After unexpectedly throwing out a hard-won contract for the development of a grand linear park through the heart of New Orleans, the city has reopened bidding. But this time, the urban planners who won the first contract say the question is not how to win the contract with City Hall, but whether they want to. […]
Posted inLand Use
Troubled complex to be auctioned, a victim of Katrina
The Gordon Plaza Apartments located in the historically troubled Agriculture Street community are scheduled to be auctioned off after the complex’s owner failed to make mortgage payments since Katrina. The now-vacant development was owned by low-income housing nonprofit Desire Community Housing Corporation. The U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department-subsidized, 128-unit multifamily complex is scheduled to […]
Posted inCriminal Justice
Go big or go home!
On Thursday, the top civil rights prosecutor for the U.S. Department of Justice, Assistant Attorney General Tommy Perez, came to New Orleans and basically said what we all already knew: * The NOPD is a mess * The NOPD has drawn just about the most scrutiny in the country * The NOPD has shown little […]
Posted inGovernment & Politics, Land Use
Like Zulu, nightclub developer may get loan from city
Update: The Thursday City Council meeting where these loans were to be considered has been postponed. The matters likely will be taken up by the council Tuesday at 10 a.m. The oversized check Mayor Ray Nagin handed Zulu on Lundi Gras may have sparked noisy debate, but a far less sensational loan from the same […]
Posted inGovernment & Politics
That old-mayor odor
I saw this quote from Mayor C. Ray Nagin’s interview with CNN: We have this kind of idealism that at some point people are going to understand what we’ve been doing. It’s almost like an underground movement. We’ve been working underground to make sure that this city can fully recover with the hope that at […]
Posted inLand Use
City planners deny plan for borrow pit in the east
Developer John Cummings had plans for an eastern New Orleans neighborhood that involved building better levees. For the nearby residents, that was fine – they just wanted them built with someone else’s dirt. The residents prevailed Tuesday with the city’s Planning Commission, which denied Cummings a permit for a borrow pit, where clay would have […]
Posted inGovernment & Politics
GOP locks keys in the car; Louisiana Dems lose keys
Healthcare overhaul had been iffy in the polls throughout the past year’s arduous negotiations on Capitol Hill. But now that it has passed, Democrats are banking that as the public learns what is actually in the law and what gets implemented in the first year of the law, the public quickly will warm to it. […]
Posted inGovernment & Politics
Healthcare wins!
Great news, everybody! After delighting in last night’s historic vote to extend healthcare coverage to nearly all Americans while simultaneously lowering the long-term deficit, I put my Democratic voter registration card under my pillow and went to bed. Lo and behold, I woke up this morning to find that my acne had cleared, my seasonal […]
Posted inLand Use
'Just' compensation difficult to define in Detroit
The push to “shrink the footprint” in New Orleans — to slowly shut down badly blighted or hurricane damaged neighborhoods by banning development and rolling back public services — fell apart under howls of resident protest against the 2005-2006 Bring New Orleans Back plan. In the New York Times, Harvard Economics Professor Edward Glaeser described […]
Posted inLand Use
City releases HUD report, invites public comments
The federal government gave New Orleans more than $6.5 million to build or repair affordable housing last year, resulting in 63 rental rehabs and 150 blighted property renovations, according to the draft of a federal report released for public review this week. Another 81 blighted properties were expropriated using the federal grant money, according to […]