Danger! Exploding real estate

It looks like the on again, off again, proposal to move City Hall over to the Municpal Auditorium site is trying to be on again.

Mayor LaToya Cantrell is taking the first steps toward perhaps converting Municipal Auditorium into New Orleans’ next City Hall.

Several previous mayors have talked about moving city government out of the building on Perdido Street that it has occupied since the late 1950s. The possibility of a move was given new support last fall, when a study commissioned by the Cantrell administration found the current building was in serious disrepair and not well configured for the current and future needs of the city’s government.

And with $41 million in FEMA funds on the table for renovating Municipal Auditorium, administration officials are homing in on it as their future home.

As far as I can tell that $41 million in FEMA funds has been and continues to be the main motivation for keeping the Auditorium on the list of potential sites. By all accounts, the difficulty of renovating the building, the lack of space, and probable opposition from the surrounding neighborhood all seem to be factors working against it.  The only positive argument for it in my mind is the old line Carnival Krewes who used to stage their balls in the Auditorium still view it as a kind of holy ground. Permanently desecrating their monument with city offices does hold a certain symbolic appeal.

The other thing that's happening is they are running out of options. The long rumored Charity Hospital option favored by Mitch Landrieu came off the board late last year when we handed most of that over to Sonder.  Also I see the VA building mentioned as one alternative in that T-P article. I may be misremembering this but I believe I heard that suggested as one possible desitnation for the soon-to-be-displaced Ozanam Inn.* The defunct Naval Support Station property has also been mentioned in the past but there are multiple problems with that including the fact that it's so out of the way for most people.  Generally one would think that a City Hall should be centrally located and accessible to transit.

I say "would think" that because Jay Banks has other ideas.

Banks said his first choice would be to move City Hall — along with the Sewerage  Water Board offices and Civil District Court — to a campus in New Orleans East, where their employees could provide an economic shot in the arm for the area.

Would it "provide an economic shot in the arm," though?  How? This seems highly doubtful.  Maybe Jay can produce some research.  Or, more likely, he's just making stuff up. Worse than that, he is making stuff up from out of a brain conditioned to make decisions about public services and land use based primarily on speculative ideas about real estate values.

For example,

Then there’s the possibility the city could recoup some of its costs by selling the property that now houses City Hall and Civil District Court, taking advantage of a real estate boom in the Central Business District.

Have we not heard enough about things going "boom" downtown lately? Maybe it's time to back off of that for a while.

* Update: Well now we know where Ozanam Inn is going so that's something.  Still no word on what's supposed to happen to the building they're vacating, though.