Moving past ‘We’re broke’: why New Orleans can’t cut its way to growth

This fall, I started teaching urbanism and real estate at a predominantly white institution. Let’s just say my class is 95% majority.

I am not an urban designer. I am a community development person to my bones. So my students answered three questions over and over: What does the community want? What can actually be built? And who is going to pay for it?

That last question will humble you every time.

Our site this semester is the former Lake Forest Plaza in New Orleans East. If you were around in the ’80s and early ’90s, Lake Forest Plaza was not just somewhere your mama went to buy something. It was a place. The movies. A skating rink. A fountain. Somewhere teenagers could go. Somewhere you ran into people. A town square and community gathering space for the East. At its peak, it wasn’t just a gathering place. It generated roughly a quarter of the city’s sales tax.

Then came disinvestment, decline, Hurricane Katrina, demolition, and nearly two decades of ideas about what might come next.

My students are standing on what’s left of it, asking: What do you build after the thing that held people together is gone? In the East, that starts with understanding who lives here, what they can afford, what they spend money on, and what they have to leave the neighborhood to find.

New Orleans East is predominantly Black and majority homeowners. Families who have been there for decades. Beautiful housing stock, Joe Brown Park, a major regional library, schools, churches and small businesses. Still, residents have been asking for years: can we get some stuff? A sit-down restaurant. Better retail. Somewhere to gather that doesn’t require getting on the interstate and spending your money in another parish.

More than a decade ago, a city market study estimated about $686 million in spending power for residents around the old mall site. That money didn’t just disappear wholesale. But a lot of it got in the car, and took its sales tax with it.

This is not a demand for a Cheesecake Factory as a civil right.

It is a question about investment and development. Who gets it? Who waits for it? And how long does a community have to prove it deserves what shows up as almost automatic in other places? 

20th-century development helped people leave cities. Now they’re returning. 

A significant part of 20th-century American development was built around getting away from the city. White flight. Federal highway spending. Redlining. Mortgage policy. Racial exclusion. Cheap land farther out. People moved, money moved and retail followed.

The suburban form was not some neutral preference that just happened, it was shaped and molded. Public policy helped make it possible and racial exclusion helped decide who got to benefit.

In New Orleans, it was the bridge and the highway. The Causeway opened in 1956 and made a way out, across the lake to the North Shore. The interstate came through and split neighborhoods in two. Ask anybody who remembers the oaks on North Claiborne. The city’s population peaked in 1960 and has never been that big again.

When the neighborhoods left behind started coming apart, the country had an explanation ready: crack. And crack cocaine did real damage. But nobody made a public service announcement about the highway that cut the neighborhood in half. Or the mortgage rules that decided which blocks could get a loan. Or the stores that followed the money out.

We built subdivisions and malls surrounded by empty parking lots. We separated where people lived from where they worked from where they shopped. Now a lot of those malls are dead or dying and the older suburbs around them are aging into the same problems cities were blamed for 40 years ago.

So what are developers replacing the malls with? Walkable mixed-use districts. Housing near shopping centers. Restaurants. Trees. Places to sit. A little downtown.

We had those. Now we call it placemaking. We could have told you that. Some of us did.

Who foots the bill to redevelop the East?

All of this sounds lovely until somebody asks the third question I make my students answer: Who is going to pay for it? New Orleans is staring at another enormous budget problem. Mayor Helena Moreno’s proposed 2027 budget includes about $77 million in cuts to close a gap of roughly $100 million.

This hole did not appear overnight. For years, federal stimulus, one-time revenues and fund balancing helped cover spending that recurring revenue could not sustain. Sometimes that is exactly what the government should do. A pandemic hits. Revenue collapses. Federal relief arrives. You use temporary money to keep people employed and services running.

But one-time money is just that. The city’s 2026 budget presentation said that in 2024, property tax,  general sales and use tax revenues came in more than $30 million below forecast, while spending was supported by one-time revenues and fund balance.

Then, after the 2024 budget hearings, another $62.3 million in spending for Council and Administration priorities was added to the 2025 budget using fund balance, based on revenue collections that never materialized. 

That sequence matters. This was not simply a surprise revenue problem. Decisions were being made while the structural problem was already visible. Now the room is gone. Some cuts are unavoidable when the money coming in does not match the money going out. That is basic math.

And public safety has real needs and consequences when ignored. But budgets are choices even when the choices are ugly. A budget is a moral document. It is also a development strategy.

Because there is another question underneath all of this: What did we use the good years and the temporary money to build that would make the city stronger when the money was gone?

I am not asking whether every expenditure was worthwhile. I am asking about strategy. Did we grow the tax base? Did we make it easier for businesses to open and stay? Did we help more commercial corridors grow? Did we give people in the East somewhere to spend their money at home? Did we invest in neighborhoods that had been waiting decades for public and private capital? Did we create places people want to live, work and spend money without making the people already there disposable?

 You cannot only ask what we can cut. At some point somebody has to ask: What are we trying to build?

Redevelopment requires a continued push, even after the first plan falls apart

I was born in Cleveland. Cleveland has been broke for most of my natural life. And one thing I have always respected about that city is that, when Cleveland decided a redevelopment effort mattered, it could stay with that thing for years. Sometimes decades.

The city assembled land. It partnered with community development corporations. It used federal money. It built infrastructure. It issued debt. It supported private developers. It phased things. It tried something, learned something and kept moving.

Not every project worked. Some deals had more hair on them than a 1974 Afro.

Redevelopment does not happen because somebody made a beautiful rendering and held a press conference. It requires political will. Site control. Patient money. Public resources. Private capital. And somebody willing to keep pushing after the first plan falls apart.

Cities like New Orleans cannot afford to confuse being broke with having no choices. And they cannot keep using temporary money to avoid making permanent decisions. Scarcity does not eliminate strategy. It makes strategy more important.

Which brings me back to New Orleans East. You cannot repair every neighborhood in one budget. You cannot rebuild every commercial corridor at once. You cannot undo white flight, segregation, redlining, highways, disinvestment, Hurricane Katrina, and 50 years of bad land-use decisions in a four-year term.

But you can decide what direction you are walking. Buy the land. Plant the trees. Build the first phase. Finance the things everybody says has too much hair on it.

Come back next year. Do the next piece. Keep going.

New Orleans has to balance its budget. But balancing a budget and building a city are not the same question. There is a difference between cutting because you must and governing toward decline.

Kristyna is a New Orleans-based social impact strategist and expert community developer who brings an award-winning legacy of building and leading organizations to increase revenue and community impact through change leadership, technical expertise, and executive coaching.