Free milk and a Brown's cow

A full two years after the announcement of its closure, the Brown's Dairy complex is going up for sale.  Does there go the neighborhood?

For decades Central City has been an affordable neighborhood for African-American residents. The NAACP has historic roots there. Dryades Street (now Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard) was a major shopping thoroughfare with dozens of bustling stores and an open-air market. The Brown’s Dairy redevelopment will create further gentrification and change the traditional residential mix. It could also drive out some long-time renters. The Muses, a mixed-income apartment complex, currently provides the highest concentration of affordable living units in the area.

Listing agents formulated two prospectuses for the site – one that highlights mixed-use redevelopment and a second prepared for hotel investors. Without a zoning waiver, the site could accommodate a 550-room hotel. There is already a successful Quality Inn less than one block from the site. Hospitality industry real estate broker Lenny Wormser believes the site is not appropriate for a major hotel chain such as the Marriott, whose development costs are in the range of $450 per square foot including land. More affordable hotel chains such as the Comfort Inn could build out the site for $150 per square foot or even less, Wormser said. Even at $150 per square foot, development costs could reach $30 million, a previously unheard of budget for any Central City construction project. The city could approve a height variance perhaps in exchange for new affordable housing offsite.

Why go "offsite"?  Is that even a thing being talked about or is Columbus just helpfully suggesting it?  These kinds of set aside deals are insufficient tokenism in the first place even when they're applied directly to the development in question.  Moving them "offsite" just cedes the question of protecting the neighborhood altogether.

And Central City is in need of protection.  According the most recent Data Center neighborhood profile, 67.6% of renters there are "cost burdened" (defined as households that spend over 30 percent of their income on rent.) The Brown's lots are also important in that they are on relatively high ground. Every land use decision that deliberately excludes poor and working class New Orleanians from the limited range of sustainable real estate is yet another missed opportunity to create an equitable housing policy.  When Brown's closed two years ago, it meant a loss of 185 working class jobs. It looks like the plan is to replace those with more nice things for rich people and more upward pressure on rents.

On the other hand, you could probably put like five Top Golfs on that property so, you know, best highest use, right?

Speaking of Top Golf, it looks like Joe Jaeger and Melvin Rodrigue have completely broken up now. Jaeger had been on board to develop the now green-lighted Convention Center hotel. But that changed after Rodrigue appeared to cut a separate deal to build a Top Golf on vacant riverfront land controlled by the Convention Center. Jaeger was already involved in a venture to open a competing golf arcade franchise on the old Times-Picayune property. The Top Golf plot prompted him to leave the hotel deal in a huff.

Jaeger told NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune he has no intention of returning to hotel project. He said he has deep concerns about Convention Center leadership. He declined to mention any leaders by name.

Jaeger said those concerns remain after seeing the lease terms revealed in the now-quashed Topgolf deal. The situation is baffling given the millions the authority spent on consultants to develop a master plan for the acreage it owns, he added.

The Convention Center leadership includes Michael Sawaya president and general manager of Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, and Melvin Rodrigue, president of the New Orleans Exhibition Authority. The 12-member authority board has a mix of business and civic leaders.

If the leadership remains the same, “I don’t want anything to do with anything on that property,” Jaeger said. “It just doesn’t work for me.”

Now, even though the hotel has been authorized and the Top Golf deal mothballed, neither side is interested in making up. Instead they are moving ahead to develop their adjacent properties independently of one another.  Thanks to LaToya Cantrell's embarrassing "grand bargain" with the tourism oligarchs, Rodrigue now has legal authority to treat the Convention Center pretty much like his own private development company. 

House Bill 617, passed by the Senate on a 33-0 vote on Sunday, authorizes the Convention Center to build and own the $550 million, 1,200-room hotel proposed for the upriver end of the giant exhibition hall. The bill also clears the way for the Convention Center to develop other vacant land it owns next to the site

He hasn't decided what to do with it yet. But whatever it ends up being, the hard part was making sure the taxpayers would back it. That's all done now, thank you very much, Mayor Cantrell.

In his email, Rodrigue admitted the vision is still being formed, though he expects convention center leadership to turn more of its attention to the future of those lands now that plans for a headquarters hotel are progressing.

“We know the type of programming elements needed to make it a successful mixed use development and have lots of ideas of what those look like,” he said.

"Mixed use," meaning some riverfront condos and retail, maybe.  There might have to be a little "affordable" set aside somewhere in there. Or maybe that can go "offsite" too. 

Jaeger is making plans for the Market Street power plant.  Or at least he would like to.  This makes it look like there aren't many solid ideas at the moment. But there are plenty of public subsidies available should any ideas emerge.

Jaeger intends to push Market Street forward starting this summer. His team attended the International Council of Shopping Centers conference in Las Vegas in mid-May. Market Street was among the projects they looked to chat up among investors. Jaeger said he and his team plan to revisit previous redevelopment ideas, including the possibility of an entertainment use for the space.

Redeveloping the century-old property will be costly. The work will likely involve environmental remediation. But developers would be able to leverage historic tax credits, Jaeger noted. The plant also sits in an Opportunity Zone, a federal tax break program that is spurring frenzied investment in real estate. That could attract investors, he said.

“It’s difficult, but it’s got some reasons why it could happen,” Jaeger said.

So here we are again with all this public money available to throw at all this vacant land on high ground.  Nobody really cares what gets built there, specifically.  Meanwhile, this city has a serious housing crisis.  Somehow, despite all the recent rhetoric about what constitutes a "fair share," nobody can figure out how to connect these two facts.  Maybe nobody wants to.