#CityOfFest

On this list of 50 most populous US metro areas, your very favorite local area is the one with the highest poverty rate.

Among the 50 most populous U.S. metro areas covered by the new data, poverty rates ranged from 7.3 percent in and around San Jose, California to 18.6 percent in the New Orleans region.

“Louisiana has struggled with poverty for a long time and continues to,” said Jan Moller, director of the liberal Louisiana Budget Project. The state “remains a very good place if you have a college degree, or if you're in oil and gas, or if you’re kind of in the economic elite.”

“But it remains a very tough place for a very significant percentage of our population,” he added.

The poverty rate estimate for last year for all of Louisiana was 19.7 percent, meaning about 899,000 of the roughly 4.5 million residents there lived in poverty. The figure is just shy of the state’s 2016 poverty rate of 20.2 percent.

Hopefully somebody will do something about that.  Over the past decade we've tried firing all the teachers, dumping millions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks into movie studios and tourist facing infrastructure, and turning all the housing into luxury apartments and/or vacation rentals nobody can afford to live in. That didn't seem to work. What else can we do?

Hey what if everybody in New Orleans learned to code created and ran their own individual festival! 

A new program, set in New Orleans, called "Fest for Success," was announced on Wednesday (Sept. 12) by Cleveland Spears III, president and CEO of the Spears Group and founder of the National Fried Chicken Festival, which is Sept. 22 and 23 in Woldenberg Riverfront Park.

At the Wednesday press conference announcing the lineup of food for the National Fried Chicken Festival, Spears said he has created a foundation called Festivals for Good, which will launch "Fest for Success, presented by Chevron."

"Fest for Success" features a "two-day boot camp for entrepreneurs, festival producers and major event organizers," according to a press release. The sessions will focus on the various elements required to start and build a profitable festivals or events.

It's finally happened. We've created a festival that is themed after making festivals. Welcome to Fest Fest presented by the Cleveland Spears Festival Industrial Complex. Here is its founding document. 

The idea for the festival-event boot camps grew out of recommendations from the Boston Consulting Group, which was commissioned by the New Orleans & Co. -- formerly known as the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation and the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau - to develop a strategic plan for the New Orleans tourism and hospitality.

Maybe not everyone remembers that BCG study. It was the hired "research" portion of a plan pushed by Mitch Landrieu in 2012 that would have designated several neighborhoods in and near the CBD as a quasi-privatized "hospitality zone" whose tax revenues would have been managed by a board of hoteliers and mayoral appointees with "substantial business interests" in the designated area.  It took a lot of heavy lifting to slap that down although aspects of it have been put into practice via piecemeal policy decisions since then.  Expect echoes of that to show up again when City Council takes up the short term rental debate next month.

BCG also has had a hand in school privatization efforts in Philadelphia and New York
and, prior to that, here in New Orleans when they advised the oligarchs assembled on Ray Nagin's infamous Bring Back New Orleans Commission.

Anyway here they are now helping Cleveland Spears do festival entrepreneurship. You can sign up for his Fest Fest seminar in order to learn how to do that too.  But I can also just go ahead and tell you it's mostly about getting a cut when bad actors like Chevron want to do PR greenwashing type stuff.

"By supporting Fest for Success, we're promoting the Crescent City's culture as well investing in its economic growth," Leah Brown, Public Affairs Manager for Chevron's Gulf of Mexico Business Unit, said in a press release. We encourage everyone with a festival idea to take part in these two-day workshops to learn more about organizing and hosting a successful event in New Orleans."

Or if you just want to see more of this business model in action, you can check out Spears's Fried Chicken Festival  this weekend.  Its "official hospitality partner" is Sonder.