Baton Rouge also has a "Faubourg Stacy"

Half the town just going Galt, as they say.

St. George supporters announced last week that they have about half of the 18,000 signatures needed to let voters decide whether the unincorporated area south of Baton Rouge’s city limits should become its own municipality. There’s no timeline to get the required signatures, which represent about 25 percent of the registered voters in the proposed city.

The St. George effort began as a push for a new school district, but it snowballed into the effort to create a new city after the state Legislature repeatedly brushed off the school proposal. The Legislature this year approved the new district but didn’t fund it, effectively killing the effort again. The school district boundaries approved by the Legislature don’t match the proposed new city’s limits, but organizers say they will ask lawmakers to redraw the lines if they are successful in incorporating St. George.

With 107,000 residents at stake, the St. George effort is the state’s largest municipal breakaway attempt in recent history. Central, which set off as its own city in East Baton Rouge in 2005, was about a quarter of the size of St. George and had a much, much smaller retail base.

Just imagine if New Orleans neighborhoods behaved this way.  What kind of a balkanized mess would we have on our hands if we just carved ourselves up into semi-autonomous quasi-private tourism, "economic development,"  police, and school districts.  What would that look like?