Chapter 1 – A vision and a plan for action
The Master Plan is neither a prediction nor a projection of the future. It is a plan. A plan for the 21st century: New Orleans 2030.

A plan that could be put into action-aspirational yet practical, focused on the long-term 20-year horizon yet recognizing that New Orleanians were hungry for short-term, visible progress in recovery. The planning process and this document were designed to meet those goals.

Chapter 2 – New Orleans Yesterday and Today: Population and Land Use Trends
Population and land use trends suggest that although New Orleans continues to be challenged by blight and vacancy, population recovery since Hurricane Katrina has exceeded initial expectations and is likely to continue at a moderate pace.

This chapter describes the post-World War II demographic and land use trends that shaped the New Orleans of today. For detailed information on current population figures, consult the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center.

Chapter 3 – The Context: Previous Planning and the Charter Amendment
This 2009-2030 New Orleans Plan for the 21st Century builds on a strong foundation of previous planning and a new commitment to creating a strong linkage between planning and land use decision making. City Planning Commission initiatives in the 1990s, the pre-Hurricane Katrina years, and the neighborhood-based recovery plans created after Hurricane Katrina inform this long-term plan.

Moreover, the City entered a new era in November 2008 when voters approved an amendment to the City Charter that strengthened the relationship between the city’s master plan, the comprehensive zoning ordinance and the capital plan, and mandated creation of a system for neighborhood and community-of-interest participation in land use and development decision-making—popularly described as giving planning “the force of law.”

Chapter 4 – The Community Speaks and Shapes the Plan
Successful city master plans are rooted in an understanding of the values, aspirations, and concerns of the communities whose future they are intended to guide. The City of New Orleans Master Plan benefitted from a conscious commitment to extensive public outreach and engagement.

In November, the success of a ballot initiative to amend the city charter and give the master plan and zoning ordinance formal legal standing prompted unusually high turnout at the previously scheduled round of public meetings.

Chapter 5 – New Orleans 2030
Developing a vision statement is an essential early step in creating a community Master Plan. Vision statements focus attention on a community’s values, sense of identity and aspirations. The process of creating a vision statement brings community members together to identify what they want to hold onto as change takes place, and what they want to improve. In creating a vision, the community is articulating their desires and hopes for the future, developing consensus on an ideal future and committing themselves to working towards that ideal.

The vision statement, accompanied by related principles or goals, becomes the guiding image for the community as it faces future challenges and complex choices.

PART 2 – THE PLAN

SECTION 1 – HOW WE LIVE

Chapter 6 – Neighborhoods and Housing
A network of neighborhoods with high quality of life is one of the most important keys to a successful city. Enhancing the livability of all New Orleans neighborhoods, while preserving their unique character, is one of overarching goals of this Master Plan. It is critical to retaining the residents who have returned and invested in the city-and to making sure that their children will be able to stay in New Orleans-and to attracting new residents to make the city their home, too. As jobs increasingly follow people in the 21st century, rather than the other way around, investing in a high quality of life is also an economic development strategy.

Chapter 7 – Historic Preservation
Residents of New Orleans are fiercely attached to the historic character of their neighborhoods. The need to preserve that character was a top priority at many Master Plan meetings. The city’s physical connection to its historic roots is part of the identity of New Orleanians. Perhaps because it is so ubiquitous, the city’s architectural character is not generally recognized as potentially one of its strongest economic assets for growing a robust 21st Century economy. Among the city’s business, economic development and political leadership, historic preservation is sometimes viewed as an obstacle to progress, a barrier to the city’s growth, rather than the economic asset it can be.

For New Orleans to achieve the vision of 2030, its image will be critical in competing globally for talent, business and private investment. Today and for the next decade or more, the convergence of market forces and demographics is putting cities that have historic neighborhoods and “main streets” of local shops and amenities in the forefront of exciting places to live and do business. Historic preservation is at the root of retaining this character and has been the foundation of neighborhood revival in cities all over the country. Viewing historic preservation as a key component in a comprehensive, integrated approach to neighborhood revitalization, rather than as an isolated function, will enable the city’s historic character – so beloved by residents – to be harnessed more consciously towards a future where innovation and preservation are linked.

Chapter 8 – Green Infrastructure: Parks, Open Space and Recreation
One of the most important themes of this plan is how quality of life is central to the economic success of cities and their ability to retain and attract residents. Excellent parks, recreational resources for adults as well as children and youth, and access to water and nature are key ingredients to the quality of life desired by everyone in the 21st century. City master plans and comprehensive plans traditionally include a chapter devoted to parks and recreation and many cities also have stand-alone master plans for their park and recreation systems.

A Parks, Recreation and Open Space plan was completed in 2002 as part of the pre-Hurricane Katrina master plan process, following a 1980 parks plan. In addition to analysis and recommendations for the overall park and recreation system, the 2002 plan also included a list of park projects by Planning District. This chapter of the 2030 Master Plan is indebted to the 2002 Parks, Recreation and Open Space plan.

Chapter 9 – Health and Human Services
This chapter provides the basis for ensuring that the health and service needs of all New Orleans residents will be adequately met according to national and international best practices, and that these services will be provided in appropriate settings that are not only easily accessible to residents but which also contribute to the overall quality and vitality of their surrounding neighborhoods.

The chapter outlines a framework for decision-making that will assist the city and other decision-makers in prioritizing physical and operational developments that promote positive social and health outcomes and help move the city toward the health and social goals identified by the community throughout this planning process.

SECTION 2 – HOW WE PROSPER

Chapter 10 – Sustaining and Expanding New Orleans’ Economic Base
This chapter describes the key economic base industries in New Orleans, assesses their prospects, and identifies the challenges and opportunities that will influence their future. Based on these findings, a set of goals, strategies and implementation steps designed to support and strengthen these industries and gain maximum economic benefit for the city are recommended.

Chapter 11 – Reinforcing the Building Blocks of Prosperity
New Orleans’s ability to promote and sustain the processes of innovation, trade, and investment-its capacity to produce-is the key to achieving shared and sustainable growth. This capacity to produce is most directly a function of the characteristics of what can be called the community’s economic building blocks- its human resources, its entrepreneurial climates, physical infrastructure, economic institutions, and general quality of life-and, more importantly, how these building blocks are put to use. This section assesses the local strengths and challenges associated with each of these important building blocks.

Chapter 12 – Community Facilities, Services and Infrastructure
New Orleans community facilities and basic infrastructure including water, sewer, and drainage systems have long been underfunded and poorly maintained. Many facilities, such as police and fire stations, libraries, and community centers, were severely damaged or destroyed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and federal funding is supporting millions of dollars in investments in new and rehabilitated public facilities. Every neighborhood will see improvements resulting from these investments but the full value will depend on the city’s capacity to maintain them over the long term. This chapter focuses on facilities and infrastructure with the exception of transportation infrastructure. Roads and other transportation infrastructure are discussed in Chapter 13.

SECTION 3 – SUSTAINABLE SYSTEMS

Chapter 13 – Transportation
The largest transportation planning effort in New Orleans in recent years was contained within the 2004 transportation element of the New Century New Orleans Master Plan, which presented goals and recommendations for shaping the transportation system in New Orleans in the future. Transportation was also discussed in the recovery plans created in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This chapter builds upon the findings and recommendations of these other plans, weaving them together into an overall systems building strategy.

Chapter 14 – Resilience
The primary hazard risk that New Orleans continues to face is that of flooding. This risk comes from three distinct sources: flooding from the Mississippi River, heavy rains, and hurricane-related storm surge. This chapter outlines the input that the planning team has received from the public on this topic, the current level of risk that the city faces, ongoing efforts to mitigate the risk of flooding, and the further goals, policies, and actions that are needed to create a more resilient community.

Chapter 15 – Environmental Quality
This chapter discusses some of the ways in which sustainable redevelopment practices have been employed in New Orleans to date, and puts forth strategies that will continue to foster improvements to the quality of the built and natural environment of the city for generations to come. As the nation’s attention turns increasingly to the economic, health, and environmental benefits of cleaner, more sustainable and more energy efficient practices, New Orleans is poised to become a national leader in these trends.

Chapter 16 – Land Use Plan
The focus of this chapter is the Future Land Use Map, which shows the land uses desired over time, and their densities and intensities. It is accompanied by the Land Use Table, which shows the relationship between the land use designation on the map and zoning classifications. The map reflects the land uses that correspond to the long-term vision, goals and policies expressed elsewhere in this plan and, with the table, it constitutes the most direct link between the Master Plan and the Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance. The Future Land Use Map is not a zoning map and it does not govern design or function.

Chapter 17 – Citizen Participation Program
This chapter addresses an issue that is critical to the success of implementing the plan and realizing the aspirations reflected in it. The issue is that of the relationship of citizens to their government. It is an issue that produces a wide range of responses among stakeholders. The November 2008 charter amendment requires that the City create a citizen participation program by ordinance.

Chapter 18 – Structures for Implementation
This chapter discusses specific activities and tools that can help ensure the implementation of this plan. The 2008 master plan charter amendment will assure that the plan will be consulted for land use regulation purposes and in the preparation of the capital plan, but the effective implementation of the plan will require much more.

Simultaneous with this planning process, a new Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance is being prepared that will reflect the policies of this plan. Nonetheless, throughout the planning process, citizens expressed their concerns-and sometimes their cynicism-about implementation, enforcement, and accountability.

The success of this Master Plan is dependent on building the capacity of city staff and public officials to apply and enforce policies and programs that support it. Everyone will need to ‘work with the plan’ to ensure the city is able to realize its potential.

The site has profiles of a number of New Orleanians incubating different approaches to city-building and links to their ongoing research post-2005.

In order to progress, city residents must engage with the dire issues we face — a broken criminal justice system, failing schools, an inadequate health care system and a level of disinvestment in our neighborhoods that would be unthinkable in most other American cities. WIth this in mind, Karen Gadbois and I are developing New Orleans Public Record. Working with us are other dedicated New Orleans writers including former T-P editor Jed Horne and author Ethan Brown.

The Public Record will be a digital news magazine focused on core issues facing the Gulf Coast — criminal justice, the economy, education, the environment, land use and politics. The mission of the site is to empower Gulf Coast communities with the information and analysis necessary to advocate for more accountable and just governance. It will do this by delivering groundbreaking, data-driven investigation and analysis on these issues that are so critical to New Orleans and other Gulf Coast communities as they continue to recover and regenerate.

Last week, our effort received support from The Zeitoun Foundation a New Orleans-based nonprofit providing grants to New Orleans organizations dedicated to rebuilding and fortifying the city and aiding its residents. The Zeitoun Foundation was formed in order to distribute the funds garnered from Zeitoun, a nonfiction book about the post-Katrina experience of a New Orleans family written by Dave Eggers and published in July of 2009. Transforma Projects provided support for NOPR’s citizen journalism training program. Transforma is a grant-making initiative funded by National Performance Network, with major contributions from the American Center Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Annenberg Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

NOPR will serve as a communication and research tool for a coalition of New Orleans-based initiatives to make decision-making, public policy, and legislation, at the local, state, regional, and federal levels more transparent and accountable to the public. The other members of the New Orleans Coalition on Open Governance include: The Neighborhood Partnership Network, The Citizen Participation Project, The Greater New Orleans Data Center, The Greater New Orleans After School Partnership, The New Orleans Institute, The Public Law Center, Louisiana Rebuilds, The Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana, Puentes New Orleans, The New Orleans Office of the Inspector General, The Urban League of Greater New Orleans and Nolastat. As a research and communication tool, NOPR will make public information more accessible and provide analysis to equip advocacy. The coalition is supported by a grant from George Soros’ Open Society Institute .

Our organization will be “local” in its purpose yet national in its impact, as the recovery of the Gulf Coast represents one of the greatest tests of our democracy in its history. The struggles of post-Katrina and Rita communities—decaying infrastructure, no-bid contracts handed out by local governments, massive displacement of population due to loss of housing—are experienced nearly everywhere in America right now. Similarly, reforms in charter education, public housing and environmental protection that have emerged in the region over the past three years are instructive to communities around the country. In addition to the national relevance of Public Record’s content, its organizational structure would serve as a model for other regions seeking a forum for data-driven, analytic journalism at a time when access to information is expanding, but the forums for engagement shrinking.

In addition to articles, slide shows, videos and map created by regular contributors and citizen journalists, we will regularly publish opinion pieces from outside contributors.

Every issue of the publication will reflect the site’s mission of empowering Gulf Coast residents with the information and analysis necessary to advocate for more accountable and just governance. We hope that you will support us in our mission.

In a commentary released this week by the Equity and Inclusion Campaign, Courtney Howell and Diane Huhn from Bayou Grace Community Services urge Congress to fund coastal restoration in southeastern Louisiana. Their argument? That a safer, healthier bayou ecosystem means less need for disaster relief and a stronger local economy — and a stronger local economy means less reliance on federal assistance.

Photos by Karen Gadbois

The community of Isle de Jean Charles has already begun to pay the price of coastal erosion. The tiny spit of long-settled land is gradually sinking into the Gulf of Mexico. For the families that live and earn livelihoods fishing on the tiny spit of Terrebone Parish, the island’s slow death is devastating. Following Hurricane Gustav, I visited the island with colleagues from the New Orleans Institute and United Houma Nation. In an article for New Orleans City Business, I described what we saw:

“Five days after Gustav’s winds sent water from the Gulf of Mexico surging onto the narrow spit of marshy land, freshly washed-up, dead fish line the entrance to the narrow island, their silvery backs sparkling in the sun. Abandoned horses, dogs and cats wander in the mud. Lining the island’s only road are severed trailers and the mud-caked debris of wooden homes reduced to sticks by racing winds and a pounding, seven-foot storm surge.”

We found houses that had been thrown onto their sides by the storm’s 120 mph winds. Homes toppled into deep layers of thick, oily post-diluvial mud from the Gulf of Mexico.

The fast-eroding island is not protected by the federal levees that protect other vulnerable coastal communities and will never be, according to the current expansion plans for Morganza to the Gulf of Mexico Hurricane Protection system. Oil pipelines cut into the wetlands surrounding the narrow strip of marshy land have sped up erosion and killed off once plentiful fishing supplies. Residents can tick off on their fingers the half-dozen tropical storms to hit the island in the last decade. Most agree that the fierce winds of Gustav caused the most damage.

“Sometimes you look at it and say how do we pick up the pieces,” says United Houma Nation member Chris Chaisson. “You say, why doesn’t the government buy these people out? But understand this is an Indian community, and it is our land. I’m trying to hold back the tears. We are the bumper zone for the region and look around at the price. All my people are devastated.”

Gustav left families without homes, fishermen without boats, kids without toys and schools without functioning, unflooded classrooms.State and federal agencies spent millions getting Isle de Jean Charles and surrounding communities back up and running. Now they face another hurricane season without adequate protection.

In their commentary, Huhn and Howell say that without reliable federal funds for the Corps to perform coastal restoration work, this twinned cycle of environmental and financial loss will continue to put the future of the bayou in peril while still costing taxpayers in the band-aid approach now used to avert outright humanitarian crisis.

“If policymakers took a more holistic approach to restoration, they would recognize that protecting the coast would reduce the constant need for federal dollars to rebuild communities,” the commentary says.

Indeed. The piece is worth a read.

The NORA/Mid-City Request for Proposals closes on July 10. It targets individual renovators and small contractors as well as developers, prioritizing projects that rehabilitate existing structures rather than new building.

The tour of for-sale properties will be held on Saturday, June 27, from 9 am to 12 pm. The event will feature open houses of Road Home Buyout and other NORA-acquired properties that have been cleaned out and are ready for renovation. Selected homes will be open for two hours -either from 9am-11am or from 10am-12pm. The tour will set off from 315 S. Cortez Street, located between Canal Street and Banks Street and between Jefferson Davis Parkway and Carrollton Avenue. Tour attendees will also be required to sign an agreement that holds both NORA and Mid-City harmless for any liability should a potential purchaser choose to enter a property.

The absurd hat, better suited to a late spring second line than the back of a book jacket, seemed to me a sign that the chatty writer believed that he not only got New Orleans, he owned it. I’m of this place, he seemed to be trying to say by wearing the hat in the author photo on the jacket of his new release, Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans.

Well, the truth is Baum is about as “of New Orleans” as I am, which is to say not at all. That became all too clear to me as I read a piece by him published today in the New York Times.

Baum’s basic premise is that New Orleans, with its relentless parading and crawfish boiling, can teach the rest of America a thing or two about happiness.

“New Orleans can teach us that the life we build with our neighbors deserves at least as much attention as our endless thrust towards newer and bigger,” he concludes at the end of the piece, called “The Way of the Bayou.”

With that, I don’t disagree. My neighbors in the Seventh Ward, with their unannounced visits, frequent outdoor parties and friendly greetings, have certainly exorcised the aloof East Coaster out of me. Where Baum gets in trouble is failing to reconcile this hackneyed, yet somewhat true, understanding of southeastern Louisiana culture with the more disquieting elements of life here.

This point is patently false. Three years after Hurricane Katrina, a large chunk of the Lower Ninth Ward remains a vacant, weed-choked wasteland. Storm-damaged apartment complexes still dot Eastern New Orleans. The shopping mall there has nor yet been rebuilt, nor has the hospital.

Baum goes onto assert that “life still revolves around second lines, the meticulous year-long building of Mardi Gras Indian suits, the boiling of crawfish and the lowing of saxophones.” Hmm, essentialize much?

Last time I checked, most people in the region are neither Mardi Gras Indians, nor musicians. Somehow between the second lines, my neighbors and I also do things that people in other parts of the country do, things like work, worry about expensive or non-existent health care, pay bills and try to find good public education for our children.

The biggest problem of the story, however, is its reinforcement of the mistaken notion that New Orleans is somehow immune from the recession. While I agree with his pronunciation that “the gyrations of the Dow, the collapse of General Motors, the prospect of regulating credit default swaps -even the collapse of the housing markets – mean little to most New Orleanians,” I would argue that people here feel the repercussions of these things in the form of empty storefronts, stalled development and tightfisted banks.

The main commercial thoroughfare in my neighborhood — Broad Street— does not look significantly different now than it did a year ago or even two years ago when Baum left the city. Shops remain boarded. Stray cats languish in the empty parking lot in front of the shuttered Robert’s Grocery store. While a handful of new businesses have opened, most of them are gas stations or convenience stores owned by absentee landlords. Last week, a business owner petitioned the City Planning Commission for a zoning variance to open a pawn shop in an empty store at the busy intersection of Broad and Canal Street. Those who live in the time-worn, one-story homes that sit on either side of the four-lane highway worry that the pawn shop will attract other businesses, like payday lenders and check-cashing stores, that trade on desperation – and often exploit poor people. Yet with no other business stepping in to offer an alternative, residents are wary of fighting the pawn shop and being left again with the derelict building.

“No one was clamoring to be on Broad, even in good times, but in a better economy you typically would have seen better small businesses coming in to serve the neighborhood,” says Jeff Schwartz, an urban planner, and the director of a neighborhood development organization, Broad Community Connections.

Schwartz says that the primary way the recession is coming home to roost is the lack of new investment coming to the city.

As WWL reporter Lee Zurick put it in an acceptance speech he gave last month upon receiving a Peabody Award for the investigation he, with assistance from blogger Karen Gadbois, did into the New Orleans Affordable Homeownership program, “New Orleans is still fighting to recover from Katrina’s devastation (and so) our job as journalists, our reason for being, is more critical than ever.”

Indeed, Lee won broadcast journalism’s highest honor for telling a story based in fact, investigation and community. Unlike Baum’s story, Lee’s investigation could not be wrapped up with a neat cliche. This is because New Orleans is just not as simple or sanguine as writers like Baum would have you believe.

Baum’s cliche-ridden reflection on New Orleans’ languid ways comes a few months after he offended people here by saying, in an interview with Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal on National Public Radio, that he thinks “that in 10 or 15 years New Orleans will be the disorganized, impoverished, violent, screwed up, corrupt city it was before the storm and that’s really the way they want it.” Baum blurted the prediction in response to Ryssdal’s asking if he worries that he’s been “too captivated by New Orleans to see the destruction?”

Thankfully somehow, the gregarious writer had the sense to publicly apologize for the off-hand remark somewhere between narcissistically narrating his firing from The New Yorker — and everything else-- on twitter to writing this latest piece.

But to return to the big picture, Baum’s myopic happytalk matters because New Orleans, like so many other parts of this reeling world, needs help. If decision-makers are mistakenly led to believe that New Orleans is doing better than the rest of the country, advocates will have a much harder time securing the outside resources people need in order to get back to sewing the Mardi Gras Indian suits and boiling the crawfish so highly valued by their non-resident scribe.

This post also appeared on Next American City

Unveiled yesterday on the rundown Sixth Ward block where a developer plans to build out the starchitect’s first New Orleans house, the design incorporates signature Gehry flourishes such as an angled roofline and a tilted axis into the shotgun’s long, narrow line. Its name – the “Modgun”- cheekily refers to house’s modern, modular construction. While the Modgun bears touches of Gehry, it is all in all a tame design bearing more resemblance to the humble 19th century cottages that surround the development site than the brash, larger-than-life work the Los Angeles architect is known for. The house will be Gehry’s first addition to New Orleans since an amphitheater he designed for the 1984 World’s Fair was torn down following the event.

The unusually contextual design is no accident. Gehry, who did not appear at Wednesday’s press conference, played secondary collaborator to the Modgun’s original architect, a New Orleans artist, architect and urban planner Robert Tannen. The two men — both spry older gents with propensity for hard angles, industrial materials and flashy outfits — are longtime colleagues dating back to shared work on the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum in Biloxi, Mississippi and an ecotourism development in Panama.

Tannen first developed the modular shotgun in the harried months after Hurricane Katrina, envisioning it as quick, affordable design solution for residents who wanted to rebuild in way that reflected the city’s historic African-Caribbean architecture, while incorporating the latest innovations in construction and design. Based on the building block of a shotgun’s traditional 12- or 14-foot-square room, the Tannen Modgun maintained the low, lean lines of classic New Orleans homes. Modular construction, however, let families add rooms as time went on, “based on what you need or whatever you have in the way of funding,” Tannen said.

But as one in an exhausting flurry of architectural prototypes unveiled in the months after Katrina, the Modgun failed to attract much attention from builders or homeowners until last year when Tannen got in touch with his old buddy Gehry, whose Los Angeles firm agreed to tweak the design for free.

Gehry added a central screened-in porch, some additional twists in the connections between modular rooms and his signature angled roofline. The house’s relative lack of bells and whistle, however, kept it relatively affordable for moderate-income New Orleanians, and appropriate for the city’s regulated historic preservation districts. This year, local developer Fortune Development opted to use the design on a vacant blighted lot it acquired from the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority. Already, Fortune has secured needed equity from Liberty Bank, a local African American community bank.. The company is now seeking additional financing, but once that it is complete, construction can be completed within three to six months, says Fortune CEO Hal Brown.

Gehry and Tannen hope to see more of their houses built around the city. Tannen says he could see variations on the modified shotgun rise on dozens of the 4,000 blighted lots NORA plans to redevelop with investment from private developers like Brown.

The sheer diversity of the players behind the Modgun- a Los Angeles celebrity architect, a local architect and his team, an African American community bank and a state-chartered redevelopment agency- is a hopeful sign for neighborhoods in New Orleans and across the country that are staring down ever-growing lists of vacant infill sites.

“This is the kind of thing we’d like to see happen more often and I’m sure other cities would too,” said NORA real estate director Ommeed Sathe, adding that he hopes that the buy in from a name-brand architect will spur other private investment in the area.

Another positive sign is the relative tameness of Gehry-Tannen’s boldface design. While the house will surely attract some curious eyes, Sixth Ward neighbors need not worry about the Bilboa effect causing traffic jams on their quiet street. For better or worse, post-Katrina New Orleans has become a wet lab for new design. From the futuristic, raised dwellings of Brad Pitt’s Make It Right project in the Lower Ninth Ward to the sleek, metal-clad homes erected by Tulane School of Architecture’s UrbanBuild students in Central City to the vinyl-sided, look-alike McCottages and modulars that have sprouted, mushroom-like, across the city since the storm, New Orleans has swallowed quite a range of new housing styles. By and large, this is a good thing. But so is respect for the city’s historic fabric — and for the tight budgets of the people who lived here. New Orleans doesn’t need a shiny Gehry bauble and thankfully, Gehry did not try to sell it one.

This article is cross-posted at Next American City

Among the former state representative’s biggest supporters:

*Apartment developer Michael R. Vales

*Waste Management company River Birch Inc

*Predatory lender Community Loans of America

The master plan, if passed into law, will limit where waste management companies like River Birch or Metro can dump. New zoning codes determined by the plan will also limit multifamily development in some parts of the city. While the move away from the city’s current method of ad-hoc, market-driven planning most directly impacts multifamily housing developers like Vales, it also raises new questions from companies like Metro that depend on new development to spur business.
River Birch’s $2,500 donation to Murray came through a limited liability corporation owned by company Chief Financial Officer Dominick Fazio. The company owns a massive landfill in Jefferson Parish.

The master plan could also change the lay of the land for storefront lenders like Community Loans of America, which frequently open up shop in areas with high concentrations of poverty and low rents.

Despite the innocuous name, the Georgia-based business is known for sending working-class and poor people spiraling into debt with 300 percent interest-rate loans. In public planning meetings, New Orleanians have said they don’t want predatory lenders like Community Loans in their communities. Planners could ostensibly respond to citizen demands by regulating where these storefront banks operate and putting caps on the number of lending institutions in certain geographic areas.

Murray sponsored Senate Bill 75 after Orleans Parish voters narrowly approved a change to the city charter that gives a citywide master plan the force of law, meaning that all capital expenditures, land use and zoning decisions must conform to it.The bill essentially undermines the charter change amendment by sending the plan back to voters for passage into law.

In a release sent out today, the Bureau of Governmental Research urged legislators to reject the bill. “(SB 75) represents a backdoor attempt to undermine a charter change approved by New Orleanians only seven months ago,” BGR said. The governmental oversight organization argued that Murray’s bill would “dilute accountability by allowing elected and appointed officials to abrogate their responsibility for the outcome of the master planning process.” BGR also warned against other similar bills introduced in the House by New Orleans representatives, saying that these bills could force a situation where planners would have to design a plan that will pass political muster without ruffling any feathers, “rather than one that addresses the grave challenges our city faces.”

The Citizens for One Greater New Orleans has compiled information on the master plan and its opposition on its site

The paved bike path will run along the Lafitte Corridor from Louis Armstrong Park to Carrollton Avenue, connecting the Treme, the Seventh Ward and Mid-City and creating a straightforward car-less route across downtown New Orleans.

Last Saturday, nearly 150 showed up to go on the annual walk of the now-overgrown rail pass. The excitement in the air was caught by WWL’s intrepid camera. Luckily for all us, our own Mary Rowe was there to explain that the greenway is about more than just a straight, flat route to the Parkview Bakery
As bike-maven Rowe put it to WWL., the greenway is about “connecting neighborhoods, it’s connecting different aspects of the city — the industrial aspect, the residential aspect, the recreational aspect.”

My vote for the next biker-minded public works project is planting shady oak trees along the sidewalks on Broad Street. I can deal with biking in smog, but pedaling through unremediated smog and sun in the dead heat of a New Orleans summer feels to me like a pretty clear-cut bad idea. And if you think about it, planting trees is a lot more affordable than nursing a whole population of heat stroke victims back to health.