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.

The New Orleans “Master Plan” http://nolamasterplan.com/ was passed by a slim margin of voters to much ballyhoo by its supporters and a good deal of suspicion and skepticism by those of us who questioned the wisdom of giving a plan the force of law prior to any plan being drafted. When proponents trumpeted its ability to ensure “neighborhood input” in stopping development many of us just saw it has a way to empower the perpetual opposition that crops up with EVERY proposal. The bone they threw to people who want much needed development to come to New Orleans is that, for a project that met all the myriad of criteria, it would add more “certainty” to being able to develop.

That was a lie.

We were told it was going to bring a set of rules “unaffected by politics”. What we got was the empowerment of NIMBYs to stop everything anybody wants to build.

The latest case is Tulane’s new proposed stadium. You can read about it here.

The optimism about the new Tulane Stadium meets destructive force of NIMBY empowerment.

The short story is: Tulane wants to build a stadium they can build under the current zoning rules. A dozen NIMBYs get up in arms. They appeal to a councilwoman, who made her ‘bona fides’ as a NIMBY, who is convinced that issues that can be handled simply with municipal code enforcement need to be handled with land use regulation. The councilwoman proposes an “interim Zoning District”(IZD) to throw sand in the works of Tulane developing a stadium despite overwhelming support for the stadium, protesting all the time that she doesn’t want to “impede progress”. Three other pandering councilwomen join in and the IZD passes.

And they use the “master plan”, which they tell us is supposed to add “certainty” to the land use process, to justify it.

What is clear is that the only way the “master plan” will be used is to guarantee the “certainty” that nothing can ever be built without either kissing the rings of self appointed neighborhood poo-bahs or paying off council people to ignore the perpetual opposition to change.

The post “master plan” world is one in which a project that wasn’t envisioned by the people putting together the plan, who made no secret they were under the influence of preservationists and other anti-development groups, will require a year of meetings, hearings and thousands of dollars in fees. But a handful of NIMBYs can stop a project that is ALLOWED by the plan just by whining to a sympathetic pandering councilwoman. A post “master plan” New Orleans is one in which NOTHING ever gets built again unless there is NO ONE who objects.  This is an impossible standard in a city where a debate on an issue between 3 people can bring 5 different opinions.

What we have now is a system where the opposition, the forces of NO, are always given deference and that will lead to a New Orleans where nothing can ever grow again.

This is just a set, in concise form, of many of the themes, backgrounds, motifs and issues that are going to be central to this forum going forward. I expect that these will change over the course of writing in more detail. And who knows, my mind may change on some of these in the future. But now, just now, these are some of the more important points I’ll be working on with posts here.

- The River. The reason New Orleans is here, the reason our city was built here, and the reason we are still important to the rest of the country is due, primarily, to the river. Forget this and you will suffer for it.

- International Trade. We built a lot of things and grew when trade was central to our life in New Orleans. We began to ignore it and we began our decline.

- Tradition may or may not be a problem. Insularity almost always is.

- Romanticizing New Orleans and thinking that it is so “unique” that it doesn’t need to participate in the U.S. or world economy is one of the most damaging things you can do to the city. The people of New Orleans make it unique and if the people can’t sustain themselves then New Orleans dies as they leave for economic opportunity elsewhere.

- If you think national retail chains and large scale business are somehow incompatible with New Orleans, you haven’t been here long enough.

- Those who complain that they don’t want New Orleans to be like “Houston or Atlanta”  don’t seem to realize 1) Both those cities started out trying to be like New Orleans (in terms of economic primacy) and 2) that a lack of opportunity for our citizens will have them moving to places like Houston or Atlanta.

- Historic preservation is fine in small doses and when completely voluntary. When it becomes compulsory and preservationists become strident it becomes stifling.

- The combination of strident preservationists and an insular ruling class combine to be like a bad jealous lover for the city of New Orleans. They don’t want you to change and they don’t want you to meet anyone new.

- I will struggle to remember that you can get into a lot of trouble speaking in metaphors and similes in New Orleans.

- Neighborhood Organizations can be a double edged sword in a community, providing a method for disseminating crucial information and being a catalyst for positive neighborhood projects but oftentimes being resistant to change, a self appointed cadre of the NIMBY-minded with a reflexive NO towards most new development.

- Basic code enforcement, or rather the lack of it, is impacting economic development.

- In New Orleans, oftentimes, something is restricted so that you can have the privilege of paying to do it or have it done. More regulations generally just mean more opportunity for corruption.

- Almost every new development that has been built in the city in the past 50 years has had a positive impact on the areas around them. In the cases where you think they haven’t you need to perhaps look closer at what is causing the decline.

- Concentrating poverty has failed miserably.

- And to paraphrase Ernie K-Doe. “When you got your money in your pocket, that’s your money.”  That pretty well underscores how important individual economic opportunity is and why we should do the things we need to do to make sure that we build a prosperous city.

So… these are it… mostly, in a couple of bullet points what we will be talking about here.

Use the area under the overpass at Canal and Claiborne to build a bus
transfer station.

Currently: The vast majority of RTA bus routes terminate at the corner
of Canal and Basin/Rampart/Loyola. There are no amenities for riders
to keep them from having to wait for buses in the sun and rain. Other
buses that serve riders in the city terminate on the corner of Loyola
and Tulane. The area of the bus stops is run down.

Proposal- Use the area under the overpass at Canal and Claiborne to
consolidate the bus stops into a bus transfer station.

Elements:

-         Fence the area for security with limited access points on
the ends of the station.

-         Provide Security for the area with both cameras and guards.

-         Install two small kiosks, about the size of a news stand to
sell cold drinks, newspapers and magazines. Use the rents from these
kiosks to defray the costs of security. On special event days local
merchants can be brought in, market style, to provide goods for the
bus passengers.

-         Install a Public Address system to announce the arrival and
departure of the buses.

-         Create a driver’s breakroom with a functioning restroom.

-         Provide ample trash receptacles.

-         Install adequate lighting for security.

-         Install a light colored fabric cover under the overpass to
keep debris off of the passengers and provide a canvas for a series of
decorative color changing LED light fixtures that can be programmed to
respond to special events. (Purple, Green and Gold for Mardi gras, Red
and green for Christmas, Team colors for a superbowl, etc.

Benefits

-         Would get public transit customers out of the elements while
waiting for their bus.

-         Would encourage reinvestment in both the corners of Canal
and Basin/Rampart and the corner of Canal and Claiborne.

-         Would consolidate the bus waiting areas to facilitate transfers.

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.

New Orleans is a city that needs to regain a spirit of progress. Here we will examine, discuss, brainstorm and promote ways to move our city boldly into the future.

We will discuss policies and strategies for creating a prosperous and exciting city.

This is the start.