Progress For New Orleans

One of the most beloved aspects of the “New Orleans Culture” is its embrace of music. Unfortunately for decades New Orleans zoning code was hostile to live music in the city. The only place that live music was a “Permitted” use under the zoning code was Bourbon Street, initially, and then Frenchman Street additionally. Outside of these two entertainment zones, live music was either “conditional” or not allowed.

The City of New Orleans is now rewriting its zoning code and we have the opportunity to expand & protect live music and the venues that host it.

Well, this a moment of opportunity. If you want to see Live Music thrive and grow in New Orleans you need to send in a note to the City Planning Commission.

A couple of key points to hit in your comments would be.

- A desire that live music be a “permitted” use in Commercial, Mixed Use & Neighborhood Business zoning categories provided the venue can operate within the municipal code’s sound ordinance.

- That live music is an integral part of the New Orleans economy as expressed through the “cultural economy” sections of the Master Plan.  And that not allowing live music to play a larger role in neighborhood economies is contrary to  the ‘spirit’ of the City’s master plan.

Public comments may be emailed to the CPC office at cpcinfo@nola.gov. Please type “CZO Draft” into the subject line.

The folks looking to shut down live music venues are already organized. New Orleans if full of NIMBYs looking to shut down anything they can’t specifically control or doesn’t specifically meet their needs. We have an opportunity to get live music as a permitted use enshrined in the zoning code if we act now.

It is kind of harsh to start with such an emphatic title. Particularly when I know that all of the volunteer’s hearts are in the right place and it’s kind of like the little old lady telling you she doesn’t need your damn help crossing the street.

But seriously, there should be NO volunteers working on oil spill recovery work on the Gulf Coast. NONE.

BP, Transocean, Halliburton and who ever else is involved in this massive catastrophe needs to pay the full costs of the clean up.  They took a calculated risk for what would have been, and may yet still be fabulous rewards. But sometimes the dice come up snake-eyes and things go spectacularly wrong. This is the cost of being involved in the petro-chemical industry. They need to write the checks.  

The state of Louisiana and the Federal government should not be in the business of wrangling free labor for what should be well compensated positions doing hot, messy and dangerous work. Working in the marshes along the Louisiana coast isn’t a day at the beach.

This oil spill threatens to impact the Gulf Coast economy for years to come. A billion dollar impact on the seafood industry and the ways that the money that won’t be coming in will ripple through the rest of the economy in lost taxes. The visitors that won’t be coming to Gulf Coast beaches. This is going to add economic dislocation to environmental disaster.

So BP (which I am using as shorthand for the consortium of contractors responsible) needs to hire people. They need to replace the money that would have flowed through the economy via the ways in which it has in the past, and free labor via volunteers just undercuts these workers and in a sense lets’ BP off the hook for the full cost of the clean up.

Everyone who is cleaning off a bird, everyone who is scooping oil out of the marsh, everyone who is grading the crude off the sand, needs to be paid for their effort.

If non-governmental agencies are called in for their expertise, and they should be, they need to document the man-hours involved and present BP with a bill and send checks to those working.

If this oil spill is going to suck 100 of millions, or even billions of dollars out of the Gulf Coast economy then it is up to BP to replace that by paying EVERYONE involved in anyway with Oil Spill Recovery.

And if they won’t pay? Then they need to have an assessment placed on their existing offshore leases which will have them forfeiting a significant portion of the money from their production from producing fields until everyone is paid.

So, I’m making a plea against the use of volunteers in the oil spill recovery. If you are coming to the Gulf Coast to work to clean up BP’s mess then you should be paid by BP.

Prior to Katrina New Orleans had a housing crisis.

It may not have seemed like a housing crisis but it was. And it all related to our population numbers and our economy.

At the peak of our population we were close to 650,000 people. This was prior to most of New Orleans East being developed. Since those times in the early 1960s we have continually lost population and in the meantime we built probably a third more houses and apartments in the 1970s and 80s.

Add to this a form of housing, the shotgun, that dominates many older neighborhoods, that has proven itself extremely unpopular with a modern American family that wants bedroom doors that close. Finally moving out of a shotgun house was for many lower middle class New Orleans families proof that you could sustain yourself in some fairly comfortable manner.

The rents, pre-Katrina, were fairly cheap and based upon two things:  An owner who didn’t need to pay off a mortgage but didn’t really spend that much on upkeep and tenants who couldn’t afford much working in the low wage, tourism based economy.

The storm, and the subsequent housing shortage in the immediate aftermath, drove up rents, but we also saw wages rise to meet the new financial reality.

Now both wages and rents are falling.

More and more apartment complexes are coming online, many of them financed by disaster recovery funds.  This in turn is driving down rents for the small landlord.

The small landlord, in contrast, has new debt and new and prohibitively expensive insurance. If the rents reach pre-Katrina levels, and in many places they are approaching that, there will be no incentive to maintain these houses.

Meanwhile, the population has not kept pace with the growth in housing and the economy  is failing to produce the jobs for the citizens so that they can afford rent.

The growth in new housing development undercuts the need to save any marginal old houses that dot our city streets with blight.

But, even now we have two city agencies fighting over whether we keep blighted houses or remove them.  The New Orleans Redevelopment Authority (NORA) has been continually stymied by the Neighborhood Conservation District Committee (NCDC) in demolishing houses.

So, here’s the question? Just when can we get rid of houses that no one wants to live in, that have been empty for years, when it is likely we won’t have a population to fill all of the houses we have unless we significantly remake our economy into one where people have the resources to take on expensive projects like renovations of blighted property?

It’s clear to me that we are going to have to reimagine a New Orleans that perhaps doesn’t have the street density it once had. Or one that mixes new construction and design in with older buildings. But we can look at a block that in the future has 10 stellar houses with side yards rather than 15  half fixed/half blighted houses.

We have to adjust our thinking. Vibrant cities change constantly. But unless we attract more people on the basis of economic development, there will be little reason and fewer resources to address blight by any other mechanism except demolition.