Landrieu, who served as the state's top tourism official during his seven-year tenure as lieutenant governor, pointed to New Orleans' authentic culture as a major draw for visitors.
"What you saw here today is empirical evidence that this is creating jobs, creating tax revenue," he said, adding that tourism officials have set as a goal of attracting 13.7 million visitors -- with an $11 billion economic impact -- by the city's 300th anniversary in 2018.
"That's our big World Cup," he said. "That's our Olympics."
I don't mean to come down too hard on the value of a healthy tourism industry. It's probably better overall that more people want to visit our city than don't. But it's this notion that our city exists solely for the purpose of drawing and catering to these visitors that has done us more damage than our leaders seem to be aware of or care about.
We frequently hear them talk about the "economic impact" of tourism in terms of overall dollars and number of "jobs" created. But such numbers are meaningless when divorced from the questions of how those dollars are distributed, what kinds of jobs are created, and what any of that means for the quality of life most of us enjoy. What good does "$11 billion in economic impact" do given that the bulk of it is experienced by low wage, low benefit, and often part-time or seasonal employers? How proud should our elected representatives be of their accomplishments "creating jobs" that have reduced a generation of New Orleanians to a life of transient hustling?
Like Mayor Landrieu, I'm looking forward to celebrating the 300th anniversary of the founding of the city I grew up in... provided I manage to hang on here long enough to see it. I wonder, though, if we're approaching the point where it ceases to be our city anymore.
I wonder what those of us who call this place home will have left to celebrate once our city fathers have managed convert the most famous and beloved portions of our civic space to a commercially governed theme park.
Senate Bill 573 proposes the New Orleans Hospitality and Entertainment District and gives its loose physical description as "all territories within the boundaries" of Faubourg Marigny, French Quarter, the Central Business District, the Warehouse District, Convention Center District, Louisiana Sports and Entertainment District and any areas connecting them to one another. It also gives the mayor the right to designate an area of town as part of the zone.
The district is proposed as a taxing body with the authority to issue and sell bonds.
The bill calls for the district to have its own board of governors that includes the chairs of the Greater New Orleans Hotel and Lodging Association, the New Orleans Chapter of the Louisiana Restaurant Association, the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center-New Orleans, the Louisiana Stadium and Exposition District, the New Orleans Tourism and Marketing Corporation and the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau.
The mayor will also be allowed to appoint four Orleans Parish residents to the Hospitality and Entertainment District. Those appointees must have "substantial business interests" in the established zones either as "owners or operates of hotels or other tourism or hospitality businesses."
That board would be permitted to levy taxes on hotel rooms, the sale of food and beverages and on in-premises hotel parking at establishments within the district. The proceeds from the hotel tax would be split evenly between the Marketing Corp. and the CVB, according to the legislation.
This legislation proposes to cut out a slice of the city and hand it over to an unelected board of "substantial business interests" who have purview over such basic services as sanitation and security and, quite likely, the authority to tax and borrow on the city's behalf. Earlier this week, we read about, admittedly eccentric, School Board President Thomas Robichaux's characterization of Governor Jindal's school privatization initiatives as "modern day fascism." Robichaux was widely ridiculed for his sensational word choice. But the substantive part of his argument that our public resources are being hoarded away from us by "substantial business interests" and their political cronies went largely untouched. Whatever label one chooses to apply to it, the practice of carving out a sector of the city to be privately managed by unelected elites is concerning. At the very least, it puts the citizenry at an uncomfortable degree of remove from public governance.
The designation of so-called "Hospitality Zones" implies that there are parts of the city where some of us aren't really welcome. Earlier this year, City Council was criticized for imposing a curfew law critics believed was designed to keep black teenagers safely out of sight of visitors. Council's imperfect response to this criticism was to propose extending the curfew city-wide ensuring that no one felt left out. Council has yet to take up the matter of extending the curfew, however. Perhaps, in light of recent events, they're trying to figure out whether or not they should add a dress code. The appearance of this "Hospitality Zone" proposal should make intentions clear, however.
To some degree, this partition already exists in practice. On a somewhat recent early morning visit to Jackson Square... during what Varg likes to call the ecotone... I witnessed a policeman attempt to move a homeless person sleeping slumped over on one of the benches near the Cabildo. "This is a tourist area," the cop said to the man, repeatedly, "You have to move out of here or be arrested." I know Jackson Square is a favorite spot for tourists to visit. But I, like a lot of New Orleanians, like to go there too. This was the first time I'd heard it referred to specifically as a "tourist area" in the sense that non-tourists might be less welcome or even subject to arrest for simply being in a public place. But, lately, the city has made this a matter of unofficial policy.
During the 2008 NBA All Star Game, a minor controversy was ignited by the city's acquiescence to the NBA's request to shut down the public square for use as an invitation-only corporate event. A similar clash ensued during preparations for the horrific Dave Mathews concert accompanying the NFL's 2010 Kickoff Extravaganza. Because we are told a primary impetus behind the creation of the Hospitality Zone is preparing the city to host more major sporting events, we can assume we'll be seeing more episodes like these in the future. This can end up affecting our ability to use our public spaces for civic as well as recreational purposes too. Remember the Mayor was particularly eager to evict the largely peaceful Occupy NOLA demonstrations last year in preparation for the college football bowl season.
Is it too much of a stretch to conclude that declaring whole sectors of the community special Hospitality Zones and restricting the activities of locals within those zones might put a bit of a drag on that "authentic culture" the Mayor is hoping to sell there? Inevitably, the more discerning authenticity connoisseurs are going to catch on to this. Luckily, there's already a fallback in place. We can always sell them air-conditioned bus tours of what this New York Times reporter actually termed the "Jungleland" beyond their Zone.
Harris spit out his sunflower shells in disgust. A luxury motor coach, filled with tourists behind tinted windows, trundled down Florida Street toward the Make It Right houses. Seventeen expletives have been edited out of the following paragraph:
“Every day 20 tour buses come down this street to look at this neighborhood and take pictures,” Harris said. “Don’t tell me they’re just touring the city. If you’re trying to tour the city, then you’re in the wrong neighborhood. They just ride around in the part that’s been devastated. Lower Ninth Ward ain’t receiving a single penny for that. Why can’t I get something? Why does the man driving the bus get all the money? I ain’t a guinea pig. I don’t want to be put under a microscope. We’re the ones that suffered down here, who lost everything. There are still dead people that they haven’t accounted for. It’s frustrating. It took almost seven years for the Ninth Ward to look like what it looks like now, and it still don’t look like [anything].”
Reading through that reminded me of this "authenticity" inspired moment from the HBO fantasy series Treme
That bit is authentic New Orleans—there is nothing New Orleans loves so much as New Orleans—but the show can't get past the desire to be authentic. It feels like a hell of a vacation in New Orleans. Granted, it's a well-informed, nuanced vacation, and Simon has clearly made an effort to ask the locals where to go, but it is a vacation nonetheless. In the first season, a Katrina tour bus rolls up on a Mardi Gras Indian funeral, and we balk at the voyeurism (of course, after being scolded the driver says: "you're right, you're right," and drives off. Everyone must get along!). But the show functions with the same impulse to uncover the "real" New Orleans.
There isn't anything in the Hospitality Zone bill that relates specifically to filming productions like Treme. Of course that doesn't seem necessary anyway as film crews regularly range throughout the city appropriating blocks of parking and sidewalk access at a time. Often they're on the hunt for some of that authentic culture the Mayor tells us is such a great draw for visitors. But, more than anything, they're drawn here by a corrupt wrinkle written into Louisiana tax law. So although the Hospitality Zone ground hasn't officially been carved out yet, the ground has already been broken on its "economic impact" model.
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