By Karen Gadbois, The Lens staff writer | The New Orleans landscape is dotted with signs boasting about “our recovery in progress,” an effort by former Mayor Ray Nagin’s administration to tout his successes. His successor is taking that idea even further, seeking proposals to spend tax dollars to photograph and videotape the recovery so […]
Posted inGovernment & Politics, Land Use
Recovery projects are progressing, but half are not yet under construction
By Ariella Cohen, The Lens staff writer | In the nine months since Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s administration took over City Hall, long-delayed capital projects have made steady, if slow, progress. Even so, don’t expect to see too many cranes in the sky just yet. More than half of 210 planned projects remain in pre-construction phases. […]
Posted inOpinion
Formula for recovery: New Orleans needs a population explosion
Eli Ackerman & Alan Williams, The Lens contributing opinion writers | The census numbers are in and they’re troubling, but they suggest New Orleans’ only strategy for full post-Katrina revitalization. We need to grow the city’s population enormously and strategically. New Orleans is now home to 343,829 of us, meaning that close to 100,000 people […]
Posted inGovernment & Politics, Opinion
Are we still waiting for Superman to corrupt our kids and culture?
Recent events have only confirmed the fears I expressed in my first “Waiting for Superman” post. I warned about the dangers of linking educational reform efforts to the so-called “Superman” character, but nobody listened. No one seems to care that Superman is, at root, a phony. His real name is Kal-El, and he’s an illegal […]
Posted inInvestigations, Land Use
Transplanted medplex houses in need of life support
A $3.2 million effort to preserve houses that once stood at the site of the planned Veterans Affairs hospital has left them open to the elements and shorn of the detail that made them worth saving.
Posted inEnvironment, Land Use
Despite 8 deaths in abandoned warehouse, city has done little new to fight vagrancy
By Ariella Cohen, The Lens staff writer | Six weeks after eight young people were killed by a fire in the fallow 9th Ward warehouse where they were living, the city has not taken new substantive action to reduce vagrancy or shut down unsafe squats. “We just don’t have the manpower,” the city’s newly appointed […]
Posted inLand Use, Schools
Ghost schools haunt New Orleans neighborhoods
Five years after the Orleans Parish School Board shut down dozens of hurricane-damaged public schools, New Orleans residents continue to live alongside the wreckage.
Posted inOpinion
KIPPsters vs. Hipsters: Why so little choice in Downtown schools?
By C.W. Cannon, The Lens contributing opinion writer| The post-Katrina era in New Orleans has been marked by an oddly familiar mix of promise and disappointment, of rising above historic obstacles and of continuing an almost masochistic submission to them. The terms of the dialectic are continuity and change, and its fabric is skin color. […]
Posted inGovernment & Politics, Schools
Consultants give early glimpse of report on UNO-SUNO merger, stress differences
Jessica Williams, The Lens staff writer | State higher education officials heard an initial report today from the consultant studying the possible merger of Southern University at New Orleans into the University of New Orleans, who took pains to point out the vast differences in the two institutions. “When you think about SUNO and UNO, […]
Posted inGovernment & Politics, Opinion
Student takes role of David to creationist’s legislative Goliath
Zachary Kopplin undertook an unusual “science project” for his senior year at Baton Rouge Magnet High School. He’s defending science itself, by advocating for the repeal of the Louisiana Science Education Act. Kopplin rightly views the legislation as costumed creationism – ridiculous Trojan horse legislation that lets instructors teach scientific “controversies” where none exist. He […]