Moving City Hall - Is there a real plan?

Update: See also this Gambit commentary

I'm not in love with our current City Hall building and it seems clear that it doesn't quite have the capacity we need for all of our departments. However I really question the efficacy of the purchase of the Chevron building for conversion.

I wrote this late last week at SaveCharityHospital.com about attempts in the legislature to undermine the New Orleans Master Plan:

It has become increasingly clear to us that the Master Plan has been partially undermined by the failure to include the city's major development projects in its scope. Without a substantive evaluation of the impacts of the two competing hospital plans - the LSU-preferred $1.2 billion medical campus or the less expensive and faster alternative to renovate Charity Hospital - the Goody Clancy Master Plan remains insufficiently comprehensive. The failure to critically analyze other large development projects such as the potential abandonment of City Hall in the wake of the proposed purchase of the Chevron building, the Reinventing the Crescent Waterfront riverfront project, and the proposed sports entertainment district around the Superdome.

Taken individually, none of these are necessarily catastrophic proposals. On balance, however, they represent an enormous commitment of recovery dollars to projects not subject to the skeptical analysis of the Goody Clancy planning process.

The failure of City Council and the City Planning Commission to acknowledge and deal with these deficiencies has created a climate that has invited such bold moves which undermine the master plan concept, such as those attempted by Senator Murray and his allies.

Should attempts to undermine the Master Plan ultimately fail, the City Planning Commission and the City Council will be charged with approving or rejecting the version being crafted by Goody Clancy. Yet, the deficiencies in the scope of the plan will still remain and so too will public queries to the CPC and Council about the strength of the document.

Now I didn't support SB 75 because I would like to see New Orleans adopt a comprehensive plan that might help us make smarter development decisions going forward. I do think there are legitimate criticisms of the process that need to be made but those that offered the bill weren't making them.

That the City Planning Commission has given their trademark rubber stamp to this proposal to relocate City Hall is really frustrating and speaks to their overall abdication of responsibility over the last several years.

City Hall wasn't built all that long ago and when we built it, the city razed a whole section of the city to do so. It was planned. The streets were planned that way. That's why when you stand on Rampart you have this site line to the neon sign atop that building.

I'm wary of the casual way in which we're about to entirely abandon all of that. Especially since we don't seem to have a plan for that entire area of downtown we're prepared to leave vacant. Think about it. Between City Hall and the state office building (currently under demolition) and all those nasty parking lots around Loyola Ave., what exactly is planned for that huge swath of real estate?

Surely someone will propose a really neat sounding project - maybe a park. And maybe it will be a good idea in isolation.

But again, what exactly are we doing? How many more critical recovery projects will get pushed off because of some absolutely critical political legacy project like a new downtown park or a new city hall?

Are those really our priorities?

How much longer are we going to have to put off sustainable investment in neighborhood nodes because of the apparently pressing need to move money around in downtown New Orleans?

Making such a big decision to abandon large swaths of the old administrative and downtown medical district (Charity and the VA), will leave a big gaping hole in the middle of the CBD with absolutely no public plan for what we're going to do with that land.

For the City Planning Commission to be so casual about approving the purchase of the Chevron building strikes me as pathetic.

Why are they so eager to undermine the master plan they worked so hard to create?

I really appreciate Arnie Fielkow's stand on this issue. It takes guts even if this statement kind of sounds like a tweet.

"Great city needs such as the reopening and enhancement of playgrounds, police and fire stations, street repairs, etc., certainly should be top priority when competing with limited city funds," Fielkow wrote.

Yes! What exactly is the vision here? Are we in the business of making this city livable for residents or are we just leaving legacies? Let's put the brakes on this train.

This is precisely the type of thing I thought a comprehensive master plan was supposed to address. I'd love for someone to get Dave Dixon of Goody Clancy on the record about some of this stuff.

Look, I think we need better administrative buildings for municipal government. I also think a monorail rising above the Mississippi River from Riverbend to Holy Cross would be awesome.

Just because something is a good idea doesn't mean we should put it at the top of the list.

City Business Picks Up Slack

It is increasingly clear that the Times-Picayune has no interest in covering the LSU/VA and Charity Hospital.

City Business has two clutch articles out right now.

First, Richard Webster provides a little bit of context for those that say the residents of Lower Mid City should be forced out of their homes to make way for the new LSU/VA projects.

It’s for the greater good of the city.

Those are typically the last words a community hears before the bulldozers roll in and demolish homes and businesses, clearing a path for promised economic development.

The residents are told to take one for the team. They’re promised they’ll be taken care of, that they will be justly compensated for the loss of their home and their sacrifice will benefit all of New Orleans.

This is what the people who live in lower Mid-City on the footprint of the planned LSU-VA medical complex are being told. But given how the city and state have handled past economic development projects, it appears more likely that those standing in the way will be tossed to the side and forgotten all in the name of progress, said Bobbi Rogers, director of the Lower Mid-City Residents and Business Owners Association.

“There’s very little hope that the city will be fair in this matter to its citizens,” Rogers said. “Look what they’re doing to the public housing residents and what they did to the people who lived in St. Thomas or Treme when they built Armstrong Park. People have been led to believe that if you sacrifice, you’ll have financial gain. People tell me how much I’m going to make out. My response to them is, ‘Would you like to trade places and gamble on that?’”

He includes some words from Dave Dixon of Goody Clancy, the firm now doing the zoning master plan and a guy that's slowly earning some of my respect:

“The idea that people need to sacrifice for the greater good isn’t necessary. What it leads to ultimately is paralysis,” Dixon said. “Unless those sacrifices are somehow visibly spread across the entire community, those people will stand up and say, ‘It’s not fair. We’re the only ones being asked to sacrifice and we don’t share the benefits.’

“So they fight the process and it becomes much more difficult to create larger projects and attract investors because no ones likes to fund a controversial project in this day and age. New Orleans is in a position to attract a lot of investment, but it will be very hard to do in a city where people are constantly fighting over each proposal.”

That's not all from City Business, either.

Ariella Cohen wrote a sterling piece about "plans" to market the old Charity Hospital for some sort of condo redevelopment. State law ensures that it can't even hit the market for another two or three years because it has to be offered to other state agencies first. Even then, the condo market isn't exactly robust these days.

The best little nugget from this article comes from Downtown Development District President and CEO Kurt Weigle:

The building is so large that you could have luxury condos on top with a private entrance for the owners, students on the other side and seniors in another wing with none of them even knowing the other is there...

Yes, let's turn our Charity Hospital into a diorama of social stratification. It's going to look great in the December 2017 DDD e-newsletter.