull in extreme rainstorms. But three decades after the slab revolution began, intense spring cloudbursts of 10 inches and more in just a few hours, storms thought to be relatively rare, came with dismaying frequency: 1978, 1980, 1989 and 1995.

Now that we know the problems inherent in the slab-on-grade home, we now need to develop methods to make the raised home compete economically with the ranch house.

In my post I wrote: The popularity of the ranch house is due in part because of the cost savings involved by substituting materials cost for labor cost as a result of the changing labor market immediately after World War II. Rule of thumb is that labor cost is twice that of materials cost. When developers needed to build thousands of housing units in a short period of time and for families on a limited budget, the ranch house built on a concrete slab became the construction method of choice for many decades. The ranch style further grew in popularity as it became a symbol of middle-class upward mobility and the raised cottage came to symbolize the old neighborhood.

This is echoed by Michael O'Brien of Virginia Tech's Myers-Lawson School of Construction:

Levitt broke down the construction of a house into 26 industrial processes, right down to landscaping. He used just a few floor plans with few variations. His building crews moved from lot to lot, doing one thing at each site -- flooring, window installation, painting -- with ferocious efficiency. He effectively reversed the assembly line: The house stood still, the assembly line moved relentlessly past.

"What American industry learned in cranking out B-17's and Sherman tanks, they started to apply to housing," O'Brien said.

In four years beginning in 1947, Levitt produced 17,447 homes in his landmark Levittown. At its peak, O'Brien said, Levitt's teams finished 25 to 30 homes per day. Home builders around the country took note.

Moreover, a new consumer psychology was taking shape. The new ranch-style house -- the iconic "Red Rambler" model -- became the consumer ideal, the popular symbol of progress and status.

But the ranch soon exposed its soft underbelly.

(I)n time the homes would show their limitations, chiefly their limited size and, oddly in the earliest days, their lack of central air conditioning or other amenities like porches, high ceilings or big windows to deal with the New Orleans heat. The Maumuses started with an attic fan. They would add central air conditioning later.
The limitations existed because the houses had powerful national appeal across every region, O'Brien said. Especially in the early years, builders learning mass-production techniques tended to export successful models into new climates with little or no adaptation, he said.

"People were not thinking so critically when they took designs from one part of the country and moved them to another.
"In the Northeast, a house might not be too bad. But you put it in Florida and it might not be the best thing. But the history of housing is filled with those kinds of errors," he said.

The good news is that maybe people are beginning to take notice. The Southern Pine Council (Southern Pine is the type of wood most used in the Southeast United States) has launched a web site promoting the virtues of raised floor construction. The site is full of good information but what I think is lacking is inovative detailing that would reduce the extra cost of raised floor construction versus slab-on-grade.

Without the kind of outside-the-box thinking that is needed, builders should be sent to the Principal's office.

Carrot-n-Stick

2006-10-24T18:46:00.000-05:00

The RAND Corp. has released a study which proposes that the rebuilding process should not concentrate on restoring things the way they used to be but rather improving and restructuring the infrastructure to have the Gulf Coast better weather the next catastraphe.

The politically volatile option of closing flood-prone areas to redevelopment might do more to reduce death and property loss than building bigger and better levees and floodgates, a new RAND Corp. study concluded. The study released Monday also warns public officials to plan now to avoid a repeat of the breakdowns in regional infrastructure and services, including a disruption of first-response and public safety networks, in the event of another Katrina-like storm hitting the Gulf Coast.

And it warns that as the community rebuilds, the "inherent bias towards creating what used to be" could blind residents and public officials to better rebuilding alternatives.

The wide-ranging 66-page report, which examined four flood disasters around the world in an effort to find lessons for New Orleans, contains both short- and long-term recommendations and examines both preparation for floods and rebuilding issues.
"In the short term, you've got to realize that someday this kind of disaster is going to come back," said James Kahan, one of the authors of the report and a senior behavioral scientist with RAND, the Washington, D.C., policy think tank. "It may happen next year or in two years or five or 10 years. But you've got to have the infrastructure to deal with it, even if it brings another tidal wave and the levees break again."

These are all good points and citizens need to see that their elected officials follow-though on their obligations. That said, one of the authors, James Kahan, points out the obvious that throws spanner in the works:

"Some activities, such as evacuation planning, simply cannot be implemented on the fly," the report said. Kahan said the most difficult decisions will concern where people rebuild in Katrina's aftermath.

"You've got to have a place for people to live or you can't encourage them to come back," he said. "But if you just put people in the same old flood plain, the next time a similar storm comes, you'll have the same problems all over again, and you don't want that.

"Maybe you don't want to encourage a return for everyone who wants to come back," he said. "It's not an automatic decision. Their protection has economic and environmental consequences, and I think there's 100 percent agreement that what happened last year is not to be tolerated."

He realizes that with private-property rights, the government cannot simply tell people where they can and can't live. What can be done is to offer incentives for people not to rebuild in flood-prone areas. Use the carrot, not the stick.

Release The Architects

2006-10-24T17:22:00.000-05:00

The LRA has submitted it's application to FEMA's Alternative Housing Pilot Program which is intended "to identify and evaluate alternatives to and alternative forms of FEMA Disaster Housing."

No conclusions are reported in this press release but it is interesting to note some of the participants involved.

Katrina Cottages & Carpet Cottages - Cypress Cottage Partners
This partnership of The Cypress Group, The Shaw Group, ICF International, Duany Plater-Zyberk, and Lowes with architect Marianne Cusato showcases both single-family models and a multi-family model. This project includes infill redevelopment housing in New Orleans in the historic Treme neighborhood, as well as at Jackson Barracks, the headquarters of the Louisiana National Guard. Additional project sites are infill locations in Lake Charles and Abbeville - addressing diverse housing needs, particularly elderly housing for rural aging populations.

Home at Last - Family Resources of New Orleans
This non-profit community housing development organization identified two sites in rural St. Charles Parish that will serve as transitional housing communities for displaced residents of New Orleans. Working in partnership with Skyline Homes and Champion Homes, Family Resources presents a project that is transitional, while also working with modular housing developers to design an alternative solution to group trailer communities.

The Phoenix Systems-Built Home - Fibrebond Corporation
This company is an established, high production capacity firm that builds concrete panel building systems. After Hurricane Katrina, they were essential in adapting their building designs to produce and build many schools throughout the disaster-impacted area. Fibrebond has developed a model home that applies their building system and capacity to the housing market. This home represents an affordable, easily produced and built solution to the challenges of critical post-disaster housing.

SmartPlus® For A Better Built Home - Palm Harbor Homes
This manufacturing company has significant production capacity and designs that have the flexibility to be applicable Louisiana and nationwide. The models in this project represent a cost effective, attractive alternative to the trailer.

Homes Now LLP
This firm is based in Louisiana and partners with Genesis Homes, Inc. a division of Michigan based Champion Enterprises, Inc. Champion operates 36 manufacturing facilities in North America and the United Kingdom. Genesis has developed a series of off-site built homes specifically for the Southern Louisiana market. They can produce 250 homes per month or 2,880 homes per year.

CORE - Plus One
The "CORE" concept from Plus One, an architecture and construction services firm, represents an immediate emergency concept for transitional recovery housing. This CORE is a module of essential services (bathroom, kitchen, utilities) that can be appended to a home being rebuilt for a temporary period. The module can be stockpiled for reuse in the next disaster.

Once FEMA announces a decision, the state will work with the parish and municipal governments or applicable jurisdictions to determine sites, where needed, for the placement of the housing units in the most heavily impacted parishes. The LRA will set the overall housing policy and guidance for the transitioning of displaced citizens into livable homes.

More than 200,000 housing units in Louisiana suffered major or severe damage as a result of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Currently, there are over 85,000 occupied trailers in Louisiana and an estimated need of 96,000. Louisiana has the largest number of occupied trailers both individually and in group sites of any state impacted by the hurricanes of 2005.

Based on this list it appears that the direction that Louisiana is intended to pursue is for more permanent, modular housing be provided as opposed to the tin-cans we are so accustomed to. Also I like the fact that Marianne Cusato and Duany Plater-Zyberk are involved in in this project. From the beginning, they have demonstrated the ability to think outside the box while proposing designs that are architecturaly pleasing, but also popular with the general public.

Should FEMA adopt some of what the LRA is proposing, we may see in improvement in the appearnce, value and code compliance with these new homes as they will have some things much of the current housing stock does not: economically constructed and architect designed.

Take Me To The River

2006-10-23T09:26:00.000-05:00

In a follow-up to earlier posts here and here, New Orleans CityBusiness has a story about an agreement between the city and the Port of New Orleans that would ostensibility return part of the riverfront back to the citizens.

The cooperative endeavor agreement between Mayor C. Ray Nagin and Gary LaGrange, president and CEO of the Port of New Orleans, tentatively scheduled for Thursday as of press time, symbolizes the return of a 4-mile stretch of Mississippi riverfront to citizens. It includes visions of riverside green space and the construction of RiverSphere — a museum and river research center — and a riverfront performing arts venue.

Quote the Talking Heads:

I dont know why I love her like I do
All the changes you put me through

The Mississippi River has always been a threat to New Orleans but likewise, we can't bring ourselves to leave it. Indeed, for New Orleans to be content, she need to be brought closer to it.

(Your Home Has Lifted Me) Higher And Higher

2006-10-19T19:27:00.000-05:00

Some people are not happy the local rebuilders are not doing so in accordance with federal regulations requiring that rebuilt home be raised three feet.

NEW ORLEANS — Nearly three-fourths of New Orleans homeowners applying for federal grants say they'll rebuild their Katrina-damaged homes in flood areas even though city restrictions are unlikely to prevent their houses from being wiped out if the levees fail again.

The restrictions, which say that the city's homes must be raised at least 3 feet to avoid flooding, have come under fire from some local officials and government watchdog groups. They say 3 feet of elevation is not needed in areas that did not flood after Hurricane Katrina, and 3 feet is too low in areas that saw 20 feet of water.

Even the Federal Emergency Management Agency says thousands of houses could flood again if they are rebuilt under the new rules. "If there is another catastrophic event, flooding will occur," says Doug Bellomo, a deputy director of risk analysis at FEMA.

The Louisiana Recovery Authority, which controls billions in federal relief money, expects about 53,000 New Orleans homeowners to apply for federal grants. The grants provide up to $150,000 for uninsured losses, and residents can use the money to rebuild or relocate.

So far, 14,534 New Orleanians have applied for grants; about 10,634 have said they want to rebuild where they were.

"The taxpayers are going to be subsidizing unwise construction," says Robert Hunter, director of insurance for the Consumer Federation of America. About $7.5 billion is available to homeowners.

The New Orleans City Council adopted the 3-foot rule on Sept. 1 to avoid losing millions in federal grants. The recovery authority has said parishes that don't adopt the rules will be excluded from receiving some of the relief money.

St. Bernard Parish, where all but 50 homes flooded, is considering rejecting the rules. "Our goal is not to adopt them," says St. Bernard Councilman Craig Taffaro. "We don't agree with the science."

Paul Rainwater of the recovery authority says the rules are "not perfect," but will help residents get much-needed flood insurance.

The second paragraph sums up the contradiction in the government's regulations. The second problem is that, while residents will get government grants to repair their homes, it does not include enough to cover the cost of raising it three feet.

It is possible to get a FEMA grant of up to $30,000 to rais a home. However, that amout is about what it costs to raise a house that is already raised on piers. If your home is a slab-on-grade (BTW is the type of house most likely to flood), the estimated cost to raise it could be as much as $100,000.

So when homeowners are contemplating taking out a loan for approximately $70,000 versus purchasing flood insurance, it may be that the premiums are lower for a non-raised house compared to the mortgage payment.

Rita Coolidge would be proud.

Wi-Fi Unplugged

2006-10-19T12:22:00.000-05:00

The City of New Orleans will pull the plug on its citywide wireless network as it is replaced with a network provide by a private ISP.

The wireless network that is run by the city for citizens will be taken down to avoid overlap between the two systems, said Mark Kurt, the city's director of information technology.

"Once EarthLink has deployed their network, we will remove our equipment, and redeploy elsewhere as the situation warrants. The other wireless networks that have been set up by the city for temporary facilities and public safety will continue to be operated by the city as long as they are necessary and funding is available," Kurt said.
EarthLink intends on providing wireless service to 20 square miles of the city, in the Garden District, Central Business District, French Quarter and Algiers, by the end of the year, said Clifton Roscoe, EarthLink general manager for New Orleans.

Having both the city and EarthLink systems running in the same spots might cause interference, Roscoe said.

The Atlanta-based company began constructing a wireless system in New Orleans in September by starting to install its access points. Next, individual radios will be installed around the city. Once the system is running, it will be turned on, but EarthLink won't necessarily announce that the system is up until the entire project is complete, said Deisha Galberth, a spokeswoman for EarthLink.

The free service, which is faster than dial-up access but slower than other high-speed Internet options, will be provided as long as the city rebuilds, according to EarthLink. The company has said it hopes to profit from the deal by selling higher-speed wireless service to those who want it. It also plans to continue building out the system if there is demand for it outside the original 20 square miles.

The city's small Wi-Fi network in the Central Business District and a portion of the French Quarter, which was started just after Hurricane Katrina, enabled businesses that no longer have offices to operate out of coffee shops, restaurants and bars in the days and months after the storm when there were few communications options available.

Not everyone is happy with the city providing this service.

But, the city's efforts were opposed by other Internet service providers who said the city was essentially taking business away from them.

The have a point. The companies made a not insigficant investement to provide their technology only the have the government use taxpayer money to compete with them.

Now, while the city will contract with a private company to provide this service is a good thing, at least in the short term, I have reservations about the city creating what will amount to a monopoly and stiffling incentive to create competition which drives advancements in technology while keeping costs down.

How I Hate Thee...

2006-10-16T12:33:00.000-05:00

The LRA isn't too popular these days. Want to know how unpopular, just read this letter-to-the-editor.

Published: Oct 14, 2006

Are the media in Baton Rouge giving you any sense of how the people in the most-devastated areas feel about the Louisiana Recovery Authority? Hate is not too strong a word.

We hate the bureaucracy designed to siphon off money that people need to rebuild their lives.

We hate the unnecessary delays.

We hate Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s “covenant” that tells people in a free country where they have to live.

We hate elevation requirements enacted to make the Army Corps of Engineers’ job easier.

We hate the fact that this is ridiculously impractical even if they gave us the pittance they are offering for the work.

Where will we get the thousands of skilled workers to do this job? How long would someone have to wait?

We hate the fact that they know this, and still choose to place this burden on us.

The recovery authority’s Sean Reilly indicated that they would use the “money we control” to send a message that some areas should not be rebuilt.

We hate the fact that people who evacuated and now live and work out of state will still face financial ruin because we are worth less to Blanco since we won’t be around to vote for her.

We really do hate the LRA, and we’re trying not to hate the people who developed this plan. The whole tone of the plan is condescending.

This “covenant” business sounds like it was written by someone who lives in a restricted community.

The pain caused by government ineptness and corruption is second only to losing our loved ones.

It was actually LESS stressful to lose all our earthly possessions.

God help us, because the state of Louisiana sure isn’t.

Vicky Mocklin
librarian
St. Bernard resident now in Memphis

God help us all, indeed.

Oooohhh, That Smell

2006-10-16T06:23:00.000-05:00

The New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board and St. Bernard Parish are considering using treated sewerage to rebuild wetlands in southeast Louisiana.

The $40 million project would create the largest "wetlands treatment" system of its kind in the world, according to New Orleans and St. Bernard officials and state scientists familiar with the plan. It is being pursued by the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board in conjunction with St. Bernard.

The project, which is still being refined, calls for diverting sewage plant discharge that now ends up in the Mississippi River and instead pumping it into wetlands in the vicinity of Bayou Bienvenue. That area once was a dense cypress forest that served as a buffer against Gulf of Mexico hurricanes. But in recent decades, lethal doses of salt water intruded into the wetlands and levees cut off nutrients from the Mississippi. The 30,000-acre area has degenerated into scrub marsh broken up by large swaths of open water.

Louisiana politics stinks. Now, so will our wetlands. But, at least there's symmetry.

Risky Business

2006-10-15T22:43:00.000-05:00

Investors and potential buyers are understandably skittish about getting into the condo business in New Orleans. But enough of them are jumping in to keep several condominium projects in the area on track.

Hurricane Katrina sped along plans for a spate of new high-rise residential towers, but more than a quarter of the proposed housing units have already been killed or put on hold.
Out-of-town investors "are circling like eagles" with capital ready to invest in downtown projects, said Kurt Weigle, executive director of the Downtown Development District. And inquiries from outside developers have increased five-fold, possibly because of special tax incentives being made available to building projects in hurricane-impacted areas.

But not all of the residential projects will be built, experts say. The pricetags on most of the announced projects have risen 30 percent due to escalating prices on labor and building materials, developers say. That big of an increase is giving pause to both the developers behind the condo towers and the potential condo buyers who, in some cases, are backing out of sales contracts when presented with the higher prices.
Furthermore, the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act, which created billions in subsidy programs to assist in the rebuilding of New Orleans, has been less encouraging of condominium projects, which enjoy no tax benefits under the program, said Gary Elkins, a local attorney specializing in tax credits.

On the surface this is good news for the economy in the short term. In the long term, the jury is still out. If these projects do get built but without sufficient clients to fill the units, the result will be an overbuilt market with undervalued properties and depressed revenue.

Partially completed and and vacant condominiums are not the kind of development we are looking for.

Robbing Perault To Pay Perrilloux

2006-10-15T22:42:00.001-05:00

The Corps of Engineers plan to restart drainage project in the area. That is good news. The bad news that there may not be sufficient funding for them.

Nine months after Congress appropriated $224 million in emergency spending for new flood-control projects in Orleans and Jefferson parishes, the Army Corps of Engineers appears poised to award the first few contracts.

Representatives of the corps and local governments hope that's enough to build 14 priority Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control, or SELA, projects that are designed and ready to go.

But there are financial doubts, in part, because of spiraling costs churned up by the post-Hurricane Katrina construction frenzy.
And it now also appears that the corps will have to use some of the money to pay for SELA construction already in progress.

Although Congress and the Bush administration earmarked $224 million for new SELA projects last December, they also took back the $27 million that had been appropriated for ongoing work in the 2006 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30.

And no SELA construction money was included in the administration's proposed '07 budget, either.

"Because there has been such a slowdown of work and only one new SELA contract issued in the last five years, I think we'll only have to spend about $8 million of the money this fiscal year," said corps SELA program manager Stan Green. "Beyond that, I don't know. We can only spend what we have to spend."

But whether the $224 million will cover the 14 SELA projects isn't the only financial concern for flood-control program managers, who predict they will need several hundred million dollars more to complete all the SELA projects that have been authorized but not funded. Many of them aren't even designed yet.

Now here's the bad news:

"Unfortunately, the number ($224 million) that went to Congress was outdated when it was given, and it didn't reflect post-Katrina costs, which weren't even known at the time," Green said. "But as a result, SELA is way in the hole."
Corps Protection and Restoration Office chief Tom Podnay estimates that it could take as much as an additional $800 million to finish out the program.

The good news for local sponsors, such as Jefferson Parish and the Orleans Sewerage & Water Board, is that projects built with the $224 million in emergency money require no local match.
But the flip side is that less construction will be done because all remaining costs for the 14 projects, including the corps' overhead, must come from that pot of money.

My question is this; since Congress doesn't know squat about the cost of flood control projects in Louisiana, someone had to compile an estimate of what the potential costs would be. I wonder who that would be? Hmmmmm.

Bon Voyage

2006-10-15T22:40:00.000-05:00

For the first time in fourteen months, a cruise ship has shoved off from a New Orleans pier.

The Norwegian Sun, which will sail every Sunday through April 8, 2007, will be followed by the Carnival Fantasy, which on Oct. 26 begins five- and four-night cruises to Mexico year-round; and Royal Caribbean's Grandeur of the Seas, which resumes its week-long cruises to the Western Caribbean Dec. 2, continuing through early April. Royal Caribbean has no plans to return to New Orleans after the spring.

Princess' Golden Princess will sail three cruises in December, testing the market for possible future sailings, said Robert Jumonville, who oversees the cruise industry for the Port of New Orleans.

It was obvious Sunday that the worry isn't so much about drawing passengers from the New Orleans area. The ship was packed with people wearing Saints jerseys. Questions about the score were the buzz, even during the fire/safety drill. TVs in the bars were broadcasting another game, so shouts erupted when the crawl gave the final score.

But the reason for optimism is not because of the locals going on cruises. Rather, it is the expecation of out-of-towners staying in-town just prior to their cruise.

It was obvious Sunday that the worry isn't so much about drawing passengers from the New Orleans area. The ship was packed with people wearing Saints jerseys. Questions about the score were the buzz, even during the fire/safety drill. TVs in the bars were broadcasting another game, so shouts erupted when the crawl gave the final score.

"Everywhere I go, people think we're underwater," said LaGrange, who added that confronting this misconception is one reason he's traveling so much. "The major point is to tell them the sliver on the river, the French Quarter, the Garden District, Uptown are open for business."

LaGrange said the cruise industry here is an economic engine that has filled almost 20,000 hotel room nights a year.

Officials of the International Council of Cruise Lines report that cruise passengers in New Orleans leave an average of $330 a night in direct spending, he said. That compares with about $92 a night spent by cruise passengers in other cities. The reason is so many passengers spend a couple of days in New Orleans when they cruise from here.

The irony here is that the ocean almost destroyed the city. Now we are looking to the sea as a way to rebuild.

Yossarian Lives!

2006-10-12T13:34:00.000-05:00

Conventioneers are not coming to New Orleans because of a lack of flights. Airlines aren't scheduling more flights to New Orleans because of a lack of conventioneers.

Last week, Microsoft canceled three meetings in New Orleans that would have brought a combined 30,000 people to the city next year because the company felt there weren't enough flights for attendees to travel to New Orleans in a reasonable amount of time. The group was particularly concerned about international attendees.
Though Microsoft is the only group known to have canceled a post-Katrina convention because of limited air service, the move was still a blow to the New Orleans tourism industry, which says that such corporate meetings are critical as the city struggles to hang on to conventions and lure new ones. Contrary to initial reports, airport and convention officials had worked closely with the company, but they said little could be done about Microsoft's need for stronger international service. Meanwhile, some conventions with dates in New Orleans are urging their attendees to book flights early to avoid problems.

Although the airport made great strides in restoring flight service in the first months after the storm, the gains have come more slowly in the past six months. New Orleans now has about 61 percent of the seats and 65 percent of the flights it had operating before Hurricane Katrina. The airport serves about 25 percent fewer destinations than it did before the storm, increasing the chances that passengers will have to fly to a hub city such as Dallas, Houston, Memphis or Atlanta to catch a connecting flight. And planes are going out fuller than they were before the storm, making it harder -- and often more expensive -- to book a flight.

"There's just no flights," said Al Latham, a Denver real estate agent with a home in the French Quarter. Latham has traveled to New Orleans five times since Hurricane Katrina, and next month he's bringing 25 people from his office to the National Association of Realtors convention, the largest show to convene in New Orleans since the storm.

Stephen Perry, president of the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention & Visitors Bureau, said the bureau has been able to work with convention groups and airlines to make sure there's adequate air service for meetings.

"We're doing literally everything humanly possible," Perry said. "We're being more aggressive than ever."

But others say New Orleans is losing business because of its air-service challenges.

"Unfortunately, the answer to that is yes. I've talked with a number of groups that were booked or were interested in holding a meeting in New Orleans, but after checking into the (air)lift, they decided against booking into New Orleans," said Phillip Jones, president and chief executive of the Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau and former secretary of the Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism for Louisiana. "It's a real challenge for New Orleans.

But the airlines say it's not their fault.

With a lower population and reduced tourism to the city, showing sustained demand is a challenge. Airlines want to see at least 90 days of sustained demand for more service before they'll consider additional flights or larger planes, Hunter said, and there's a six-month time lag before the official enplanement statistics are released through the Department of Transportation.

Fortunaely there may be a solution:

Your probably thinking that the last thing we need is another airline that's more than glad to suck us dry by charging outrageous prices, but not this time (miracle). One Louisiana native is trying to put together a New Orleans airline called DirectAir that would offer cut-rate fares to last-minute travelers. Though the idea seems unrealistic, it has stirred some interest among legislators which in return is prompting the state's 7-commercial airports to condider spending money to study the concept.

The airline would offer low fares (I've heard that before), and would funnel travelers from Louisiana's 6-regional airports to New Orleans, there they could connect flights serving 57 other cities in the U.S. and Latin America. DirectAir plans on using Boeing 737-300 or McDonnell MD-80 aircraft for the trips.

Now get this, DirectAir plans on offering $50 flights to Atlanta, $78 flights to Cancun, and $55 flights to Houston (again I'll believe it, when I see it). Passengers would not be charged extra for switching flights and would not pay extra for making last-minute reservations.

So catch as Catch-22 can.

News To Me

2006-10-12T13:20:00.000-05:00

Carnegie Mellon University recently (Oct. 9) held a series of lectures where one subject was New Orleans' Master Plan. Though many pixels have been used informing the public of the ongoing process of re-planning flooded and devestated areas of New Orleans but a master plan for the French Quarter is news to me.

Title: Stepping up to the Scaffold: Post-Katrina Planning on the Gulf Coast The basics: Architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, leaders of the firm Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, will speak about their involvement in post-Hurricane Katrina rebuilding efforts in Mississippi and Louisiana. The team is one of the leading proponents of New Urbanism, an urban design movement dedicated to the promotion of healthy alternatives to suburban sprawl, and was recently awarded the master-planning contract for the French Quarter in New Orleans. When: 6:30 p.m. today Where: Carnegie Library Lecture Hall.

No transcript is available as far as I know nor could any information on the French Quarter master plan be found.

Dude, Where's My Coastline?

2006-10-11T12:38:00.000-05:00

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita ripped away 217 square miles of Louisiana's fragile coastline, with each turning huge swaths of land to water overnight, accelerating a process that already posed grave threats to coastal communities, according to a new U.S. Geological Survey study.

Survey scientists compared satellite images taken in 2004 with similar images from October 2005 to match areas that were wetlands, undeveloped dry land and farmland with what looked like open water several weeks after the storms.

The survey underscores the state's repeated demands that federal officials speed efforts to rebuild the Louisiana coastline, both to protect fragile fisheries and wildlife and to augment the buffer of plants, soils and barrier islands that can slow the approach of killer storm surges.

Everyone knew that our coastline was seriously damaged during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita but no definite number was established to quantify the damage. Although this map puts it in visual terms that most people can understand.

So far, finding a solution to this problem has been as elusive as finding an honest politician in Louisiana.

The Wild Blue Yonder

2006-10-10T20:05:00.000-05:00

The N'Awlins Air Show is back on schedule for 2006 after a one-year hiatus due to MWR New Orleans being used as a staging base immediately after Hurricane Katrina.

Signs Of The Times

2006-10-10T19:13:00.000-05:00

New Orleans will finally begin replacing damaged and missing streetsigns throught the city.

Navigating the post-Katrina streets of New Orleans should get easier with the launch of a months-long project Monday to replace thousands of traffic signs knocked down or swept away by Katrina.

City officials estimate that up to 20,000 signs -- from one-ways and yields to street names to parking and freight zones -- need to be replaced across the city.

As city officials have struggled to cut through mountains of red tape over the past year, many neighborhood residents have taken matters into their own hands, fashioning and hanging hand-painted signs themselves.
While FEMA has fronted the money to start the work, Public Works Director Robert Mendoza said City Hall and the federal agency remain about 10,000 signs and $1 million apart in determining replacement needs.

Ronnie Simpson, a spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said Monday that FEMA and the city are continuing to negotiate, but he couldn't provide specifics.

The sign initiative, which began Monday in the Garden District, Coliseum Square and Central City areas, is not scheduled to be completed until next spring.

Though signs were restored on major thoroughfares months ago, many main streets still lack functioning traffic signals. In most cases, those intersections have four-way stop signs.

Plans call for the sign replacement effort to move systematically through the city's 13 planning districts over the next six months.

Beginning next month and continuing though year's end, the program will move to the Uptown and Carrollton neighborhoods, followed by Marigny and Bywater; the French Quarter, the Central Business District and the Warehouse District; and upper Algiers.

In January, work crews will move to Lower Coast Algiers, followed in February by the Lakeview and the Lakefront, Gentilly and Pontilly and eastern New Orleans.

The Lower 9th Ward, one of the city's least populated and most heavily damaged areas, will be addressed in March.

The contractor performing the work is United Rental of Harvey. The firm monitoring the work is Integrated Management Systems Engineers.

City officials said sign crews are prioritizing their work based on safety concerns and will deal with individual citizen complaints as they come in. Anyone wishing to report a missing sign can call 658-2299.

Squandered Heritage

2006-10-10T10:21:00.000-05:00

Karen Gadbois is a member of the Squandered Heritage blog which is chronicling the demolition of New Orleans architectural gems. Their blog is a must read if you care about the character of this great city.

Drink Da' Wata'

2006-10-10T08:46:00.000-05:00

You can now drink the water in the Lower Ninth Ward.

Tap water is now safe to drink in the northern section of the Lower 9th Ward where thousands of homes have been without potable water for more than a year.

Sewerage & Water Board officials announced Monday that the basic public service has been restored to more than 4,000 customers in what had been the sole remaining section of New Orleans without drinkable water.

The state Department of Health and Hospitals has certified the water as safe for everyday use, Marcia St. Martin, executive director of the S&WB, said at a news conference.
The affected area, hard hit by Hurricane Katrina and floodwaters, is bordered by the Industrial Canal, the St. Bernard Parish line, North Derbigny Street and Florida Avenue, St. Martin said. It also includes the sewage-treatment plant at 6501 Florida Ave., she said.

"That area's now open for development and repopulation," said City Councilwoman Cynthia Willard-Lewis, who has pleaded with water board officials and Mayor Ray Nagin's administration to speed up infrastructure repairs.

St. Martin said the S&WB needed more than a year to return water to all of New Orleans because of the "unprecedented amount of damage." Workers couldn't begin repairs on a "major trunk line on Florida Avenue until a barge was removed," she said.

There were buses on top of houses, and houses on top of houses, said Willard-Lewis, who noted that a portion of the Lower 9th Ward was damaged by Hurricane Rita as well.

"I think it's great, but I'm not sure I trust it," said George McCullum, who lived for nearly 50 years in the area.

"I'm driving over to New Orleans tomorrow (Tuesday) to cut the grass," said McCullum, referring to his flood-damaged property, "but I'll probably bring my own water."

McCullum and his wife were displaced to Dallas and have since moved to Bay St. Louis, Miss.

"I still haven't gotten back into my home," McCullum said. "I'm still waiting to see what's going to happen to my neighborhood."

Now if only the Corps of Engineers can keep out the non-potable water.

Holy Cross, Batman. It's Gentilly.

2006-10-09T17:18:00.000-05:00

Holy Cross High School has chosen a Gentilly site to relocate its campus after being severly flooded by Huricane Katrina.

The school's board of directors picked the site of the now-closed Redeemer-Seton High School and nearby St. Francis Cabrini Catholic Church over its other option, a vacant 20-acre north Kenner tract that the Jefferson Parish School Board was willing to sell for about $2.5 million. The school's owner, the Congregation of the Holy Cross, has agreed with the board's recommendation, Holy Cross announced.

The decision caps 13 months of anxiety over the future of Holy Cross, which saw its campus in New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward badly flooded by Hurricane Katrina, as were many of the neighborhoods on which Holy Cross depends for enrollment. Since reopening, the school has taught students in portable buildings at that campus while its leaders searched for a new home.

The Gentilly site was the preference of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, which had some influence but no firm authority to tell Holy Cross what to do. Archdiocesan leaders said they wanted to keep Holy Cross in New Orleans and promoted the Gentilly site as way to spur redevelopment in that area.

Now if only the Jokers on the Orleans Parish School Board can make a decision about what to do with their schools.

Update: More information on the aftermath here and here.

Lucky Number 13

2006-10-09T10:05:00.000-05:00

Governor Blanco's Road Home program has handed out only thirteen checks out of an estimated 200,000 potential applicants.

At this rate all checks should be delivered by the time the next once-in-a-lifetime storm comes this way.

Locked Up

2006-10-06T10:20:00.000-05:00

U.S. District Judge Eldon Fallon has ordered that the Industrial Canal Lock Replacement Project be put on hold in order to further evaluate the enviromental impact of the project.

"The court finds that the corps failed to take a 'hard look' at the environmental impacts and consequences of dredging and disposing of the canal's contaminated sediment and should revisit the project in light of recent catastrophic events," U.S. District Judge Eldon Fallon wrote in his opinion, referring to the effects of Hurricane Katrina.

The ruling was hailed as a victory by Pam Dashiell, president of the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association, which filed the lawsuit asking that the project be reviewed. The neighborhood group, concerned about disruptions from the $764 million construction project, had worked against it in tandem with environmental groups concerned about contamination of the waterway.

I am neither a lawyer (thank God) nor an enviromental expert so I don't want to get into the complexities and impact of this decision. I'll let you educate yourself and come to your own conclusion.

I do know that shipping is an integral portion of the New Orleans area economy.

"The Gulf Intracoastal Canal Association estimates that for every 24 hours that the lock is closed, the nation's transportation industry loses $500,000," the statement said. "Before Katrina, about 9,000 direct and indirect jobs relied on deepwater shipping to the port's Inner Harbor, and the lock replacement project is essential to retaining those jobs in the long term."

Whatever the outcome it should come soon. The rebuilding of New Orleans should not be held up while lawyers lock horns.

Survey Said!

2006-10-05T23:25:00.000-05:00

Apparently the population of New Orleans is a wee bit smaller than the the Mayor has assumed.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Fewer than 190,000 people live in New Orleans, a fraction of the 454,000 people estimated to reside in the city before Hurricane Katrina hit last year, according to a survey released Thursday.

A spokeswoman for the Louisiana Recovery Authority, Natalie Wyeth, called the results of the door-to-door survey of households "the definitive, most precise set of numbers we've seen." But a local demographer, who has studied the city's population, dismissed figures as a "fairly significant underestimation."

"This is important, because funding decisions are based on population," demographer Greg Rigamer said....
According to the survey, an estimated 187,525 people lived in Orleans Parish, as of August. The figure did not include those living in college dormitories and jails and did not include people who work in New Orleans but live outside the city, said Dave Bowman, the project's lead from LRA.

The Orleans Parish population count had a margin of error of plus or minus 11.5 percent, the survey showed. Survey results, with even greater margins of error, also were released for hurricane-hit Jefferson, Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes.

In those parishes, populations were estimated at 435,786 in Jefferson, with a margin of error of plus or minus 12.7 percent; 20,024 in Plaquemines with a margin of error of plus or minus 36.3 percent; and 25,016 in St. Bernard with a margin of error of 17 percent.

Pre-storm populations from July 2005 were estimated at 452,824 in Jefferson; 28,995 in Plaquemines and 65,364 in St. Bernard, according to the survey.

So whom to believe? According to this story in August, some "experts" estimated the population (at the time) to be between 210,000 and 235,000. On the other hand, some estimates had the population at 171,000 (apparently determined by the USPS) with an expected increase of 20,000 (by the same group that estimated the population to be 235,000) for the following six months. That would put the population in-line with the latest survey.

I suppose we can better estimate New Orleans population by asking the audience of "Family Feud".

Katrina Cottage, Aisle Ten

2006-10-03T12:57:00.000-05:00

The Katrina Cottage is going retail.

The "Lowe's Katrina Cottage" offerings range from a two-bedroom, 544-square-foot model to a three-bedroom, 936-square-foot house. The cottages will cost $45 to $55 per square foot to build, Lowe's estimates, meaning the smallest would run about $27,200 and the largest $46,800. Estimates do not include the cost of the foundation, heating and cooling, and labor.

"We're starting on the Gulf Coast, where the original idea came from, but as soon as we feel the logistics are worked out we could go national," says Ms. Cusato, whose website, www.cusatocottage.com, has received more than 7,000 inquiries since January. "We want to be sure that when we say it's available, we're 100 percent sure we can deliver."

If Lowe's is successful, it's likely other companies will offer their own designs. "There is such a huge opportunity, when you talk about the number of houses that need to be built in Mississippi and Louisiana, that I think a lot of folks are looking at this type of concept," says Dan Tresch, director of governmental affairs at James Hardy Building Products, which provides the siding for Cusato's cottages.

So what started as response to the inadequecies of FEMA housing is burgening into a new dwelling type.

The only question I have is can we use the ten items or less line?

The Beef People

2006-10-02T22:31:00.000-05:00

New Orleans, Winn-Dixie should be commended for helping rebuild our broken city. The company plans to spend $25 million to reopen its storm-damaged stores. The company reopened its Gentilly store at 4600 Chef Menteur Highway last Friday and will reopen its Chalmette store on Paris Road Oct. 12 â€” the same day Winn-Dixie is scheduled to emerge from bankruptcy.

New Orleans CityBusiness has more.

A River Of Inspiration

2006-09-28T13:27:00.000-05:00

The New Orleans City Planning Commission has issued request for qualifications (RFQ) to redevelop the Mississippi riverfront.

From NOLA.com:

Some of the world's best-known architects, from Frank Gehry and Rafael ViÃ±oly to Rem Koolhaas and Norman Foster, could have been forgiven a look of puzzlement when they opened their mail one day last week.

There before them was a large black box containing pralines, a can of French Market coffee and chicory, an Emeril Lagasse cookbook, a history of New Orleans' "urban landscape," an iPod full of New Orleans songs and -- of all things -- "Da Mayor in Your Pocket," a device that plays recordings of six of Mayor Ray Nagin's more memorably colorful comments.

The collection was intended to help get the architects into a New Orleans frame of mind as they looked over the city's invitation to get involved in planning a major redevelopment of parts of the riverfront.

Nagin has chosen the New Orleans Building Corp. to oversee the redevelopment planning, and a note to each architect from Sean Cummings, the agency's executive director, said, "We come bearing gifts and an uncommon invitation, one infused with excellence and high aspiration. . . . We welcome you to this city, and we invite you to help reinvent our riverfront."

What might the reinvention involve? Cruise ship terminals, hotels, parking garages, museums, maybe an amphitheater or an opera house or a planetarium, according to the terms under which the port and city agreed to open the area up for redevelopment. Perhaps the plan's highest aspiration is to allow for a riverfront park or green space that would facilitate pedestrian access to the waterway that was responsible for New Orleans' birth and growth, but that for much of the city's history has been almost invisible to many residents.

While the redevelopment has been talked about for many years I hope this effort actually results in the citizens having more access to the most valuable real-estate in the city.

The final draft of Riverfront Vision 2005 can be accessed here.

The Good, The Bad, The Indifferent

2006-09-27T15:54:00.000-05:00

The good news: Phase I of the New Orleans Heart and Surgery Institute reopening is up and running.

The bad news: Phase IV of the Morial Convention Center has been put on-hold.

And the indifferent: Quin Hillyer of the American Spectator pens his opinion of the Saints victory over the Falcons and its meaning for the city at large.

Pipe Dreams

2006-09-26T14:21:00.000-05:00

A local engineer has an idea, and a pump, to eliminate the use of outfall canals to divert water out of the city but the Corps of Engineers and S&WB are still sleepwalking.

The former outfall canals would be filled in and the land turned into parks, used to build housing or other uses.
With no canals to pump rainwater into, water would be channeled from city pump stations to the Mississippi River, or the Gulf of Mexico, through a network of underground pipes.
The upside: Storm surge would never again overwhelm the 17th Street, London Avenue and Orleans Avenue canals as happened during Hurricane Katrina.
Thatâ€™s the dream of mechanical engineer Patrick Rousset.

Should Congress be convinced of the advantages of this system, the landscape of the city could be greatly enhanced. Instead of open canals that are subject to overflowing (re: Katrina) and act as barriers between one part of the city and another, the land above the drainage pipes could be converted to linear parks that can not only increase the amount of green space, but also reconnect neighborhoods to form a more cohesive city.

Smackdown

2006-09-26T11:27:00.000-05:00

The New Orleans Saints grounded the hated Falcons of Atlanta.

Oh Rebuild Me A Home, Where The Walkers Can Roam

2006-09-25T16:00:00.001-05:00

The district rebuilding plans have been released and can be viewed via the links below:

I haven't been able to fully digest the impact the plans will have on the city as a whole but I can make a few observations.

First of all, the changes to the city scape are not as dramatic as I would have hoped which makes all the more likely that the rebuilding will happen. The recovery plans mostly focus on the restoration and improvement of the damaged infrastructure. That should be a no-brainer. However what is important is that different utilities and infrastructure are given different priorities reflecting their importance to the residents.

Second, one thing that did stand out is that a district's priorities were somewhat consistant with that of other districts with similar income levels. Fore example. The more affluent districts tended to want less parks and more green space along boulevards, mixed-use commercial developments and better streets and sidewalks. The middle-class neighborhoods are looking for some of the same improvements as the affluent areas in addition to pedestrian and bicycle paths whereas the poorer areas tend to concentrate on parks, neighborhood grocery stores and pharmacies as well as improved mass transit and sometimes an expanded street car line.

What is positive about these plans is that they reflect the priorities of the residents and not the dreams of some far-off planners. In addition, these plans are not entirely inconsistent with the city master plan commissioned by the BNOB last fall and was widely criticized.

The next step will be for the various district plans to be coordinated into an overall master plan for the city. Some might say that the earlier master plan was a waste of time and money. Not necessarily. The plan unveiled by the BNOB can serve as a guidepost for integrating the disparate plans into a single cohesive plan that everyone can be happy with.

Profiles in Design

2006-09-25T08:50:00.000-05:00

The AIArchitect does a profile of one of my old college classmates, Trula Remson. I'm glad to see she is doing so well and it doesn't suprise me. She was one of only, I believe, two honors graduates in our class and the first to pass the ARE. All this despite our fifth-year professor saying that women aren't cut out to be architects.

I can also personally attest to her efforts to offer a lifeline to those who lost their homes, their offices, and their firms. A couple of days after Hurricane Katrina struck, I received an email from her suggesting that I contact the local AIA as they were compiling a list of firms willing to hire, either permanently or temporarily, displaced architects. After a handful of phone calls, all made from the mall where I was shopping with my family, I landed a job with a Baton Rouge firm till my current firm was able to establish temporary offices.

Thanks to her efforts and forethought, I never missed a paycheck.

Are You Ready For Some Football?

2006-09-15T17:18:00.000-05:00

The Superdome repairs and renovations are complete enough to play football.

A lush green turf carpets the floor. Plush black leather seats fill the club sections. Bright gray and blue paint shines on the walls. Glitzy 42-inch flat-screen televisions hang from the walls of the luxury suites.

While a flurry of work continues around the clock, the first phase of the $185 million renovation of the Superdome is essentially complete. Minor repairs are all that's left before the iconic 31-year-old stadium reopens to an international audience Sept. 25 when the Saints return home to play the Atlanta Falcons on "Monday Night Football."

Hurricane Katrina ravaged the stadium, causing millions of dollars in wind and water damage to the roof and interior. The facility sustained further damage when it served as a shelter for more than 20,000 storm victims in the week after the hurricane.
"We're ready to play football," said Doug Thornton, the regional vice president of SMG, the company that manages the Superdome.

That's not to say the work is finished. But the major jobs in the multiphase project have been completed in recent weeks. All that remains, Thornton said, are "little strokes."

Workers still need to spray sand and rubber fill into the artificial turf playing field. That work is expected to be completed by early next week.

Technicians also need to program the scoreboards and video boards. Italian porcelain tile and temporary carpet needs to be laid in the building's upper-level concourses and lobbies. Menu boards and graphics must be installed in the concession stands. And about 20 percent of the light fixtures still need new lamps.

Otherwise, the Dome is good to go. In fact, Thornton said the construction is farther along than originally anticipated. Workers have already started to install countertops and cabinetry in some of the stadium's 137 luxury suites, a job that originally fell under a later work timeline.

"I am not worried about anything," Thornton said. "A week is a lifetime in the construction business."
Thornton led several members of the Louisiana Stadium and Exposition District board of commissioners on a tour of the building Wednesday afternoon, and the group left the building impressed
"It looks much better than I expected," Commissioner Craig Saporito said.

"I'm loving this," said Commissioner Sara Roberts.

So far, Thornton said, the six-month project has avoided any major setbacks during final testing of the building's operating systems.
A test performed last week by environmental engineers for the state indicated that air quality inside the facility is excellent.

Tests continue on the video board, scoreboard and message board system, which includes two new 27-by-48-foot video displays in the end zones, four high-tech 8-by-44-foot scoreboards in the corner of each end zone and four new 183-foot-long LED halo boards along the facade of the loge level. All the equipment has been mounted and wired.

Similar tests will be conducted on the lighting and public address systems in the next few days.

One of the final tests will be a "super flush" of the plumbing system. The test, which consists of hundreds of workers simultaneously flushing toilets throughout the building, was scheduled for Wednesday night or this morning.

Thornton said all the work and testing needs to be completed by Wednesday so he and other officials have time to conduct a thorough evaluation of the building.

The Saints are expected to hold their first practice in the Dome on Sept. 21 to familiarize themselves with the building. More than half of the players on the 53-man roster have never played in the stadium.

Complicating matters is the planning for the opening event itself. Dome officials compared the game to a Super Bowl in terms of planning and preparation. For example, leading up to the game, ESPN is expected to broadcast many of its daily shows live from the footbridge between the Superdome and New Orleans Arena.

As part of the NFL game-day events, the Goo Goo Dolls will conduct a live show outside the stadium. Bono, the lead singer for U2, is expected to perform for the Dome crowd before the game.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco, former NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue and his successor, Roger Goodell, are expected to be at the game.

"Overall, we're in as good a shape as we can possibly be," Thornton said. "We're very happy with the Dome project."

Looks Great. Less Rent

2006-09-13T09:14:00.000-05:00

The City Planning Commission has approved developers plans to convert the long vacant Falstaff Brewery into mixed income apartments.

Plans to convert the long-vacant Falstaff Brewery complex at 2600 Gravier St. into the Falstaff Apartments, a 156-unit mixed-income housing development, won approval Tuesday from the New Orleans City Planning Commission.

No one spoke against the project at a public hearing, and both the commission and representatives of nearby neighborhood associations praised it, saying it would restore a deteriorating and highly visible building and provide much-needed low-income housing.

But the commission voted to require more off-street parking spaces than the developers said they can provide, at least right now, placing the project's future in question. The final decision is up to the City Council, which is likely to take up the issue next month.

Whether or not this type of development will be financially achievable is yet to be seen. The way I see it, for the developers to charge the type of rent they are proposing they will be forced to do a renovation without all the bells and whistles the New Orleaneans would like to see return to the old brewery.

It is best remembered by many New Orleanians for the "weather ball" atop the brewery's towering sign. The ball's changing colors and the direction in which the letters of the name "Falstaff" lit up, whether from top to bottom or vice versa, forecast local weather conditions.

These little "whizbang" features cost money and have little return-on-investment. Furthermore, the Falstaff Brewery is located in a part of town that has little if any attraction to tourists. Probably the best we can expect from this development is a spruced-up building that is occupied and generating income. Both results are far better than the status quo.

However, a second phase to this project promises to further enhance the area:

The two-story Silo building at South Dorgenois and Perdido streets, which is separated from the rest of the complex, is designated for commercial development at a later date.

The developers are seeking to change the site's zoning from HI, heavy industrial, to RM-4, multiple-family residential, and to create a "mixed-use planned community district overlay."
Depending on the types of retail spaces envisioned, this could help sweeten the pot for more upscale residents. But the same old bug-a-boo remains; parking.
The biggest issue in dispute before the commission was how many off-street parking spaces the developers should have to provide. Under the zoning law, they should have 259 spaces for the apartments plus 43 for the retail spaces to be developed later.
The commission's staff recommended requiring only 156 spaces for the apartments, one for each unit, and waiving the commercial spaces for now.

But Miller said the developers can provide only 56 to 115 spaces at a site across Gravier Street that holds a former brewery administration building. If the Historic District Landmarks Commission or the council authorizes demolition of that building, the site could hold 115 vehicles. Otherwise, it can hold only 56.

There is a large parking lot between the brewery and South Broad Street, but that is not part of the rezoning request and Miller said that efforts to lease parking spaces in that lot or other nearby lots have been unsuccessful.

Miller asked the commission to require only 125 off-street spaces, which he said would be enough for a complex where many low-income residents are likely to use public transit, not their own cars. But commissioners said other residents are likely to have more than one vehicle per unit.

In the end, the commission voted to require 142 spaces, giving the developers credit for 14 spaces they could put in an alley behind the Silo building that the commission said should instead remain open recreational space.

Parking has always been a problem that that part of town. Dwight Eisenhower once said "If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it." The Planning Commission needs to understand the real purpose of mass transit. Where large numbers of people are confined to a relatively small space, that space becomes highly valuable and portioning larges parts of it for the sole purpose temporary storage of personal vehicles becomes less economical. This is where mass transit comes in. Since buses and street cars are always in uses and stored "off-site" when not in use, valuable land is not devoted to parking.

This part of New Orleans is much like Downtown in that there is large number of persons in the area during working hours mainly due to the location of the city courthouse down the street at the corner of Tulane and S. Broad St. Renovating the Falstaff Brewery will only that many people to the area.

The solution: the RTA should devise routes to include people coming to the courthouse and leaving the Brewery in the morning and vice versa in the evening. An even more ambitious plan would be to include a street car line down Tulane.

But then again, maybe I've had a few too many.

I'll Explain This So Even You Can Understand It

2006-09-08T17:16:00.000-05:00

Sen. David Vitter apparently has straightened out the Corps confusion with regard to the status of the MR-GO.

Vitter straightens out Corps confusion
By CityBusiness staff report

2006-09-06 3:23 PM CST

METAIRIE â€” Sen. David Vitter, R-Metairie, today reaffirmed his position on Mississippi River Gulf Outlet with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. After the conference call, Vitter made the following statement:
â€œI really think weâ€™ve gotten the Corps back on track. They assured me today that deepdraft navigation through MRGO is off the table and they are focused on the important restoration work needed to replenish the wetlands MRGO has destroyed. Thatâ€™s essential to protect St. Bernard Parish and New Orleans East in particular.â€�
The Corps also promised to include business relocation costs in its recommendations and consult extensively with state and local officials.â€¢

Now on to more important matters.

My City Is Smarter Than Your City

2006-09-07T18:15:00.000-05:00

New Orleans finally ranks high in something positive.

City	State	Percent
The brainiest cities in the United States
Top 25 cities with more than 250,000 population, ranked by percentage of bachelor's degrees among residents 25 and older
Seattle	WA	52.7
San Francisco	CA	50.1
Raleigh	NC	50.1
Washington	DC	45.3
Austin	TX	44.1
Minneapolis	MN	43.2
Atlanta	GA	42.4
Boston	MA	40.9
San Diego	CA	40.4
Lexington-Fayette	KY	39.5
Denver	CO	39.0
Charlotte	NC	38.8
Portland	OR	38.8
St. Paul	MN	36.5
San Jose	CA	36.1
Colorado Springs	CO	34.9
Honolulu	HI	34.7
Oakland	CA	33.8
Pittsburgh	PA	32.3
New York	NY	32.2
Albuquerque	NM	32.2
Anchorage	AK	32.2
Omaha	NE	31.9
Nashville-Davidson	TN	31.7
Columbus	OH	31.4
New Orleans	LA	31.4