Forty five percent of Treme is STRs

This is an infuriating report on STRs and the housing crisis for several reasons but, holy crap, just read the dang lede.

New Orleans’ Treme is regarded as the nation’s oldest African American neighborhood, but some of its residents, like Darryl Durham, now say that legacy is fading quickly.

In recent years, short-term rentals with companies such as Airbnb proliferated and now operate on about 45% of the Historic Faubourg Treme District’s parcels. Resulting rent rises and property taxes stemming from that have forced out many black families and residents, said Durham, a musician who has lived there since 2006.

I daresay prior to the David Simon plague, Treme wasn't much on the radar of the typical American authenticity tourism investor.  Maybe they would have discovered it anyway. We're coming up on Jazzfest season. No doubt the smart money visitors will be scoping out our neighborhoods for new opportunities.

The city is much more an open book than it ever was. But nobody knows how to read it anymore.   Transplants (even the good ones) tend to outnumber natives in a variety of spaces. For me, the most profound change in that regard over the past decade has been at work.  I still can't decide whether it's more frustrating when I have to explain the most basic information about the city's history/culture/politics to co-workers, customers, and especially bosses or when they confidently explain them to me incorrectly. The vernacular of life in New Orleans we once took for granted has either disappeared entirely or been converted into some over-curated caricature of itself.  For the profit of the very few, of course.

New Orleans is a tourism- and hospitality-centric economy, and Sharika’s story is similar to the stories you hear from hospitality workers in the city. Tourism generates approximately $7.5 billion a year in revenue for the city, yet the workers who make the system run aren’t seeing their fair share. Instead, they see inconsistent incomes and public transit routes, but consistently rising rents (often driven by the explosive growth of short-term rentals) and cost-of-living.

This past weekend we had a fun day. On a Sunday in March, here on the Central City/Garden District cusp, one can walk out the front door, turn left and walk to Super Sunday, turn right and walk to St. Patrick's Day, or set out some chairs on the sidewalk and wait for bits of both to come to you.

This year we did it all three ways.We walked down to Parasol's and sipped whiskey for a while. Then we walked back up  and followed Indians around for a while before planting ourselves on the porch.  The sad thing about days like that, though, is these little treks through the neighborhood make it obvious how many tourists "live" there.  They're easy to spot rolling their luggage in and out of a startling number of houses with tell-tale keypad locks like this one.



So the fun days at home are increasingly tinged with dread. As neighborhoods give themselves over further and further to tourism, what and who are neighborhood celebrations for? And will there be anyone left who actually lives here with a long enough memory or family history in these communities to even care or know the difference?