Progress For New Orleans

The full extent of the disastrous ‘Master Plan’ vote from 2008 is finally coming into focus. The latest poison pill to growth in New Orleans is the ‘Neighborhood Participation Plan’, which was inserted into the authorizing ‘Master Plan’ amendment. This will come as little surprise to anyone who has followed land use and planning issues, as the chief proponent and architect of the dubious notion of a ‘master plan with the force of law’ has been against EVERY new development and any change in this city for decades.

But now we are faced with a so-called “Neighborhood Participation Plan” which threatens to derail any and every new development requiring any sort of variance or zoning change. It adds time and expense and more uncertainty to almost every application to the City Planning Commission.

You can check it out here (this should pop open a PDF)

All of the yellow boxes are new hoops for getting a conditional use through the process if the NPP gets adopted as is.

The draft of the “Neighborhood Participation Plan” includes:

- A “pre-application” process which extends the timeline for consideration indefinitely.

- A requirement that most zoning changes and some basic variances go through their own specific ill-defined “Neighborhood Participation Plan” that the applicant is expected to pay for and administrate.

- A requirement that the applicant must present, as part of their application, once it finally gets out of the ‘pre-application period, all of opposition and concerns to their application.

- Once the  application  is submitted it can be subject to endless public hearing requirements.

- It writes in special treatment for neighborhood associations which, traditionally, have been more opposed to new development and zoning changes than the public at large.

What it excludes is any protections against groups or individuals attempting to extort concessions that don’t touch specifically on the parcel in the application.

This new method of delaying zoning change requests indefinitely  will politicize to an even greater extent an already opaque, convoluted and onerous process. It will lead to needing your neighbor’s permission to use your property as you see fit. It will add an infinite amount of new rings to kiss. Watch for established businesses to manipulate the process to keep out competition.

All of this is against a background of a wholly inadequate zoning code that doesn’t provide flexibility for property owners and makes conditional uses and zoning changes necessary by failing to plan for the obvious notion that narrowly written criteria will exclude the great bulk of what people actually want to do with their property. But it is naturally New Orleans that the rules are put in place so that we can have the privilege of paying to have them relaxed.

So how we fix this, short of doing the smart thing and throwing the whole thing out and starting all over again?

- Remove the pre-application process and requirement.

- If there is a Project Neighborhood Participation Plan to be required, and why would there be, but if there is, it should be paid for and administered by the Planning Commission Office, using the District Planners. And it should be done within the application timetable.

-There should be no increase in fees associated with this Plan, instead it should come from the city’s general fund. It is not the fault of the applicant that the code didn’t take into account their plans.

- If neighborhood associations want special access to the process there should be fees for that special access.

- Remove the provision in the flow chart where an application can be subject to endless public hearings.

We have done enough in New Orleans to empower the endless opposition to growth and development. We are struggling as a city because of it. If we can’t remove this “Neighborhood Participation Plan” at least we can find ways to make it less destructive to the future of 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.

We could have used this whole experience to fundamentally remake the city into one that provides opportunity for its citizens and perhaps create a new prosperous city. We could have used this to create a new New Orleans based upon economic opportunity but instead we are continuing to pursue the same methods that have led to our stagnation and decline.

Economic development sections put low wage tourism first and follows it with the dubious concept of the “cultural economy”. The rest of the chapter seems to be focused almost exclusively on the ‘public private” partnership. It almost ignores our place in the global economy and the benefits that has brought us over the course of our existence.

And all of this is premised upon a dubious new theory that contradicts millennia of observation on the growth and prosperity of cities. The planners brought to the table the idea that a diverse and cosmopolitan population will drive economic development instead of what has actually been the case since the dawn of civilization, that economic development will bring a diverse and cosmopolitan population. We didn’t get built on this swamp because our forefathers came for the culture, they were the culture, they came for the economic opportunity and that’s how real, vibrant cities maintain themselves.  We can’t pretend we can pay people to BE the culture, we have to recognize that we have a culture because people got paid doing other, more productive things.

The one thing this master plan desperately needed to do was to sweep away the 70s CZO that zoned our neighborhood businesses out of existence. The empty storefronts that dot our city are the legacy of a previous plan, more suited to Slidell, that painted on zoning with a paint roller rather than recognizing the diverse land-use mosaic that is our streetscape. This plan pays lip service to opening up these locations to encourage the entrepreneurial spirit of the city but it should be boldly declaring that these storefronts can be a force in our economic renaissance.

But of course they are being cautious, lest they upset the forces of NO, that are holding this city back economically because it may, possibly, make their lives the slightest bit less comfortable or not cater exclusively to their needs. Well, we have a whole passel of city ordinances to deal with any disturbances and better we use them than foreswearing commercial uses and leaving our city filled with vacant buildings.

In a city that is going broke, the Planning Commission gave themselves another 14 or so district planners. Instead of eliminating the need to “kiss rings”, the so-called Citizen Participation Plan adds another layer of rings to kiss as they empower the most obstructionist elements of our city to stand in the way of new development or request kickbacks from projects.

We have already seen this play out as a neighborhood association already requested a cut of the operating funds of the ill-conceived “Re-inventing the crescent”. Not only unhappy with getting a park that will further erode New Orleans’ raison d’etre they wanted to be paid. And this is a public project. How many developers looking to bring jobs and sales tax revenue will be similarly held up?

The plan is overly protective of the housing for 650,000 plus people that we don’t need and hostile towards the commercial property that we desperately need for the jobs and the sales tax revenue they produce. It has removed most commercial zoning west of the industrial canal unless it is adjacent to a housing project.

There seems to be notion in this town that we can complain about section 8 housing and property taxes and in the same breath stop the businesses that bring jobs and sales tax revenue as if these two aren’t linked. That we can call for more police and better schools without understanding how more and better employment opportunities help both these situations.

At a time when we are struggling to maintain and grow our population we should be making it EASIER for people to rebuild and businesses to open. But instead of a growth plan, this thing focuses on a preservation plan.  But here is the bottom line, without a robust economy there are no resources to preserve anything and without a prosperous population there is no reason to preserve anything.

Throughout the process there have been calls for “input” but when it comes to the actual plan it seems to stick pretty closely to the desire of special interest groups with their obstructionist agenda. So much so, that the Fairgrounds Racetrack isn’t mapped to be commercial, like it should be, but is mapped for doubles, like we need

yet more housing without jobs.

Additionally, have we told the people of Lakeview that a new massive interstate interchange is coming to their

neighborhood or the people of New Orleans East that we don’t really care if they can get to work downtown or the people of the Treme that Claiborne is probably going to be 8 lanes of traffic at highway speeds, if we keep the destruction of I-10 in the plan. The only thing that works in the plan is the new hospitals, which it gives rather tepid support to.

My wish? Send it back to the City Planning Commission with the notation to make the entire plan advisory only. Take the destruction of the I-10 out of the plan. Open up the “Citizens Participation” Groups to all comers and not just members of unelected neighborhood associations. Short of going back to the drawing board to build a plan that embraces progress and puts economic development first, without the fantasy that either preservation or culture is economic development, a plan that opens up the city for development and redevelopment rather than giving into the forces of NO and their desire to hold the city back. We needed to start with the idea that everything not explicitly forbidden is allowed,

rather than the other way around. We need to find ways to say YES. It is the only way for New Orleans to survive and thrive.  Thank you.

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.

The proposal- Turn the old New Orleans Charity Hospital into a
biomedical business incubator.

The background – For a decade New Orleans has been looking to promote
the biomedical industry as a growth sector for its economy. As new
facilities for medical services are planned and come online there are
concerns about the disposition of legacy buildings. Amongst these is
the old New Orleans Charity Hospital. Concern about the fate of the
building is affecting discussions about the new modern,
state-of-the-art hospital facilities that are more suitable to the
practice of modern medicine than the Depression era, WPA inspired old
Hospital. This proposal seeks to, at once, provide and answer to that
question AND attract jobs and investment that are sorely needed in an
economically depressed and hurricane recovering New Orleans.

The plan – Use Old Charity Hospitals square footage as research space
for biomedical startups. Give over entire floors or wings to research
on a per square footage basis that starts at a very low cost and over
the course of a set term increases to market rate.

The mechanisms – A possible way this can be approached.

1 – An authority is set up to handle the building and research space
applications.  For sake of this exercise it is called the Old Charity
Biomedical Incubator Authority. (OCBIA)
OCBIA would be responsible for:
-       Basic building maintenance.
-       Processing applications for space
-       Tenant management
-       Building management.
This can be a city-state partnership, a private-state partnership, a
city-private partnership. But whomever the partners were they would be
responsible for restoring basic systems to the Old Charity Building.
The composition of the OCBIA board should be from the research and
financial sectors with a couple seats to represent city and state
interests.

2 – A biomedical start up would apply for space. – There would be a
form that would ask several questions to see if qualifying criteria
were met.
-       Type of research.
-       Committed funding sources. Grants, venture capitalist, private sources,
-       Projected square footage needed both at the beginning and at height
of research. To plan for future expansion of the research project.
-       Demonstration of ability to handle build out expenses and first
years lease payments.

A committee of researchers and financial administrators either would
evaluate the proposal on several criteria.
-       Long term prospects of success.
-       Added value to local economy of successful research.
-       Ability of the management team to see research through to conclusion.
-       Long term viability of the company.

3- Once chosen the start up would be responsible for:
-       The build out of their raw space
-       Lease payments
-       An annual report on progress of their research

The organization handling the process would be responsible for:
-       Providing a basic electric, water and sewerage service as well as
maintaining elevators and common areas.
-       Overseeing the build out of each research space to ensure there
weren’t permanent alterations to the building, or that any permanent
alterations didn’t undermine the building.
-       Managing tenants, contracting for shared services, like waste disposal.
-       Handling disputes between tenants.

4 – The start ups would be housed in the incubator for a set period of time.

After a suitable time, businesses would “graduate” from the incubator
to the local real estate market. This period can be 5 to 10 years.

A condition of participation in the incubator is that upon
graduation they would commit to continue to locate their business in
New Orleans.

The benefits-

New Orleans can be expected to reap several benefits from this proposal
-       Biomedical research jobs at good wages for an educated workforce.
-       The ability to attract and retain a college educated information workers.
-       A revitalized local real estate market for both research space and
market rate housing.
-       Enhanced economic positioning and increased economic diversity.
-       An adaptive reuse project for an outdated building.
-       A new industry built on a foundation of innovation.

Like everyone in New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding affected my thinking about my city and my relationship with it.

Prior to the storm I had very little interest in local politics and the policies and personalities which ran the city. I was more focused on national issues.

But you can’t see your city in ruins, your fellow citizens either suffering or running wild in the streets, on national television for a couple of weeks without thinking that we must have been doing something seriously wrong to get us to this point. So, while the levee failures were the engineering failure that wrecked havoc on the physical infrastructure, we had economic and social failures that stretched for years and decades prior that had wrecked havoc on the lives of the citizens..

I started to look at Katrina through the lens of our economic decline and how that played into the problems before, during and after the storm. How lack of economic opportunity left folks vulnerable because they lacked the resources to choose their own path, how the lack of good jobs slowed the recovery and still continues to slow the recovery.

It is a big change for a self-identified “art guy”. I’ve gone from writing screenplays to thinking about zoning policy. The drive towards making up stories has been supplanted by the need to attempt to do the things needed to ensure New Orleans’ economic sustainability. If you had told me 10 years ago I’d be this “pro-development” I would have laughed. But things change and it changes you.

Central to this is the idea that people need jobs, in general, and good jobs, in particular in order to put their lives back together. They need economic opportunity and a good shot at career advancement to meet their obligations to their families and have the resources to enhance their lives and their community. And if they don’t find it in New Orleans they will leave to find it somewhere else.

As a result of this I have become extraordinarily sensitive to anyone who stands in the way of our city’s economic development. It is a “jobs first” outlook. It has made me very sympathetic to those who are bringing jobs to the city and fairly hostile to those attempting to obstruct those who are bringing business and jobs to the city.

Put simply- I will generally support those who are doing something and oppose those who look to stop them. To borrow a baseball rule, the tie goes to the runner.

New Orleans can only survive in a meaningful way if we work diligently to make its economy strong. Not just for its own purpose but because it allows its the city to retain and attract its population, it allows it to access the resources from the nation it needs to protect itself from hazards when it can demonstrate it is economically important to the nation. It allows the citizens to maintain themselves and be in a position to make their own choices.

And this is why I am working towards a future for New Orleans. Not just one that is a whisper or pale reflection of the past, but one that finds us, once again a world economic center.