Hanson Hosein and his assistants have been touring the city with their
cameras to find out how a wide variety of “Mom and Pop” businesses are
faring in post-Katrina New Orleans. Not surprisingly, they’ve found a
playing field that’s far from level. See a three-minute in-production
preview.

The clip includes comments from Dr. Edward Blakely of the city’s
Office of Recovery Development and Administration as he bicycles with
Hosein through a Katrina-damaged neighborhood. Blakely tells Hosein
that “…the pressure from the ordinary citizens [is] to bring more
Wal-Marts, bring more Lowe’s, bring more Home Depots…” Blakely
concedes that big boxes may “put these… little guys out of business”
but insists that citizens he is hearing from say they’re focused on
their own rebuilding efforts, and “… can’t think about that guy’s
business.” Granted, Dr. Blakely’s sound bite was extracted from a
larger conversation, but it is fair to ask whether his
characterization of citizen attitudes is accurate. Are New Orleanians
really clamoring for chain retailers per se, or simply for a robust
local economy? It is a mistake to conflate the two.

Locally-owned businesses have been critical in our city’s recovery.
Many reopened within days of the storm, showing their loyalty and
commitment to this community while the corporate chains nervously kept
their distance. Now that federal recovery money is trickling in, big
retailers are courting local politicians and scoring the sort of tax
incentives our local businesses can only dream about. Ironically,
independent business owners will subsidize with their tax dollars
those projects that threaten their very livelihood.

We believe that, in fact, most New Orleanians do understand the link
between community well-being and their neighborhood businesses, and
therefore do not favor the subsidized outmigration of dollars from the
local economy. For this very reason many residents of Orleans Parish
resent the drive out to neighboring parishes to shop at the big boxes;
they’d rather spend their dollars closer to home. “If I’m going to
spend my dollars at Target,” the reasoning goes, “I’d rather spend
them at a Target in Orleans Parish.”

Those who profess such an opinion may be unaware of the long-term
costs of cozying up to corporate chains: inevitably, profits are
siphoned off from the “lucky” host community and invested elsewhere.
Meanwhile, the citizen-owned businesses that have invested and
re-invested in New Orleans—and that collectively contribute hundreds
of millions of dollars and many thousands of jobs to the local
economy—get ignored by the architects of public policy. Not only is
this unfair; it is ultimately self-destructive, undermining local
decision-making, wealth creation and retention, environmental
sustainability, and competition.

The loyalty of publicly traded corporations lies with their
shareholders, not with New Orleans. Inviting them here may be a
Faustian bargain—with unhappy endings for local businesses and
consumers alike. Hanson Hosein has documented the chain-sawing of
independent small businesses around our country. His current film
project exemplifies his belief—and ours—that New Orleans can be
smarter, more diverse, and more local than hundreds of less lucky
American communities with derelict main streets and nowhere to go but
the big shiny Wal-Mart on the edge of town.

One of the best ways to counter a surprise is to let your government representatives know that you know. One of the most effectiveways to declare your position on the surprise development is to write a polite letter or email to the appropriate individuals.

So whether your neighborhood becomes the site of a haunted bed & breakfast, a high-rise condo, or something else that does not fit the Unified New Orleans Plan, the Master Plan, or your idea of rational, sustainable development, focus your efforts on writing letters. They usually receive some sort of response and provide documentation that will provide clarity and direction as the process and dialogue move forward.

One of the most important aspects of a good letter to a city official and news outlets is to write a polite, fact-based letter devoid of angry rhetoric. As an example, below is a letter that Karen Gadbois wrote on behalf of her neighborhood association.

************

Dear Ms. Wright,

It is my understanding that a preliminary plan for the Carrollton Shopping Center area has been put forward internally, including double left hand turn lanes on Palmetto and the relocation of a Bus Stop at the Palmetto Canal.

While I understand that this plan has not been adopted or formally reviewed the fact that the Developer is going forward with financing strategies utilizing tax credits it would seem that the public should be engaged.

I attended the meeting last year {May 2007} where the developer set out vague and non-specific ideas for the property with no mention of the impact on the area or the wishes of the residents in terms of traffic and scale. While we were asked what kind of stores we would like we were never asked what kinds of traffic and transportation issues there were nor what mitigating factors may come into play. In fact at that very meeting the developer needed to be reminded of his obligation to mow the grass. Which may give some indication of his familiarity with the site and surrounding areas.

If you are familiar with the area, you would understand that this intersection not only causes great issues with the on and off ramps of 110, but that the underpass is impassable in a heavy rain fall. The issues that have plagued that area Pre K have not been relived by the lack of retail there. It is as bad as it ever was.

http://blog.nola.com/times-picayune/2007/05/storms_sweep_through_region.html

We in the community have spent endless hours visioning and planning as we were ordered to in order for funds to be released by the State. It seems that the plans we made with UNOP and Lambert are not being considered.

Could you please inform us of a meeting timeline for this project, if there is one. If not would you please inform Mr. Fiel of the need to engage the community.

As you stated, “As noted in this email chain to you, no updated conceptual designs for the footprint of the shopping center itself have been presented to ORDA by the property owners.”

Our concern is not just with the design of the shopping center, but with the configuration of the area surrounding it. We do not want to find ourselves in a position of arguing about poorly designed intersections which do not take into account the knowledge of people who use it on a daily basis.

Thank you,

Karen Gadbois

Northwest Carrollton Civic Association

*******

This letter was cc’d to many of the decision makers in our city. Karen received a response from a sampling of the contacted, including a response from Dr. Edward J. Blakely and Lavon Wright, community Development Specialist for the Office of Recovery Management. At the very least this begins a dialogue, and lets the relevant folks understand that your neighborhood is not one that likes surprises. (Full disclosure: Karen is a member of the Urban Conservancy board).

A single vote in opposition to a broadly supported neighborhood request to the Board of Zoning Adjustments (BZA) to reconsider a decision by the Department of Safety and Permits has left the neighborhood facing the prospect of a high-volume, formula fast-food outlet on the corner of Magazine and Nashville.

Article 14 of New Orleans’ Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance (CZO) establishes the BZA. Many of the zoning appeals in our city go before this board of seven members, who are appointed by the mayor and approved by the City Council to serve 5-year terms.

The only requirement for BZA members is that they be real estate owning, qualified voters of New Orleans. To this board is entrusted decisions that can affect a neighborhood, or the entire city. In a nutshell, they have a lot of power, though no requirements to bring urban planning or zoning expertise to the table.

On January 8, 2008, the Audubon Riverside Neighborhood Association (ARNA) and Smart Growth for Louisiana filed an appeal with the BZA. The nonprofits asked the Board to overrule the decision of the Department of Safety and Permits that classified “The Pita Pit” as a cafeteria restaurant rather than a fast food restaurant. This less intense use would allow Pita Pit to operate at the corner of Magazine and Nashville in a B-2 Neighborhood Business District without submitting to the conditional use process required by the CZO.

Specifically, the organizations requested (1) that Safety and Permits abide by the language of the CZO regarding fast food restaurants, (2) that the decision to issue a permit to Pita Pit be reversed, and (3) that the development at issue be classified as a Fast Food Restaurant under Article 2.2 (#153 ( c )) of the CZO. The organizations had letters showing broad support from neighborhood associations, citizen organizations, and concerned citizens throughout the city requiring a fast food operator to obey the law and to respect their neighborhood.

This is the third time since Katrina that Safety and Permits has issued a fast food restaurant a permit to operate on Magazine Street without going through the conditional use process. The Garden District Association is currently challenging the Subway on Louisiana and Magazine. And Safety and Permits now admits that they wrongly allowed Quiznos on Washington and Magazine to “slip through” after Katrina.

Yet Safety and Permits continues to point to these two restaurants as precedents for permitting yet another fast food chain as a cafeteria style restaurant, circumventing the CZO’s provisions for safe guarding neighborhoods.

Approval of the appeal would have given the City Planning Commission staff the opportunity to study this controversial project and to make recommendations concerning its suitability. The neighborhood, in turn, would have had the opportunity to have its voices heard.

The request to appeal was denied despite the fact that 3 of the 5 BZA members present voted in favor of the neighborhoods, and only one voted against (the fifth member abstained). An appeal to deny requires 4 votes in favor to pass.

According to the governing documents of the BZA, ARNA and Smart Growth should have received a written summary of the facts of the appeal and reasons for the decision of the board to deny (Section 14.3. Standards and Reasons for Decisions)

The organizations received a brief notice stating only that “no action” was taken because four votes were needed to overrule Safety and Permits; therefore the incorrect classification of Safety and Permits stood.

Frustrated neighbors feel the system did not work for them. While the permitting of The Pita Pit on a street that is not zoned for fast food chains is an issue of great importance, in the final analysis it is that absence of accountability, transparency and consistency in the Department of Safety and Permits and the BZA that is most troubling. These are government agencies that are supposed to uphold the laws and work for citizens.

At present, ARNA has regrouped to address these broader concerns while continuing to address “irregularities” in the way The Pita Pit was handled before both agencies. The Pita Pit has simply served to spotlight the dysfunction of these city departments.

The Bureau of Governmental Research in its August 2006 report recommended a charter revision aimed at improving the board. The proposed language would require the city to adopt “an ordinance authorizing the creation of a nominating committee to nominate members of the Board of Zoning Adjustments as vacancies occur. The committee shall consist of the head of the largest urban planning program at a university in the City, the head of the largest planning organization in Louisiana, a representative from the business community, a representative from an historic preservation organization, and a representative from a neighborhood organization. The committee shall nominate three persons for each vacancy and shall submit these nominations to the mayor, who shall select one of the persons nominated to fill the vacancy.”

While this will not completely remove politics from the board, it will at least make sure their decisions are grounded in expertise.

There are now more than two years between us and the Federal Flood. For better and for worse, the era of planning meetings and of official planning processes is over.

It is time to focus on implementation — participatory implementation — of as many of the good ideas we generated as we have time and resources to realize.

The key word in the previous sentence is participatory. Implementation in one form or another is going to happen. A project here, a project there; a condo here, a strip mall there. Less certain — and the initial signs are not good — is how many of the community-driven aspects of the plans we collectively devised will ever see the light of day.

Developers and their friends continue raiding the Go-Zone money and tax credits of all kinds for projects that have no relation to the plans we citizens developed. The money these developers are using is ostensibly ours — but we have no say in which projects we are funding with our tax dollars.

Why not convert the planning districts used to develop the UNOP plan into ongoing democratic forums where each district would provide direct community input on budgeting and implementation priorities for that district?

While this might sound crazy, communities from Canada to Spain to Brazil are doing exactly this — taking defined areas of the city or parish budget and allowing neighborhoods to set budgets and project priorities for their areas. It is commonly referred to as participatory budgeting

What these communities are discovering is that the people in the neighborhoods understand better than city council what projects deserve to be funded. Beyond this, they are discovering that the act of participation and the sense of community it engenders lead to increased levels of happiness and well-being as reported by people in the communities.

Direct community participation in the budgeting process, in the establishing of priorities, and in the oversight of work completed is the only way to ensure that the implementation phase of the recovery doesn’t return us all to the days of developers gaming City Hall to get their projects approved and to get a healthy public subsidy for their bottom line.

Our current crop of Council members appear earnest in their desire to bring transparency to issues of land-use in the city. Unfortunately, they are new to the system and are no match for our seasoned developers and their $500 an hour attorneys.

The key is to replace the single voice of a district council person with thousands of voices of engaged, informed citizens.

Not surprisingly, as the rebuilding gains a bit of traction, more people are interested in investing in the community. Some of these projects are great news for the city while others will certainly do great harm to the community should they be allowed to move forward. Throw in the lure of a free trip to the Go-Zone money pile and the possibilities are endless.

Some of the projects that have been in the news lately include:

• Victory Real Estate Investments LLC of Columbus, GA with their secret, then public, then secret again plans to create a suburban-style, automobile-oriented shopping center at South Carrollton and Bienville;
• The transformation of a former pesticide store into a coffee shop on South Carrollton Avenue. The owner of the property happens to be a New Orleans judge;
• And on St. Charles Avenue a prominent citizen is aiming to re-zone his property for high-rise condos.

The common thread in these various projects is the necessity of zoning changes to make the projects work. In New Orleans, requests for zoning changes have historically opened the doors for all kinds of shenanigans. The motivation is high, because a change in zoning can suddenly transform a dog of a property into a goldmine.

As you might guess, New Orleanians tend to be very wary of zoning changes. After all, what makes some rezoning change requests fail, while others gain the blessing of the City Council? Is there a consistent logic? Here are two recent examples: A local chef seeks a zoning change to open a restaurant in an uptown neighborhood. This request is denied. Developers need a zoning change for a hotel in the French Quarter. They succeed.

The situation is not helped by the perception that many of the mechanisms that affect a successful change of a property’s zoning do not occur in public view. It sometimes appears that it is dinners at a steakhouse where the real meetings take place—out of the view of the recorded minutes of the City Council Chamber.

One of the challenges of discussing zoning in urban areas, is that zoning itself is often part of the problem. Many of the aspects of New Orleans we love could not be built today under the current zoning laws. Those cool outbuilding on the property lines—need a 3’ setback now. Houses next to each other—can’t do it. Neighborhood corner stores—better know that council person. Hubig’s Pie plant in the middle of the Marigny? Are you crazy? —that mixes light industrial with residential.

The biggest culprit in trying to square good urban design with existing zoning tends to be parking requirements; but there are plenty of other obstacles such as minimum setbacks and the challenges of trying to create a vibrant mix of residential and commercial uses—the hallmark of urban environments.

This is why zoning fights in New Orleans are inherently problematic: It takes a zoning change to do a really crappy project. But it also (often) takes a zoning change, to do a really good project. The projects you can do with no problems tend to be the mediocre ones. Because zoning changes are neither inherently good nor inherently bad, the process by which they are determined is critically important to the rebuilding of the city. This process must be open and transparent.

And it should be in the hands of the City Planning professionals rather than the Council. Unfortunately, this power to effect zoning changes appears to be a mechanism for generating campaign contributions and other forms of political power, so convincing the council to limit it will require a determined effort on the part of ordinary citizens. Given the abuse some residents and neighborhoods have received via zoning changes, it is understandable that some residents feel the best course of action is to stand firm with the line “No changes to the existing zoning” (or the corollary which only allows for down-zoning).

We may, however, want to look at this problem anew if we hope to emerge from this recovery with our historic urban fabric intact. Given that our zoning ordinances came out of the 1950s and came to us via the suburbs, it should not be surprising that it is easier to build a new store with a suburban parking lot than it is to rebuild the urban shopping districts such as Oak Street, Freret Street, St. Claude Avenue, or Magazine Street. It is simpler to build an in-fill house that looks like Kenner than it is to build a double camel back on an existing lot.

We just spent two years developing several new recovery plans for the city, many of which have projects or neighborhood and district components that represent a significant departure from previous plans. If the City Council has adopted these new plans as city policy, doesn’t that suggest a need to affirm existing zoning as consistent with the vision or to change the zoning to allow the new vision to emerge and prevent inappropriate, piecemeal changes?

The existing zoning didn’t create Uptown, Treme, or St. Roch. It will take some zoning changes to create visionary new projects. We just have to beware the purveyors of snake oil who also need zoning changes to set up shop.

No, not our inept mayor and moribund City Council. Not our leading lights of big business and their developer friends. We are talking about the real leaders of the recovery—the people who didn’t even know they were leaders until the folks who were supposed to be leading ducked and ran.

Who are these leaders? They are members of the Vietnamese community planning their long-term recovery. They are the residents of Broadmoor organizing their neighborhood. They are the residents of Holy Cross dedicating themselves to becoming the most carbon neutral community in the nation. They are the residents of Mid-City creating a vision of a vibrant and sustainable neighborhood. They are the Friends of Lafitte Corridor securing substantial funding to begin construction of a bike and pedestrian greenway connecting many neighborhoods. They are the more than 650 locally-owned businesses — retailers, wholesalers, professional service providers, and artists — who have come together as Stay Local! to demonstrate a vision of a vibrant and sustainable economy for New Orleans. They are all the others across the city who stepped up when our so-called leaders abdicated their responsibilities.

Unfortunately, the hard work and sound wisdom of our real leaders continues to be undermined by the opportunistic tendencies of our elected officials and their big development friends.

Because they lack faith in our local business owners and our local entrepreneurs, they argue that we must entice national chains to come and save us.

Because they lack knowledge of national best practices, they strive to aggregate large tracts of land and provide them to national housing developers rather than allow local contractors to access the land in smaller groupings. Small, diverse contractors building homes scattered throughout our neighborhoods support the existing urban fabric. This approach is time-tested and continues an historic tradition of urban housing construction that gives New Orleans neighborhoods their unique power. Large areas developed by a single corporate builder tend to be suburban, boring, and lacking in true urban character. The more organic approach also reduces the risk of bad outcomes: Two bad houses on a block are unfortunate; twenty-two blocks of bad houses destroy an entire community.

Because our traditional leaders don’t actually believe in the unique beauty and power of New Orleans (some of them live in Prairieville and Dallas) they feel compelled to give away millions of dollars in incentives to lure outsiders here. Why else would they come? Investing here is so risky (they tell us) we have to give them money.

Because they have no vision of their own, they jump at any opportunity that comes along no matter the long-term negative consequences for the city.

When tough decisions needed to be made in the fall of 2005, the mayor ducked and ran. The City Council didn’t notice because they were too busy ducking and running. And so it goes down to today.

Fortunately for the city a vibrant and visionary group of leaders working on diverse issues emerged organically across the city. The role of the mayor, the City Council, and the business community should now be to show humility and to use every resource available to them to support the visions and strategies developed by our true leaders.

No one in New Orleans today would seriously propose erecting an elevated interstate along the river in front of the French Quarter.

No one in New Orleans today would seriously propose cutting down miles of live oak trees in the heart of the city to erect an elevated expressway over top of Claiborne Avenue.

Those are Clearly Bad Ideas. If the people running the show back then were as enlightened as we are (we tell ourselves) these Clearly Bad Ideas never would have been considered.

The problem with Bad Ideas, however, is that at the time they are proposed they apppear to have a logic about them. Thoughtful people embrace the Bad Idea. In fact, they often defend the Really Bad Idea as the Only Hope. The Progressive Solution. They call it the Really Good Idea.

“But we MUST do the Bad Idea,” they say. Houston has the Bad Idea. Atlanta has the Bad Idea. We need it too!

The latest Bad Idea making the rounds among New Orleans’ leading lights is the idea that our only hope for salvation is to bring Big-Box Sprawl into the city. Like earlier arguments for demolition of “slums” and the need for elevated expressways to stimulate “progress” and “generate taxes,” today’s advocates are merely regurgitating conventional wisdom.

While it is disappointing to see our mayor and council members uncritically embracing the corporate spin of big-box sprawl, the misconceptions about chain retailing are widespread. The corporate chain retailers and their developer partners spend millions of dollars each year on PR and lobbying efforts designed to ensure them a place at the table as well as a hefty helping of public funds each time they come to town.

It is worth reminding ourselves that while big-box lobbyists and supporters talk about their stores having risen to dominate the retail landscape due to the operation of free markets, developers rarely build their “power centers” and “lifestyle developments” without extracting subsidies — the taxes paid by us residents and all our locally-owned businesses. The Wal-Mart development on Tchoupitoulas received $20 million in tax breaks. The Lowes on Elysian Fields received $3.6 Milllion. The Home Depot on Claiborne currently has their hand in the kitty.

Why is it that our local businesses — who returned and served this community during the rebuilding process — are now being forced to subsidize the corporations who plan to drive them out of business? That doesn’t seem fair.

Thankfully, New Orleans is not the first community to face the challenge of corporate chain retail. We can examine economic data from across the country. And when we do this, the chains loose their appeal. They offer little to no economic benefit. They are not generators of jobs for the poor. Rather than providing tax revenue to the city, they drain it away.

Some examples:

• From Maine: local merchants were found to return to the local economy $45 of every $100 in consumer spending, compared to $14 for chain stores. (See NewRules.org for a copy of this study).
• From Chicago: Locally-owned businesses generate a 70% Local Premium in enhanced economic impact. (Visit AndersonvilleStudy.com for a copy of this study)
• From Sante Fe: Not only do national chains send money outside of the community, they distort the local economies by shifting activity away from downtowns and concentrating sales on one property. This overstates the importance of large retailers for tax revenues and jobs. Download the PDF of this study
• Again From Maine: Dollars spent at a local retailer support not only that store, but a variety of other local businesses, including local banks, accountants, printers, and internet service providers. From an economic development perspective, the ramifications of this are substantial.
• From Austin: Development of urban sites with directly competitive chain merchants will reduce the overall vigor of the local economy.
• As far back as 1995, Sonoma County, California concluded that “retail sales … have only been shifted around geographically by the new big-box centers, with no real net increase in sales, despite population increases in the county.”

So we would like to propose a different development model. One that has been proven to work time and again:

Support local businesses first.

What does supporting local businesses first mean? It means if the city has tax dollars to give away in the form of subsidies, lets craft the legislation so that our home-grown businesses can access these funds. If the chains still want to come, let them use their own capital—not ours.

What can neighborhoods and communities do to ensure that they get good developments that increase their quality of life, rather than creating traffic and sprawl? For starters, insist that new developments in your area abide by a few rules:

1. Insist on no sale of public right-of-ways. Don’t let developers buy public streets and other right-of-ways. Make them build within the existing urban fabric.
2. Insist that developments in your community not receive corporate welfare. Taxes paid by local businesses and homeowners should not be given away to out-of-town corporations.
3. Require that all developments in your neighborhood greater than 20,000 sq. ft. submit a written document to your neighborhood organization detailing how their project supports the goals and objectives of the neighborhood plan as you created it via the Lambert Plan and the Unified New Orleans Plan. If the developer can’t explain how their project helps your community reach its goals and how it aligns with your priorities, they probably need to find another location.

This is our city. If people want to join us in rebuilding and share in the wealth we create together, let them come and be a part of it. But if they are just here to extract short-term profits by building more of the same crud that litters the landscape of Houston and Jacksonville, then it is our right to politely decline the offer.

You can find lots of useful information, reports, and tips from across the country at StayLocal.org/info/

The money grab is over. The cash is gone. While our politicians bickered over the rules of the game and who would take the credit, the lobbyists divvied up the spoils. It is unfortunate but in the face of a man-made disaster that nearly destroyed our city, our leaders could rise no further than to continue fighting over control of the ruins. It is time to leave our leaders behind. Let them follow if they will.

The producers of the Unified New Orleans Plan have begun to show their hand. “What you won’t see in the plan [are] directives that prioritize certain neighborhoods or districts,” says Joe Butler, a spokesperson for the planning process. He continues, “And we are not in any position to select how they are brought back and the timeline [on which] they are brought back.”

So after 18 months, New Orleans is about to receive a plan with no priorities, no timelines, and no budget.

While this may be a position popular with politicians (recall the disingenuous City Council vote to rebuild the entire city simultaneously), residents who live in the real world understand that no project of the magnitude of rebuilding a major urban area gets very far without priorities, timelines, and budgets. To suggest otherwise is to insult us on top of having wasted countless hours of our time over the past year and a half.

Now that we have been warned not to expect too much from the Unified New Orleans Plan—that dreaming of sidewalks in our neighborhoods was a bit too visionary —the invading hordes of planners can safely return to their prestigious firms and focus on writing journal articles about the lessons to be learned from our plight.

While we still believe legally structuring citizens into the planning and budgeting processes is critical for long-term recovery, it appears likely that this entire planning process was a colossal waste of time and resources. It certainly doesn’t appear likely to produce the tangible results we were encouraged to “visualize” many months back.

But, perhaps the Law of Unintended Consequences is at work here. Perhaps we did gain something from this process—just not what we were working toward.

Last Thursday, thousands of us marched in the streets of our city demanding that our leaders wake up and pay attention to the violent crime plaguing our community. People of all walks of life and from all across the city converged on City Hall in a show of unity unprecedented in a city that frowns on public protests and favors working through personal networks.

What enabled this extraordinary feat of public organizing? It is possible that a year and a half of formal and informal meetings—meetings with friends, meetings with neighbors, meetings with civic groups, politicians, and even the UNOP meetings, the Katrina Krewe, Friends of Lafitte Corridor, Citizens for 1 Greater New Orleans, and Levees.org —it is possible that this unprecedented expansion of social networks is in the process of creating a new and vibrant civil society in New Orleans. This new civil society includes the social aid and pleasure clubs, the mardi gras krewes, the business groups, and the neighborhood organizations but it moves beyond them and brings them into wider networks that cross boundaries in new and dynamic ways.

Unfortunately for those planners with halcyon dreams of greatness, no one got to play the role of Hausmann redesigning Paris or L’Enfant drawing the future streets of Washington on a clean piece of parchment.

But perhaps we residents of the city did gain something. Nascent. Fragile. Uncertain. And by no means inevitable. A civil society is taking its first tentative steps. If able to grow, mature, gain in strength and confidence, this development could be the single most important factor in the recovery of New Orleans.

While New Orleans has been blessed with rich culture and traditions, civil society—especially in the sense of a broad politically engaged populace—has been remarkably absent. The emergence of a vibrant civil society could go far in addressing the problems that have prevented our city from realizing its full potential.

It started with the green belts of the Urban Land Institute’s proposal and the legendary green dots of the Bring New Orleans Back plan last winter. Some New Orleanians came to see green space as a menacing blob doing the bidding of evil, scheming developers bent on violating average folks’ property rights and turning neighborhoods into golf courses for the rich.

At any rate, through a mixture of inept communication and political demagoguery, “green” has become mean. So much so that Bill Jefferson’s campaign maligned a top opponent in the House race as being part of the “green space crowd”—i. e., the Evil Others.

But relief from such foolishness—the negative burlesque of politics and the media, or the pathological anxiety of humanity — is precisely the benediction green space offers us. Green spaces don’t kill neighborhoods. They make neighborhoods more alive.

Take the oaks of City Park. Some are ancient, having presided over their surroundings since the days before the French arrived. They have witnessed tribal Indian wars, duels, and suicides. But to sit beneath their branches is to be in the presence of a nobility that transcends the small-minded grudges or petty dramas that led to those events. It is to be in the presence of a grandeur that turns worries into trifles. It is to be in the presence of a stillness that quiets the noise in our heads if we let it, that allows for a cessation of the constant doing, so that, for a change, there is just being. That is especially important for New Orleanians in this time of crisis.

A century and more ago, the people of New Orleans planted oak trees up and down the streets and avenues to provide shade from the heat and to infuse the city with life. Today, groups like the City Park “Mow-Rons” have filled the void left by Katrina and are volunteering to maintain the park on their own time. Parts of the park have never looked better. The tree planters a century ago left us a legacy. The Mow-Rons today give us a gift of encouragement.

But the greatest gift is from the green spaces themselves. The grass, waters and trees, as well as the birds they attract, speak to us at a depth beyond words. What they ask in return is that we recognize their beauty and do a bit of maintenance. As we rebuild neighborhoods we should not forget the inestimable return on that comparatively meager investment.

Over the last year,

• UC launched Stay Local.org, to raise the visibility of locally-owned businesses with a free online web listing and to raise public awareness of the cultural, economic, and environmental benefits of shopping locally;

• UC supported organizations and traditional commercial corridors throughout the city with technical assistance including partnerships resulting in successful Main St. designations and over $250,000 in direct funding;

• UC received national recognition as a leader in e-advocacy. National marketing firm MyEmma selected The Urban Conservancy as one of the 25 best uses of of e-marketing by a non-profit in 2005.

• UC upgraded our award-winning website to more effectively continue educating the community on best practices and current issues related to the urban fabric;

• UC presented and participated in over 20 conferences and meetings with state and local government representatives, businesses, and NGOs to represent UC’s positions.

We are $9500 short of our fund goal. Your tax-deductible contribution will help ensure that we can continue to provide these services at low or no cost through the coming year.

Let’s Get Down to Business!

You can take two steps right now to show your support for the rebirth of New Orleans.

1. Make a tax deductible donation to The Urban Conservancy. Donations of $100 or more receive a CD featuring world class New Orleans musicians from our own local Grammy magnet, Basin Street Records (www.basinstreetrecords.com).
2. Do your holiday shopping at locally-owned New Orleans businesses. Whether you live in New Olreans or not, you can use the searchable business directory at www.staylocal.org to find locally-owned businesses who can supply you with that perfect gift!

Now, jump over to Stay Local! and pledge to do at least 25% of your holiday shopping at locally-owned stores. The more pledges, the more we can leverage publicity of this important goal.

Thank you for your continuing support of The Urban Conservancy.

They are neighborhood planning systems. From city to city, they go by various names, but the basic idea is the same: a formal system for neighborhood participation in the planning process. And the rationale is simple:

Neighborhoods need a voice in the basic decisions that affect our lives:

• schools
• policing
• housing
• maintenance and services
• parks
• land use decisions

If they can do it in those other cities, then surely it can be done in New Orleans. With a reform-minded City Council at the helm, and civic involvement at an all-time high, the time is certainly ripe. City governance should be reorganized in a way that gives more control to the local community.

As the broken city rebuilds, it only makes sense to repair broken government as well. That’s why, in Mid-City, neighbors included a section on “Local Control” as part of their neighborhood recovery plan. They believe that governance reform is a recovery issue.

They were especially encouraged by a recent report by the Bureau of Governmental Research. The BGR has drafted specific changes to the City Charter which would give the Master Plan the force of law and give neighborhoods a formal voice in land use decisions—easily one of the most contentious matters in any city.

They’ve added language to their recovery plan endorsing the BGR recommendations. Here is the text from the current draft of their plan:

If the recovery of New Orleans is to be successful, it is critical that every neighborhood be involved as a full partner. The traditional model of top-down governance should be decentralized in a way that gives the local community a formal and meaningful role in decisions.

Community input into the recovery plan is a start but it must be extended to include implementation decisions as well as ongoing post-recovery planning.

To this end, we recommend the formation of Neighborhood Councils, similar to those in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Missoula, Montana and many other communities. These Neighborhood Councils must have a legal basis under State law, the City Charter, and City ordinances. Each Neighborhood Council would represent one of the 100 plus neighborhoods in New Orleans.

We endorse the recommendations of the Bureau of Governmental Research (BGR Report) to amend the City Charter to give the Master Plan the force of law and to include neighborhood organizations in the required approval process for land use proposals. We request the immediate adoption by the City Council of interim ordinances to implement the BGR recommendations, including a formal system of participation by Neighborhood Councils in land use decisions.

However, we believe that neighborhoods are equally affected by operational decisions that impact housing, streets, parks, police, schooling, sanitation, drainage, budgeting, regulatory review, and other issues. Therefore, we also request that the City Council establish a committee of neighborhood organization representatives supported by City staff to propose a City Charter amendment to define the role of Neighborhood Councils in reviewing strategic operational decisions by City agencies. This committee should recommend an amendment to the City Council within four months.

The Urban Conservancy encourages other neighborhoods to include such language in their recovery plans. As the neighborhood plans are cobbled together into a city-wide plan and passed up through various levels of governmental bureaucracy, a demand for reform will provide momentum for a campaign to amend the City Charter in 2007.

The Urban Conservancy is proud to be one of the many organizations supporting passage of this amendment. This is an historic opportunity to change a system that publicly and catastrophically failed our community.

Amendment No. 3 must be approved by a majority of Louisiana voters. If passed it would merge multiple levee boards in the southeast section of Louisiana into two regional boards and set professional standards for appointment to the regional boards.

Our partners in this coalition include:

• Citizens for 1 Greater New Orleans
• New Orleans Business Council
• Alliance for Good Government in Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard and St. Tammany
• The Houma-Terrebonne Chamber of Commerce
• Louisiana Association of Business and Industry
• Levees.org
• Jefferson Business Council
• Louisiana Engineering Society - New Orleans Chapter
• Council for a Better Louisiana
• Jefferson Chamber of Commerce
• Kiwanis Club of Calcasieu
• St. Charles Avenue Association
• New Orleans Chamber of Commerce
• New Orleans Metropolitan Association of Realtors
• Louisiana Realtors Association
• World Trade Center of New Orleans
• River Region Chamber of Commerce
• Public Affairs Research Council
• Slidell Chamber of Commerce
• Committee of 100
• Northshore Business Council
• Greater New Orleans Inc.
• Bureau of Governmental Research
• Citizens for a Safer Jefferson
• Louisiana Leadership Initiative
• Society of Women Engineers - Greater New Orleans Section
• Homebuilders Association of Greater New Orleans
• Baton Rouge Area Chamber
• Palmer Avenue Neighborhood Association
• Hispanic American Medical Association of Louisiana
• Metairie Women’s Club
• Baronne Street Neighborhood Association
• Colombian Volunteers of New Orleans

This Saturday, visit your locally-owned coffee shop. Get your coffee and talk with your friends. Then go vote. Heck, take one of your friends with you!

fiefdom (noun): anything, as an organization or real estate, owned or controlled by one dominant person or group.

If you haven’t heard, Harry Anderson and his wife, Elizabeth, left New Orleans. On their way out, they talked with the New York Times and, among other things, noted that New Orleans appears to be “Stuck on Stupid.”

New Orleanians hate nothing more than someone telling us what we already know. It sends us into weird spasms of denial—like when someone from out of town comments on how filthy the city is (even pre-levee failure) and suddenly the Times-Picayune is filled with letters from indignant residents bizarrely claiming that no city is in fact cleaner than New Orleans.

So before we all get our righteous indignation fired up, perhaps it bears taking a moment to contemplate what Anderson (and countless others who are voting with their feet) is saying and what we as a community might do to ensure that he is wrong — at least in the long-term. Because like it or not he appears to have truth on his side at the moment.

Anderson singles out the continuing leadership failure of the Nagin Administration along with some specific grievances related to the tax assessment on his property and Entergy’s inability to provide professional services. Back in June, a group of developers, real estate brokers and architects told City Hall that systemic problems in the permitting process were jeopardizing billions of dollars in investments.

What these two disparate—and admitedly anecdotal—examples point to is something we all have known for quite some time: that if our community is to thrive, we need large-scale institutional changes to the way business is done in New Orleans. Not just a new council or a new ordinance but serious reforms that will ensure that our gains today are enshrined in law and not dependent upon the good graces of whoever happens to be in office at any given moment.

We have three opportunities before us right now that together could go a long way toward ensuring that we don’t get stuck on stupid.

The first is the Consolidation of the Levee Boards .

The second is the Consolidation of the Tax Assessors.

The third is the passage of the proposed changes to the New Orleans City Charter that will place citizen participation legally in the planning process, create a master plan with the force of law, and will dismantle once and for all the system of councilmanic fiefdoms that has done so much damage to our community. [PDF of the full Bureau of Governmental Research report is available here ]

We’ve lost enough families. We’ve lost enough businesses. Business as usual never was good enough.

This past year has taken its toll on all of us, but we need to complete the journey. So lets pull together one more time: talk with your neighbors, get active in the passage of these three initiatives, keep a little bit of that pissed-off energy in reserve for when we need it! This is our community and we need to make certain that our political elite understand this simple lesson once and for all.

In the long run men hit only what they aim at.
Therefore, though they should fail immediately,
they had better aim at something high.
-Henry David Thoreau

The Urban Conservancy launches StayLocal.org — A Community Database of Locally-Owned and Operated Businesses.

Just as many of New Orleans’ locally owned businesses are handed down from generation to generation, so too are business recommendations passed along, word-of-mouth, from mother to daughter, father to son, friend to friend. In most US cities, shopping is an impersonal experience and transactions are purely financial. Not so in New Orleans, where your haircut comes with a history lesson, your contractor is a font of culinary wisdom, and the cab driver giving you a lift today may be the musician you go out to see tonight.

Today we celebrate our local economy. We celebrate the local businesses that stayed with us this past year — when the corporate chains abandoned us. We celebrate the local businesses that are still working day after day to reopen — because we know you are going to make it one day soon and we look forward to sharing the victory with you.

In 2003, The Urban Conservancy launched a new initiative called Stay Local! that encouraged people to spend their dollars at locally-owned and operated businesses. While the arguments may have seemed a bit academic back then, the events of the past year have convinced almost everyone of the importance of our local businesses.

As the New York Times recently recognized:

“New Orleans’s little restaurants, independent stores and small manufacturers do not just add flavor to the economy; in a city that lacks a big corporate base, they are the economy.”

“The city estimates that 95 percent of the 22,000 businesses here before Hurricane Katrina employed fewer than 100 workers (fewer than 25, in most cases). These included not just shops, but also the artists and manufacturers and wholesalers that supplied them, and the accountants and lawyers and cleaning companies that served them.”

With so many words being written about the past year, we thought it was a good time to look forward — forward to an economy teeming with locally-owned and operated businesses supporting a vibrant culture and a healthy environment.

The new and improved staylocal.org is provided as a free service to the community. The website is an ongoing effort and will be evolving over the coming months. Take it for a test drive! You can search for a particular business by using its name (Domilise). You can search for all the businesses in a given category (clothing, nurseries, sno-balls) or you can perform more complicated searches such as looking for a hardware store in zip code 70116 (hardware AND 70116).

Let us know what works and what can be improved — we don’t claim to have worked out all the bugs!

Don’t see your favorite local business? Let us know and we’ll add it. Don’t see your business? Fill out the on-line form and we’ll get it up as soon as possible. And yes, artists and musicians count as businesses! So put your name out there and let the rest of us know what you got.

Many people collaborated on this project and we want to thank them for their generous assistance. The Department of Housing and Urban Development provided funding support through their Universities Rebuilding America Partnership. Our friends Jake Wagner, Michael Frisch, and Vince Gautier at the University of Missouri - Kansas City shared their knowledge and passion. And our web developer, Ben Gauslin, performed miracles with $50 worth of software and a determination to build something of lasting value to the community.

Finally, we would like to dedicate the launch of staylocal.org to our friend Cassie Melendez — because today is your birthday. And because a year ago today you lost your home and your city. Maybe this is one small step on your road home.

As reported in the Times-Picayune, during the mayor’s press conference, attorney Virginia Boulet, a former mayoral contender tapped by Nagin as an adviser, said she is working on incentive plans to lure big-box, discount and high-end retailers to the city.

Since taking office, Nagin’s administration has been long on rhetoric about supporting local business but has never delivered to the tens of thousands of local businesses that form the backbone of the New Orleans economy.

Though the mayor and his staff bristle at any mention of the Wal-Mart debacle, the fact remains that the project was not a done deal when Nagin came to office and he therefore bears a measure of culpability in the $20 million giveaway of taxpayer money to subsidize Wal-Mart’s competing with local businesses.

Shortly thereafter, the Nagin administration and City Council orchestrated a $3.6 million subsidy for Lowes corporation to open a store on Elysian Fields. Many of us recall that as we struggled to rebuild our homes and businesses in September, October, and November, Lowes kept its store shuttered. Who was there for us? United Hardware, Mary’s True Value, Wilson Bourg Lumber, Barto’s Appliances, Liberty Lumber, Carruth Lumber, Helm Paint, and countless other locally-owned businesses.

The same story played out with regard to restaurants and coffee shops. Out-of-town corporate chains like Starbucks, Taco Bell, McDonalds, Wendy’s and Burger King kept their money at corporate headquarters while locally-owned shops did whatever it took to get their doors open.

Talking with member businesses in Stay Local! , we hear again and again how dire are the straits local businesses are navigating this summer. Many businesses have already failed. Thousands more hang on heroically without any support from the city.

Rather than announcing a bold initiative to aid local businesses, the Nagin administration now informs us that they will use the city’s limited resources to provide incentives to lure outside corporations into the city to compete against the very people who form the core of our economy.

This is a critical hour for our locally-owned businesses. Virginia Boulet and the Nagin administration need to convene genuine representation of locally-owned and operated businesses and abandon the folly of chasing big-box lucre that history and economics teach us never materialize. They should instead dedicate available funds to supporting and growing locally-owned and operated businesses. This approach would be a far more efficient use of limited city resouces and serve to leverage the unique culture that is still our greatest asset. Moreover, land use development incentives should be structured so that existing local businesses can make use of them as they expand to provide the services necessary for rebuilding.

Now more than ever we need to support our friends and neighbors who support our communities. Mr. Mayor, Ms. Boulet, look inside your community for its vision and leadership. Now more than ever we need to Stay Local!

……..

Looking for some facts about supporting local businesses? Check out this great fact sheet put together by the New Rules Project.

Also check out the great short report ‘Big Boxes in Our Town?’ by the retail analysis firm Civic Economics.

‘Bookselling This Week’ offers a brief article, Responding to Critics of Local First that outlines common arguments agains supporting local businesses and how they are easily refuted.