Faubourg Stacy

Some of you kids are old enough to remember those bumper stickers.  They went a long way to communicating the post-Katrina aspirations of a certain segment of Uptown White voters without explicitly stating those aspirations. Of course Stacy was pretty explicit about it when she wanted to be. 

Anyway, here we are after a decade or so, a public housing demolition, hundreds of Airbnbs, and several blown kisses later, and the vision is really starting to fall into place. 

With qualifying for New Orleans’ municipal elections about a month away, politicos are eyeing the party, gender and ethnic make-up of the city’s voters overall and in the individual City Council districts.

A new analysis by seasoned demographer and consultant Greg Rigamer shows that there are currently 273,627 registered voters in Orleans Parish residing in 216,052 households. This includes 119,656 (43.7%) male voters and 153,681 (56.2%) female voters.

Of that total, 149,373 (54.6%) are Black; 99,821 (36.5%) are White; and 24,433 (8.9%) are registered as “other.” Democrats make up 64.2% (175,571) of the voters; “other party” 25.9% (70,748); and Republicans 10% (27,303).

Council District A has the highest percentage of White voters, and Council District E has the highest percentage of Black voters. For the first time in recent years, the percentage of White voters in Council District B exceeds the percentage of Black voters. 

Heating up

It was surprising to learn from real estate professional Stacy Head that the Dew Drop Inn is "hot" now.

Through strategic, persistent and well-organized advocacy, long-standing neighborhood issues like blighted housing can be resolved. Just as Freret Street blossomed after Hurricane Katrina, Head considers LaSalle Street around the Dew Drop Inn as the next “hot” area for redevelopment.

It was just last month, however, that we learned that the latest attempt to develop the venue has failed.  Maybe Stacy means that makes it "hot" now for an opportunistic and well capitalized investor to swoop in now.  I don't actually think it would be Sidney in this case. But I did mention in that post that there is a "cultural overlay" district on LaSalle Street there. This is probably what Stacy is thinking about.  More importantly, though, the "opportunity zone" rules look like a tax shelter scam for parked money. 

So it's possible that we could see "investment" in the area that drives up land values without actually creating anything.  That's "hot" as hell.

NO & Co. vs #CityOfYes and other potential 2019 political schisms

2019 is a statewide election year in Louisiana and candidates are starting to slot in to some of the legislative races. There's going to be a fair amount of shuffling about this year as the next wave of term limits claims its victims. In Orleans Parish both Walt Leger (House District 91) and Neil Abramson (House District 98)  are graduating and will have to replaced. Also the legislature we elect this year will be responsible for redrawing districts after the 2020 census so this is going to be particularly important. Let's try and not muck this up too badly. Not that there's a lot we can do with the choices allotted to us. Danae Columbus's latest gossip column about potential candidates does not offer much comfort, anyway.

In Leger's district, there is a guy whose actual name is Carling Dinkler IV. Dinkler is the scion of an old New Orleans family of hoteliers renowned for observing "accepted business practices" right up until the US Attorney General pressured them to stop that.

During a tumultuous era, in which racial segregation was the norm and the fight for civil rights would turn ugly, Dinkler Hotels became one of the first hospitality companies to integrate, but change came neither quickly nor easily. Referring to the unwavering attitudes of the day, Inman Allen, son of the late Atlanta mayor Ivan Allen Jr., acknowledges, "We were a segregated society in the 50s and up into the 60s." And, though the widespread violence observed in cities like Selma and Montgomery was kept at a minimum in Atlanta, many white business owners were very reluctant to accept and implement progressive reforms.

Despite a change in ownership, the Dinklers, under the auspices of a management contract, remained the primary policy makers for the hotels. While the Dinkler family was by no means a clan of bigots, their perspective on segregation was more reflective of the times and accepted business practices than personal convictions. The Dinklers ultimately yielded to the call for integration, but some prominent Atlantans like eventual Georgia governor Lester Maddox (who opted to close his Pickrick Cafeteria, an Atlanta institution, rather than serve black customers) stubbornly refused to relinquish their Jim Crow persuasions.

That said, between 1961 and 1964, the Dinkler Plaza Hotel was the focus of several protests and racial controversies, some of which made national headlines.

Here is a podcast I found wherein Carling Dinkler III tells us about the great favor done for New Orleans back when Moon Landrieu and Lester Kabacoff got together and invented tourism. Dinkler III was a founder of the New Orleans Convention and Visitors' Bureau, recently re-branded "New Orleans and Company."

New Orleans and Co. was in the news this week when it turned out its current director, Stephen Perry has some opinions on municipal budget priorities.  Specifically he believes funding the critical infrastructure that keeps amoebas out of the water you drink and, well, your city out of the water in the first place, is a "waste" compared to funding the tourism patronage machine from which he derives a half-million dollar salary.

Cantrell says the city needs the money to pay for what her administration estimates are tens of millions of dollars in infrastructure repairs. But Perry told The Lens that such a move would undercut the city’s economy, saying that new revenue would be wasted on what he characterized as an underperforming city government.

“In an unhinged interview with the Lens, J. Stephen Perry, who takes home over $430K per year to promote the City, spent most of his time tearing it down,” Action New Orleans wrote in a Tuesday morning press release. (A 2016 CVB tax filing — the most recent one available — shows that Perry’s compensation from the tourism group was closer to $460,000.)

Of course it isn't that much of a stretch for Perry, or anyone in his position to just assume that he's running the whole city anyway. Perry and the hoteliers have already hired their own police force (sort of) and contributed to the expanding French Quarter surveillance network.  In the opening gambit of its negotiations with Cantrell this year, NO and Co. proposed a hotel-specific sales tax scheme that would finance a one-time payment to the city dedicated to infrastructure. The mayor, quite rightly, rejected the offer as inadequate. But Perryet al were so impressed with themselves that they went ahead and drew up a spending plan for the money anyway as if they were purchasing actual governing authority.

When you allow the tourism cabal to hoard as much public money for doling out to cronies and developers as it does, then you can expect they're going to assume more power than they are entitled to. But just to make sure nobody gets any ideas about reining them in, they also do a fair amount of propaganda. Here's what happens when somebody checks their work.

Amid new pressure from unions and an ongoing debate over whether the city’s hospitality and tourism industry is doing enough to support its mostly low-wage workers, a local nonprofit research group has released a report estimating that the industry’s economic footprint is significantly smaller than previous industry-led estimates.

While hospitality leaders have long touted the industry’s ranks as amounting to more than 80,000 jobs, the Data Center’s report Tuesday pegs the number of New Orleans residents who make their living from tourism at closer to 30,000.

Part of the issue with such projections, the Data Center notes, is that defining what qualifies within a set industry cluster is “a rather subjective activity, leaving definitions vulnerable to pressures to make industry clusters look as large and inclusive as possible.”

On the Lens podcast episode that features Perry's "unhinged" interview, Lens editor Charles Maldonado talks about the difficulty in trying to verify the tourism industry's assertions. Perry sources a dubious claim about what percentage of city revenue derives from tourism to an offhand comment in a phone conversation he once had with Andy Kopplin.  At one point it even sounds like NO & Co. has credited 100 percent of Orleans Parish sales tax revenue to the tourism industry.

There is additional comedy in the interview so, please, give it a listen.  Perry describes himself at the beginning as a "leftist" and then promptly launches into a rote recitation of every right wing economic talking point in the book. He complains that the city actually has "a spending problem, not a revenue problem" echoing a common Republican refrain from the past several legislative sessions.  He also bristles at the notion that we should want to fund city services by taxing a "high performing organically created private sector enterprise" which suggests he should probably go back and listen to Dinkler III's fond ruminations on our carefully planned and heavily subsidized tourism economy.

Eventually this dispute between Perry's NO & Co. and LaToya's #CityOfYes is going to have to be mediated in Baton Rouge. Which is where Dinkler IV is aiming to position himself.  According to his website Dinkler The Youngerest is "inspired by President Bill Clinton’s words, 'Opportunity for All."  Good luck figuring out what that is supposed to mean.  In any case it's hard to imagine he's likely to side against the family business in any meaningful way.

Also in Columbus's column we read the names Aylin Maklansky and Aimee Adotto Freeman as potential legislative candidates.  I'm assuming she means they're both going for Abramson's seat.  Freeman is a business consultant and, I guess, a dog person, who is associated with the usual circle of upper crust New Orleans charitable non-profits including the Arts Council and this police booster organization. She also has an association with the Tulane business school which happens to be named for an A.B. Freeman. At the moment I don't know if there is any relation there. Maklansky was a candidate for City Council in District A last year. Her father owns some sort of clinic that he also wanted to be an Airbnb or something like that.

You know at one point, I was near certain that renowned affordable housing activist Stacy Head would be interested in one of these seats.  I wonder why we haven't heard anything out of her yet.

"Woo hoo"

Why do we not get an attribution for this quote?

The Starbucks proposed for a shopping center on South Claiborne Avenue in Central City got an extremely enthusiastic approval from the New Orleans City Council last week, allowing it to press forward quickly with its construction plans.


The Starbucks will be a separate building within the shopping center that takes up the 2800 block of South Claiborne, but will require the demolition of a small section of the structure to make room for it, plans submitted to the city show.

The project also required specific City Council approval for its drive-through, which was granted quicker than it takes to get a cup of coffee Thursday.

“This is a project I’ve been working on for a long time,” said City Councilwoman LaToya Cantrell.

The project received a “woo hoo” within the Council chambers as the motion to approve it passed unanimously.

It must have just echoed out from the walls. Also LaToya has been "working on it a long time" so I'd love to hear about what kind of tax break they're getting.  Not that it's too big a deal. I mean if you're gonna put a bunch of suburban box stores and drive through fast food somewhere, South Claiborne is just about the most appropriate place for it in the city.  And, I mean, sure, if you're gonna open a Starbucks, it's probably a good idea to have a drive-through anyway. It's not safe to just go in there and hang out.

The excitement is curious, though.  It's just a coffee shop. It's not like it's Trump Tower or anything.

Basically, Stacy called them whores

When I wrote about the strip club thing last week, I left this bit out because I wasn't 100 percent sure I heard her correctly.  But, yes, it turns out  Stacy Head did indeed imply that the strippers who showed up to testify against her attempt to put them out of a job were prostituting themselves.

City Councilwoman Stacy Head, who failed last week to persuade her colleagues to put a limit on the number of Bourbon Street strip clubs, is rarely shy about expressing her opinions on the council dais.

So it might have come as no surprise Thursday when she chided some of the two dozen dancers who spoke out against the proposed cap on the clubs for accepting a financial incentive from their employers in exchange for their opposition.

Head said two clubs under the Larry Flynt brand, Hustler and Barely Legal, offered to waive 10 so-called “house fees” for any dancer who showed up to oppose the cap. Dancers must pay such a fee to the clubs each time they perform on stage.

“That’s selling yourselves out,” she said.

You see this sort of thing pretty often. It's a common trope among conservative plutocrat types seeking to deligitimize popular opposition.  This is why we are told the March For Our Lives this weekend was secretly organized by "Soros" or some nefarious actor.  The other night I saw a lady on Twitter accuse Airbnb critics of shilling for  "the hotel industry." In New Orleans we hear often from the Stacy Heads of the world that council chambers have been packed with "paid protesters" over any number of issues.  It's a small glimpse at the contempt with which the politcal insiders and City Hall regulars regard anyone outside of their own social class. 

Stacy is an accute and often cartoonish example of this.  Last week, she suggested that policymakers should consider homeless New Orleanians as though they are of lesser "value" than other residents.  Clearly she has similar notions about the Bourbon Street dancers.  But while Head is particulary nasty, it's worth noting these attitudes are spread more widely than that. I dare say they hold a majority among our political class many of whom would be advised to reflect on their own actions before accusing others of "selling themselves out."

Stacy's hard cap went soft

This was an unusual city council debate. I would encourage everyone to watch the video when it becomes available.

The New Orleans City Council on Thursday (March 22) narrowly rejected a proposal that would cap Bourbon Street strip clubs and make them a permitted use in the street's six-block entertainment district, limiting the number to 12. The zoning changes were proposed after the council asked the City Planning Commission to study strip clubs in March 2016.

The vote on the proposal was 4-3 with council members Jason Williams, Nadine Ramsey, James Gray and Jared Brossett voting against it. Stacy Head, who authored the ordinance proposing the cap, Susan Guidry and LaToya Cantrell voted for it. After the vote, about two dozen dancers who sat through most of the six-hour meeting erupted in cheers.

I'm pretty sure this will come back up under the next council. As things are now, this vote opens the whole district up for unlimited strip club venues once an interim zoning provision expires in a few months.  The way this played out, one has to wonder why Stacy proposed this at all.  If she had just put forward the City Planning Commission's  recommended 14 venue "soft cap," it probably would have passed. This way she gets nothing.  Well, that is, she gets nothing but a slight boost in tough-on-vice political cred which she must be after for some reason.  What state legislative district does she live in?  Is she in Neil Abramson's term-limited House District? What is Stacy up to?

Some of the back and forth between Head and the public commenters was pretty dramatic. Both the T-P and Gambit accounts picked up on this one.

Dancers and club workers illustrated the impact of club closures — lost wages, increased risk of trafficking, and a trickle-down effect that extends to families and the tourism industry itself. BARE’s Lyn Archer said despite intentions and “no matter your political stance on this work, we are the people being hurt by this.”

Head asked attorney and dancer RJ Thompson why dancers aren’t fighting for workers’ comp in Baton Rouge at the state Legislature. “We don’t have time because we’re here fighting you,” Thompson said.

Head had a few other disingenuous misdirects to go along with that one. The most insulting one was her attempt to downplay what was happening by saying over and over that this is "just a land use issue." Jason Williams had to reestablish some of the context.

Head said her motion is “merely a land use matter” to reduce congestion of an “intense use” in the district; City Council President Jason Williams said despite the legitimate efforts of creating legislation “in a vacuum” over the last several years, those raids (“a complete waste of time”) are now inextricably linked to the issue of a club cap. “You didn’t do that,” he told Head. “But that is part of all of this now.”

And, of course, there is more than that to it. As the Gambit report also notes, the raids and the crackdown certainly go hand in hand with the strategy laid out in the mayor's "security plan" last year. Several commenters at the meeting also made reference to the hired gun lawyer the city brought in for the specific purpose of shuttering all of the strip clubs.  But Head was just being obtuse. I'm still not sure whether or not she even cared if this thing passed.

And that brings up another interesting aspect of all of this.  It's a rare sight to see the fate of a matter under this much public scrutiny actually decided during a live council debate. Ordinarily, everything is pretty much decided in advance of the meeting. But here we apparently had people making up their minds as they talked about it.  Nadine Ramsey said as much, in fact.  Actually, what she said was Jason Williams's comments about the raids changed her mind.  Gambit's is the only report that quotes him directly (above.) But NOLA.com gives a fuller description of what he was getting at and includes a link back to a story about the basis of his criticism.

Williams led the opposition to the motion, and criticized the New Orleans Police Department's treatment of dancers during state-led raids that uncovered illegal activity in the clubs. Williams said he was disturbed by reports of officers photographing dancers in their working attire and acting unprofessional, which he said was a poor use of manpower considering no one was arrested.

But there is more to it, which is why watching the video is helpful. Williams went on to describe police behavior during those raids as "unconstitutional" and "misogynistic" adding that they may have even endangered some of the dancers by exposing their identities in front of clients. Curiously, the Advocate summed all of this up as "perceived gaffes."

But Williams said he could not support it, given perceived gaffes by New Orleans police during the January club raids and because it would not apply to other businesses where human trafficking has been suspected, such as massage parlors. 

In any event, Nadine said Williams's objections helped change her to a No vote on the cap. The Mayor-elect, however, was unmoved.  Probably because she had no idea what they were actually voting on.

Mayor-elect LaToya Cantrell supported a cap, though she initially supported the “soft cap” of 14 before Head clarified that the motion supports a 12-club cap. District A Councilmember Susan Guidry also supported the cap.

Not that this stopped her from launching into a smarmy demagogic speech about what she seems to think the raids uncovered. It was as if she hadn't heard a thing Williams had said.  Dan Faust was there to point out some of the criticisms  of and subsequent backtracking by ATC and NOPD after the raids operation although if LaToya can't even read the motion she was about to vote on, she probably hasn't paid much attention to any of that either.

Oh and James Gray was good enough to vote the right way but not before chastising everybody in the room for having the temerity to show up and criticize him... as is so often his wont.   Can't say we'll miss that when the next mayor and council take over.  When they do, if the M/O ends up being as improvisational as today apparently was, we're in for a fun ride at least. 

Kind of a strategic retreat

Looks like this surveillance business was creating too much static for Mitch in the middle of his book tour.

The New Orleans City Council is expected to drop a controversial proposal that would have required every business with a liquor license to install security cameras linked to a government monitoring center.

City Councilwoman Stacy Head, who sponsored the ordinance at Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s request, will withdraw it and introduce a proposed ordinance that, she said, will only change which city department issues liquor licenses.

They aren't actually backing off, though. They're just falling back on subtler modes of coercion.

On Tuesday, the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board, which deals with those cases, signed consent decrees with two bars requiring installation of cameras “providing a live feed to the city’s Real Time Crime Center.”

That’s the city’s name for its new video monitoring center, which collects video feeds from cameras all over the city.

The affected bars are Chuck’s Sports Bar in the Central Business District and the Hangover Bar in the Seventh Ward.

“It does seem somewhat like an end-run around” the passage of a law, said Ethan Ellestad, director of the Music and Culture Coalition of New Orleans, which has campaigned against the surveillance ordinance.

“They can still put in a proviso that anyone who goes before the ABO board has to be part of that network,” he said.

Yeah, that's how they like to do it. 

Also there's plenty of stuff worth paying attention to on Thursday's agenda besides the ABO ordinance. Stacy Head wants to impose a "hard cap" on the number of strip clubs permitted on Bourbon Street (against the Planning Commission's recommendation.) Also there are some short term rental spot zoning requests, notably the former Zara's case, which, yeah, the Planning Commission recommends against that one too.

In the meantime keep an eye out for the surveillance ordinance, or something like it, to come back during the next council's term.  After they strongarm enough businesses into having the cameras anyway, everyone will be used to it by that point anyway.

The Winter Council

The lame duck City Council is decamping to a broom closet in an abandoned bunker somewhere across the river for a few months.  This will not be a vacation. As it turns out there are still a few items on certain outgoing councilmembers' "bucket lists" that will still need attending to.  If you are a member of the public interested in providing your input on any of these items, getting yourself over  to the hidey hole where your representatives are conducting their ostensibly public proceedings is only your first obstacle.  Five of the seven councilpersons are leaving office in May so, even if you can get your pleadings through to them, it's doubtful they're going to pay much attention. So good luck.

Here are a few items that might make their way onto the agenda. The first of these probably will have to wait until after the turnover... but, also, it might not.

• A consultant recently completed a survey of city employee wages and benefits. Their recommendations are intended to look encouraging at first glance. See, they want to give everybody a raise.
  

  New Orleans city government should raise its employees' pay by 10 percent, provide for annual merit raises and allow new hires to be offered more than the minimum salary for their positions, according to a report by a consulting firm hired by the city.
  
  The report, completed last month, argues that increases in the cost of living in New Orleans and the availability of higher wages in the private sector have made city jobs less appealing and harder to fill.
  
  The last widespread boosts in salaries for city employees came in 2008, meaning most have seen at best minor raises over the past decade, according to the report.

  And there's plenty of justification for doing just that. The report cites the rising costs of housing in New Orleans as well as a 500 percent increase in health care costs for city workers over the past decade.  Of course, that's a strange thing for the consultants to bring up. A ten percent raise doesn't begin to address that problem. And they aren't arguing for more generous health benefits. In fact, they're recommending sick leave be slashed.
  

  That policy gives workers 13 days of sick leave a year during their first five years and provides those with more than six years of service 15 days of sick leave annually and those with 16 or more years of service 20 days of sick leave each year. The report recommends all those figures be capped at 12 days of sick leave per year, to meet the regional average.

  This sort of bait-and-switch strategy is used against low wage workers all the time. Offer something small but attractive up front, take something important away on the back end.  It's the same logic behind the recently passed Republican tax cut plan which all but guarantees devastating cuts to Medicaid and Social Security. We've also seen it here.
  
  
  
  
  
  In this case, what City Council is most likely to use the report for is as an argument for cutting retirement benefits.  That's what it says way down at the bottom of that Advocate article.
  

  The report also recommends changes that would make city workers' retirement system less generous, noting that other governments in the area require workers to contribute more to their own pensions. The changes recommended are similar to those the city put in place for new hires starting next year.

  Slashing pensions has been Stacy Head's highest priority in her final year on the council.  Her false claim that the retirement system is in fiscal peril echo decades-long Republican lies in agitation against Social Security. Last spring she even attempted to jump the gun on the wage survey and pass the cuts before even seeing its recommendation. Last month they finally passed a scaled back version of the cuts that only affect more recent hires.  But this is still a swipe at the retirement security of a slightly younger cohort of workers.  Head hopes "the next council" will take it further. But there's no guarantee she won't try sooner given that it's harder for people go yell at her now.
  
  
  
  
• Nadine Ramsey is trying to do a favor for a former staff member's father. 



Metairie gastroenterologist Tamer Acikalin wants a zoning change for a Frenchmen Street residential property he owns that he says could one day become an urgent care clinic. The pillared apartment house with a second-floor front porch is two blocks from Washington Square in the Marigny and just down the street from some of the city's best-known live music venues.

Under the proposed zoning change, a medical clinic is just one of 21 commercial uses that would be expanded from its current zoning designation, which only allows day care facilities and small, owner-occupied bed and breakfasts as a commercial use. One of the possible new uses is likely to rile neighbors: Short-term rentals would be allowed year-round, not subject to the 90-day cap that the New Orleans City Council adopted when new regulations took effect April 1, 2017.

We're actually seeing a rash of these "spot-zoning" requests aimed at proliferating short term rentals, lately. One thing they all have in common is a vague plan for some sort of small business on a property that is clearly meant to be used as an Airbnb hotel. Many of them have specific instances of political favoritism in common too. This is one of many but it is in the news because of how obvious it is.


Acikalin is father of Aylin Acikalin Maklansky, Councilwoman Ramsey's legislative director who recently returned to her job after an unsuccessful run for the council seat Guidry is leaving. Acikalin said his daughter has no financial interest in the property. Campaign finance records show Tamer Acikalin contributed $5,810 to Ramsey's election efforts between 2015 and 2017.

Recall that, during the campaign, both Ramsey and Maklansky were beneficiaries of pro-Airbnb lobbying groups so this is a pretty easy gotcha story.  Expect more of them to come, though.



• Most urgent on the Winter Council agenda is the surveillance ordinance. 



The plan, proposed in January as part of Mayor Mitch Landrieu's $40 million public safety initiative, includes the adoption of a city ordinance that would require bars and restaurants across the city to install cameras on the outside of their buildings pointing into public areas. The ordinance, if approved by the New Orleans City Council, would also require those establishments to store the surveillance footage on a cloud-based government server to which law enforcement would have access.

"This ordinance would put the city's surveillance apparatus on steroids, subjecting New Orleanians to near-constant monitoring of their daily lives and stifling our vibrant public space - without meaningfully reducing crime," ACLU Louisiana interim executive director Jane Johnson said.

In addition to ACLU, the camera scheme has been criticized by the Orleans Independent Police Monitor citing “potential for mismanagement, poor information security, public record law compliance challenges and user abuse,”  and by the Music and Culture Coalition of New Orleans who released a review this week. MaCCNO's report concludes that the ordinance would constitute an unprecedented expansion of government surveillance powers that exists in no other U.S. city. The proposal has not been criticized by Councilmember (and incoming mayor) Cantrell, however. Her stated position is that the cameras are "a step in the right direction at the right time."

There is a vote scheduled for the coming Thursday over in the bunker.  If you have a hard time getting there, though, there is also a committee hearing set for this Wednesday at the very convenient for everyone time, I am sure, of 2 PM. They'll be on the 21st floor of an office tower at 1340 Poydras St.  Good luck figuring out how to get in there.  Maybe someone will think to install some cameras.

What is happening

Here's the other QOTD

A request to demolish two vacant homes in the St. Roch neighborhood turned into complaints about abuses of the city's short-term rental ordinance at a New Orleans City Council meeting Thursday.

Councilwoman Stacy Head, who supported the short-term rental ordinance when it passed last year, questioned whether the new rules are working or whether the city is allowing property owners to break them.

“I feel like I’ve been duped by this whole short-term rental bull,” Head said.

Stacy Head, welcome to #TheResistance, I guess. We kind of noticed something like this a few weeks ago when LaToya Cantrell took a more pro-STR than Stacy's at this council meeting.  But, well, only one of those two is currently running a campaign that has taken a fair amount of Airbnb money.  Guess which one. 

Never open anything up

So it turns out that those S&WB bills people have been complaining about recently were indeed the bullcrap we thought they were.

About 4,700 customers — roughly 3.5 percent of all S&WB accounts — were essentially charged double for the same month of service: once based on an estimate of how much water and sewer service they used and another based on an actual meter reading.

Officials do not yet know how much the overcharges amount to.

The S&WB often relies on estimates when determining how much to bill, something that Erin Burns, a spokeswoman for Mayor Mitch Landrieu, said is caused by “a shortage of meter reading personnel and a high turnover rate in the department,” which prevent the utility from having enough staff to read each meter every month.

For the thousands of customers affected by the overbilling, an estimated bill was entered into the system just before the meter was read, leading to a double bill, Burns said in an email.

That's one way to avoid a new stormwater fee, I guess.  Any way you can raise funds is good, though, because the costs do tend to expand over there.

NEW ORLEANS -- The Sewerage & Water Board could have saved millions of dollars if it had purchased a brand new turbine to power some of the city’s most important drainage pumps, rather than spending the last five years in a costly – and so far futile – effort to repair a 1920s-era piece of equipment that it purchased, used, more than 50 years ago.

That’s WWL-TV’s conclusion after reviewing a cost analysis by one of the Sewerage & Water Board’s consultants, along with dozens of contract and billing records from the ongoing refurbishment of nettlesome Turbine No. 4.

The contract kept getting loaded up with decisions to refurbish rather than replace components. The excuses for those decisions are looking less and less credible. And, as much as we hate to give credit to Stacy Head for anything, this is a pretty good line from her that works on multiple levels.

It’s clear that the board was caught off-guard almost immediately by the difficulties fixing Turbine No. 4. At a January 2013 committee meeting, then-deputy superintendent Madeline Fong Goddard told board members, “Turbine 4 was opened up by the contractor and found to be sadly very damaged and not easily repairable.”

To which Councilwoman Stacy Head, then a member of the S&WB, interjected, “Never open anything up!” and laughed.

Well the whole can of worms is open now. That's probably less good than it seems, though.  I get the impression that we're not on a path to weeding out the corruption and inefficiency so much just contracting the corruption and inefficiency out to Veolia.  They've already moving in over there. It's probably only a matter of time before a more formal relationship is established. That might depend on who the next mayor is. But it's difficult to tell what the current candidates might think about the question.

LaToya loves STRs

Imagine espousing a housing position so wrong that even of Stacy Head thinks you are off-base.   

City Councilwoman Stacy Head said the request on Laurel Street, particularly, takes two housing units off the long-term rental market and converts them into tourist housing. Head said she supported the legalization of short-term rentals in commercial areas, but did not intend to convert residential neighborhoods to commercial zoning to allow them to proliferate.

“This seems to be in conflict with your cry for more affordable housing,” Head said to Cantrell. She explained later, “I do not believe we should allow the creeping into neighborhoods that are otherwise residential by changing the zoning to commercial.”

The short-term rental issue should not be blamed for the city’s lack of affordable housing, Cantrell shot back. That, she said, was the result of intentional efforts by city leaders after Hurricane Katrina.

“Affordability and the crisis that we’re in in the city of New Orleans is not because of short-term rentals,” Cantrell replied. “It’s because the issue of housing was not a priority in the post-Katrina environment. Resources allocated for the city of New Orleans, millions in fact, were reallocated because there was sentiment coming from policymakers in this city that New Orleans was on the path of having too many affordable units.”

Should we try and puzzle out what LaToya means by that botched line about "policymakers" and "too many affordable units"?  It's not clear even she knows what she means. Cantrell, like all of the major candidates in this dumb JV election, is a herd animal. None of them is running for mayor to advance some grand cause. They're just here because they've risen far enough within their own social/civic spheres to get the sense that this might be their turn at the top. Sure, there are issues and stuff that voters might want to hear about. But the candidates exist at a remove from all of that so they rely on staff, and survey research, and friends and advisors to tell them what to say.

Not that that helps a whole heck of a lot. In the case above, we assume someone has told LaToya a "mistakes were made" version of the past decade of housing policy she and her allies have presided over. Sure, all we did was knock down public housing and  build a bunch of nice things for rich people but "the sentiment coming from policymakers" was that was the right thing to do.  It's an ironclad rule of establishment politics that it's fine to be continually wrong about everything so long as you are wrong for the right reasons. That is, so long as you are also the right people. In LaToya's circle, landlords and real estate developers are always the right people.

And that must be why she's still listening when the same right people are telling her short term rentals really aren't a problem.  Evidence to contrary abounds. We like to think we've done a decent job keeping track of that on this here website.  The Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative has been studying the local market since the passage of the local STR law and will present its findings on September 27.  That's a free event, if you're interested.

For what it's worth, Desiree Charbonnet who, make no mistake, is also an empty husk of a candidate grasping to say whatever words test the best among strategically significant demos, has published a contrasting position on STRs on her website under a big bold red heading

SHORT-TERM RENTALS CAN MAKE THINGS WORSE

Technological advances have produced a spike in short-term rentals (via AirBnB, VRBO, etc.), which can change the character of neighborhoods and remove affordable rental housing from the market. New Orleans is a city where 60% of residents rent, so the damaging effects are profound and make a citywide impact. In short, housing policy is not just about buildings; it’s about the very social fabric of our city. It’s also not just about new construction, but also about helping people stay in their neighborhoods.

Yes, that is poorly framed.  "Technological advances" aren't causing the problem.  The technology in question is just the internet. STRs are spiking and housing is unaffordable because we have an unhealthy economic system based on asset ownership and regulatory arbitrage rather than on sustainable, equitable wealth creation. The problem is that our elected representatives are deliberately enabling this. Having said that, Charbonnet is proposing to tie STR permits to homestead exemptions which is something City Council specifically voted not to do last year. It's not the most daring plan but it is something. So far it's the closest thing to a substantive conflict between two candidates on a critical issue so it's worth following as the public forums ramp up.

AirBnBucket List

Shorter Stacy: There aren't enough short term rentals in New Orleans.  Let's sell off what's left of our public housing units so we can make more.

At the heart of this latest dispute is whether HANO should be selling, rather than redeveloping, its small apartment buildings.

Head has said the sale of such sites to private developers would place them back on the tax rolls and bring more revenue to the city, while Fortner has said keeping them and renovating the buildings allows HANO to turn a profit over the long term at a time of declining federal funding for the agency.

It's ok, y'all. She's almost gone. That is to say, she's almost through with her council term which is one reason she's working so hard on her to-do list full of stuff that screws over poor people.  The other reason she's so serious about doing all that stuff is she probably wants to run for a state office sooner or later and is burnishing her "business friendly" bona fides to that end in the meantime.  But we'll worry about that later.

Bucket list

I think Stacy Head might be trolling municipal employees in addition to trying to steal their modest retirement savings.

NOMERS isn't in bad shape or in fiscal turmoil, this is just irresponsible policy. Councilwoman Head has even said that taking on pensions was "on her bucket list" before leaving the council.

In New Orleans, the average public employee pension is about $21,000 annually -- a modest amount that helps workers retire with dignity after putting in a career of service to our community. Councilwoman Head's proposal would make drastic cuts to our already modest pension, especially for employees with less than 10 years of service or future employees. An analysis by The Times-Picayune found that the average pension benefit for our public servants would be reduced almost $8,000 annually or $670 a month. That's a monthly rent payment, family grocery budget or mortgage.

You see, typically, a "bucket list" is something that a person who is comfortably retired has time and money to work on.... 

City Council Senioritis

The councilpersons are always cranky when they get this close to the end of the their terms.

Uproar over a public letter. A derisive rehashing of one City Council member’s allegedly callous attitude toward constituents. Charges that the same member allowed a corporation to influence some of the rules for advisers to the public agency that acts as its watchdog.

All of it characterized the explosive finale to Thursday's City Council meeting, which quashed any hope that the council’s two at-large members, Stacy Head and Jason Williams, might repair their fractured relationship.

Actually this time it's even weirder since we're having an election this fall but not turning over the offices until next spring.  You can see how stressful and confusing that might be for everybody. Anyway, they are snippy. 

But Thursday’s fight was particularly bitter, driven by Head’s recent comments to news outlets about her colleagues’ actions in recent weeks.

Her letter to the Uptown Messenger described “a vested interest by some to quietly move” the cost of consulting contracts out of the public’s view, so that “politicians and their donors get rich.”

She also railed against the council’s December decision to award new contracts to the three longtime consultants and said Williams, as chairman of the Utility Committee, “refused to review” offers from other firms.

In conversations with two newspaper reporters this week, she called Williams' and other members’ push to have the consultants weigh in on the guidelines that would help govern their actions akin to “the fox drafting the security plan for the henhouse.”

Of course that depends on who is considered the fox and who are the hens in this situation.  Head's concern is primarily with how the consultants are chosen and paid.  It's a legitimate complaint but she's mostly making it only because these contracts are in somebody else's patronage downline.

Meanwhile, there are folks who might consider the fox in this henhouse to be Entergy.. since that is, after all, the utility we're supposed to be regulating here. But Head appears to be working with them, actually.  

Williams called Head’s characterization problematic, considering that she claimed to have talked to Entergy about those same rules. When Head insisted that statement was a mistake made by Cheron Brylski, her political consultant, Williams pounced.

Oh dear, we've thrown poor Cheron Brylski under the bus again. You might remember her from such political moments as "Mayor Landrieu: Productive Asshole"  "The Leslie Jacobs Explosion" and, of course, this thing Williams mentions. 

“The same Cheron Brylski that was involved in council issues very recently, that became very racially charged? Is that your statement?” he asked, referring to an email Brylski sent in 2015 to two French Quarter neighborhood groups. That email, which was accidentally sent to local media, suggested that the mostly white groups should find black people to speak on their behalf and that the council was racially divided.

Of course, Brylski is always "involved in council issues." She's a political consultant. Jason knows who she is so, you know, the shocked shocked act is a bit much.  Besides, Stacy provided enough fodder for these broadsides on her own as Williams does go on to demonstrate. 

“I really thought that you evolved past blowing kisses at disenfranchised poor people,” Williams continued, referencing a kiss Head blew from the council dais a decade ago to people angered by the council’s vote to tear down several of the city’s public housing complexes.

Anyway, as fun as all of this is, it's also a little bit sad. Basically you've got councilmembers fighting over whether each is owned by Entergy or by the lawyers ostensibly in charge of regulating Entergy. It seems like, since both are true, it should be easy to find common ground here and everybody can go back to running his or her own racket.

"Kick me"

No idea what your councilmembers are actually squabbling about here. The action in question was already approved by citywide referendum in November.  It looks like they're just arguing over whose name goes on the ordinance. Or, I guess, over who gets "kicked" in the process.

All four of the council members who voted with Brossett said they came to the council meeting prepared to vote on the ordinances. Both Head and Guidry said they were led to believe the ordinances would go through committee. At one point, Head accused Brossett of using Thursday's meeting to "kick" Guidry and called him "horrifically unprofessional."

"There's still some subtle reason I haven't figured out that we're not going through" the normal process, Head said. "Let's assume it's a perfect ordinance. Why is it not going through committee when there are concerns articulated by your colleagues?"

Not sure why Guidry would even care all that much about credit since she's retiring anyway. As for Head, I think it's interesting that she cares so much about eh "normal process" here given that she ran ahead with her plan to gut city pensions before the legal review process was complete there. But that's a whole other can of worms. 

Stacy Head still hates poor people

After all this time, this is still what she's all about. 

New Orleans City Councilwoman Stacy Head is proposing changes that would make the city’s main pension plan less generous for new employees and those hired in the past 10 years — changes she said are necessary for the long-term viability of the system.

The changes would mean newer employees — who make up almost two-thirds of the workers enrolled in the New Orleans Municipal Employees’ Retirement System, or NOMERS — would accrue benefits at a slower rate and new hires would have to work longer before being vested in the system or becoming eligible for retirement.

The proposal also would either do away with cost-of-living adjustments for all retirees until the system is nearly fully funded or else require the city and employees to kick in extra money to fund those increases.

She's on her way out of office this year. This must be the goodbye kiss. 

Merry Christmas to the landlords

New Orleans, as you may know, has a bit of an affordable housing crisis.  Our political leaders thus far have responded by prioritizing the needs of developers, landlords, and, I guess, "the platforms" responsible for enabling short term rentals in neighborhoods where nobody is actually able to live anymore.

Their favorite policy tool has been the so-called "density bonus" recently championed by Latoya Cantrell and adopted into the CZO which allows developers to build nice things for rich people so long as they set aside a very small percentage of available units at reduced rents. We've written a bunch of times about how this is pretty much just a shell game sop to luxury developers.  So it's not too too surprising that our elected representatives are so enamored of it.

Once upon a time a similar policy was praised for making possible the development of the American Can Company into (mostly) luxury (but with a token amount of affordable) apartments.

Several other builders had tried to develop the American Can project but failed to come up with the necessary financing. Mr. Kabakoff used public-private partnerships to finance the deal. His first mortgage consists of $29 million in tax-exempt bonds from the State of Louisiana's private activity bond cap program. The program mandates that 20 percent of the housing units be set aside for low-income renters.

Pres has made this trick of diverting taxpayer subsidies into profits a specialty over the years. He didn't exactly invent this scam, though.  It has made Donald Trump very rich, for instance.

The way Donald J. Trump tells it, his first solo project as a real estate developer, the conversion of a faded railroad hotel on 42nd Street into the sleek, 30-story Grand Hyatt, was a triumph from the very beginning.

The hotel, Mr. Trump bragged in “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” his 1987 best seller, “was a hit from the first day. Gross operating profits now exceed $30 million a year.”

But that book, and numerous interviews over the years, make little mention of a crucial factor in getting the hotel built: an extraordinary 40-year tax break that has cost New York City $360 million to date in forgiven, or uncollected, taxes, with four years still to run, on a property that cost only $120 million to build in 1980.

The project set the pattern for Mr. Trump’s New York career: He used his father’s, and, later, his own, extensive political connections, and relied on a huge amount of assistance from the government and taxpayers in the form of tax breaks, grants and incentives to benefit the 15 buildings at the core of his Manhattan real estate empire

Our local representatives love Donald Trump.  Or at least they did before he got into politics.  In 2007, the City Council enthusiastically thumbsed-up a proposed Trump Tower development on Poydras Street.

The 1.6 million-square-foot tower, estimated to cost about $400 million, would fill most of the largely vacant block bounded by Poydras, Camp, Natchez and Magazine streets. It would be 716 feet high, plus a 126-foot spire, and would contain 734 luxury condominium and hotel units and a 715-space garage.

Florida developer Cliff Mowe said he hopes to break ground this summer on what would be Louisiana's tallest building. Construction is expected to take 28 months, putting completion in late 2009.

New York real estate magnate Donald Trump announced on Aug. 25, 2005, that he would join a team of Florida developers in building a 70-story tower in New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina hit four days later, but within two weeks Donald Trump Jr. said the developers would go ahead with the project.

Although financing has not been nailed down, Mowe has said several large lenders are interested in the project, in part because of Trump's involvement.

No one spoke against the proposed tower at the council meeting. The plans were approved 5-0 on the recommendation of Councilwoman Stacy Head, whose district includes the site. "This is Trump," Head told her colleagues in asking for approval. "Woo-hoo."

Woo-hoo, sure. Except by this time, the post-Katrina market for labor and materials was already souring Trump on this project. The 2008 financial crash is said to have killed it entirely. But, if you remember, this was a period during which federal recovery funding was causing New Orleans to "buck the trend" economically speaking.  Taxpayer money was pouring into the area. If only someone (looking at you, Ed Blakely) had offered Trump a sufficiently sized bucket of it, our skyline might be blessed with this jewel today.

Anyway so we never got Trump down here but we still had Pres Kabacoff and that was plenty, thank you very much. Pres hasn't risen quite as high as Trump has but he's done ok for himself in our small pond. His most recent project is even redirecting public money to Airbnb so it's nice to see him keep on the cutting edge like that.

Meanwhile, back at the Can Company, that tax exemption just expired.  You won't believe what happens next.

NEW ORLEANS -- Michael Esnault and his partner Anne Tucker have lived in the American Can Apartments building for the past six years, but they’ll soon be former tenants – through no choice of their own. They recently found a note taped to their door notifying them that they had until the end of December to vacate their apartment.

"(It’s) definitely a slap in the face," Esnault said. "I always paid the bills on time and everything else. What got me is the corporate greed."

Dozens of families are losing their leases at the Mid-City apartment building as the operators phase out all of their subsidized and low-income units. Esnault and Tucker are leasing one of the 53 units in the building set aside for low- and fixed-income families.

The American Can was built in part with government subsidies, including $29 million in tax-exempt bonds. Those bonds required the owner to keep 20 percent of the units for affordable housing for a minimum of 15 years.

That requirement expires at the end of January.

Those tenants are now losing their leases.

Where will these renters go now?  Well, you know, we're working on that. Just gotta get the right subsidy to the right millionaire first.

On Tuesday, the IDB voted to provide the project with a payment in lieu of taxes, or PILOT.  The PILOT allows the developers to pay $56,000 a year in taxes during construction, $160,000 a year once construction is complete, annual 2.5% elevations each year thereafter, and a $75,000 bump in 2025.

The IDB estimates that the PILOT will save about $6 million over the 12 years of the deal, while developers claim that the project will generate $29 million more in property taxes for the city over a 50-year period.

The development site is bounded by the Lafitte Greenway, Jefferson Davis Parkway, North Scott and Conti Streets.  In addition to the one and two bed room apartments, the mixed-use project will have ground floor retail and restaurants and parking spaces for 570 cars. The projected project cost is $66.5 million.

Entrepreneur Sydney Torres purchased the nine-acre site in 2015, and Edwards Communities has it under contract to purchase the site from Torres.  Our sources tell us that Torres plans to keep the front of the parcel closest to Bayou St. John for future development, while giving the back portion of the parcel to Edwards Communities for this project.

Edwards Communities secured city approval for the project in November and a density bonus after agreeing to include 14 affordable units in the project.

In the meantime, Merry Christmas to the evicted!  

We lost

Shortly after Mitch Landrieu delivered his second inaugural speech in 2014, I wrote a rather tl;dr-ish post about the direction the city was likely to take. The jokey introduction has gone stale. But if you skip through that, the rest of it is worth referring back to. I tried to address the worsening effect of economic inequality in New Orleans and the stark disconnect between those effects and the priorities of the city's political class. 

I bring it up today because, two and a half years later, we're still seeing the same tendencies. The most recent evidence of this can be found in the debacle last week at City Council over the short term rental question.  Just so you don't have to read through too much of it, what I tried to show in that post were the following points.

1) Affordable housing is being crowded out by asset investment opportunities.

But it's imprecise to say simply that the problem is we're looking to "transplants" to expand the tax base.  More to the point, we're looking to big money buyers (granted, mostly from out of town) to radically bid up housing prices.

But what was once a leisurely inspection has become, in some cases, a feeding frenzy. Agents now bring their clients in tow. Offers are sometimes discussed outside; agents describe offers being scribbled out on the hoods of cars.

Last week, one of the properties open on the tour was 1015 Arabella St. -- a double being rented out to tenants. By Friday morning, the listing agent, Lynne Ann Fowler of Latter and Blum, said the owner had received three offers and already accepted one that was "close" to the asking price of $375,000, although she said she couldn't say the exact offer while the contract is pending.

She said the house is in need of some renovation, depending on whether the new owners want to convert it to a single and live in it, or keep using it as rental property.

It's hard to imagine a sale like that going through solely for the purpose of maintaining an existing rental property.  New Orleans, particularly in its historic neighborhoods, is an investment now.  The wage earners and rent payers have to be moved out of the way in order for the asset traders to flourish.

This shouldn't come as a surprise. Renters and wage earners have become more or less structurally irrelevant people over the past 20 or 30 years. Going back as far as the late 1970s, as automation and globalization began to seriously affect the manufacturing sector of the economy, wages became uncoupled from productivity meaning a great deal of wealth could be produced while wages remained largely stagnant. Again, I'll refer you to that conversation between Lapham and Frank for some insight as to what happened next.

as long ago as 1985 or 1986, the money earned in the United States, the income earned from wages on one hand and income earned from rents which would be real estate, stocks, dividends and interest — together they’re considered rents. But the first time in the history of the United States, either in 1984 or 1985, that rentier income surpassed the income earned from wages. And we are developing right now a really, an extremely opulent rentier class. If you think of the profits that have been made in the stock market in the last 30 years and you think of the compound interest, that is why you now have apartments selling for $95 million. So we are getting a rentier class. There’s no question about that. The numbers are all there.

If you aren't a member of a highly specialized profession or some sort of asset speculator... in other words, if you're not a part of what Mitch Landrieu euphemistically calls the "knowledge economy" there really isn't much of a place for you.

2) The rise of the so-called "sharing economy" is not only a sign of the desperation that arises from this crowding out. It also facilitates the process. 

While it's fine for the mayor to act as the city's booster-in-chief, it's important to note that the proliferation of  "entrepreneurial innovation" he's celebrating can also be a sign of distress.

Some of these new companies are obviously helpful to the economy. But when you look at the kinds of businesses getting started, and who is starting them, it becomes clear that lots of entrepreneurship in the last few years has been symptomatic of our sick job market.

This is most especially a concern when it comes to the entrepreneurial activity that takes place within what is now known as the "sharing economy." 

A huge precondition for the sharing economy has been a depressed labor market, in which lots of people are trying to fill holes in their income by monetizing their stuff and their labor in creative ways. In many cases, people join the sharing economy because they've recently lost a full-time job and are piecing together income from several part-time gigs to replace it. In a few cases, it's because the pricing structure of the sharing economy made their old jobs less profitable. (Like full-time taxi drivers who have switched to Lyft or Uber.) In almost every case, what compels people to open up their homes and cars to complete strangers is money, not trust.

New Orleans does not have Uber or Lyft yet but it does produce a lot of action on Airbnb.  An extensive feature on Airbnb's local impact ran in the March issue of Antigravity.   While the service can seem like a godsend to marginalized homeowners struggling to keep up with bills, in the aggregate it's yet another constricting force acting on the housing market.

For one thing, it puts renters in New Orleans into direct competition for space with an endless churn of visitors able to pay $50 to $200 a night. For another, it subjects residential neighborhoods to wave after wave of super-short-term outsiders, a potent disruptive and destabilizing force in areas still fighting their way back to some semblance of stability. Tourists have no understanding of the neighborhoods they’re invading, and unlike longer-term residents, they have no incentive to get along with or respect those who live in the neighborhood. They’re here to party and enjoy themselves, and it’s in the Airbnb host’s economic interest to ensure they’re able to do so. On a NOLA.com article about the city’s ongoing failure to enforce the laws against illegal short-term rentals, one commenter said his experience of living next door to an illegal guesthouse was like “living next to a frat house.”

 3) Local political leaders turn a blind eye to these stresses focusing instead on the needs of the investor class justified by what they see as easy technocratic solutions to government revenue problems.

Also at issue, from the city's perspective, is the potential for lost revenue.  After all Airbnb is basically one big off-the-books hotel.   The city welcomed a near-record 9.28 million visitors last year. A key challenge for the mayor and his new council faced with a severe budget crisis is figuring a way to capture the highest possible revenues from the city's most vital industry. 

The hotel/motel tax hike is already meeting with significant static in the legislature. I can't help but wonder, then, if this might help explain the dramatic rise proposed for property taxes.  Think about it. The housing market in New Orleans is on fire right now.  A lot of the pricier properties are already part time second homes.  A lot of property owners are getting into the illegal short-term rental business.  It could be that the idea here is to pay off the consent decree and fire pensions by indirectly taxing this off-the-books activity.

If this is what they're thinking, I have to admit it's kind of ingenious.  Leaving the illegal rental market alone keeps the real estate market hot. This means more house flipping, less blight, and, as neighborhoods seek to cultivate more tourist-friendly amenities, it means more "vibrancy."  The city can reach its goal of 13 million annual visitors and not one extra cent in hotel taxes need be raised. It basically hits all of the Landrieu sweet spots and takes a fiscal load off the city's back in the process.

Of course that for whom, against whom question remains troublesome. Rents, utilities, and other fees continue to rise. "Old" New Orleanians will have to stretch their entrepreneurial acumen to its limits in order to keep up.

So what we have is a worsening situation for poor and working class New Orleanians exacerbated by a totally unresponsive political elite. Fast forward to last week's showdown over STR and here is what the Urban Conservancy's Dana Eness observed about that.

As I looked around the council chambers on Oct. 20, I tallied the thousands of dollars in parking fees paid and and work time sacrificed by people in the room, citizens who in good faith had prioritized dedicating several hours of their day to a public process, only to have legislation ramrodded through without any opportunity to review it in advance. Hard copies of the amendments to the recommendations were made available at the Council meeting — the first time the public had been allowed a look at them.

The citizens weren’t the only ones denied sufficient time to review the Administration’s amendments; the same was true for councilmembers, who got them shortly before the meeting.  Indeed, as the hearing got underway, Councilmember Susan Guidry’s staff was drafting an amendment that would have reinserted the owner-occupancy requirement for whole-house rentals. The hastily drawn amendment failed — as might be expected when bills are cobbled together at the eleventh hour. It’s unfair to everyone and undermines public confidence.

In the absence of transparency, we can only speculate about what drove Thursday’s outcome. Perhaps it was for expediency’s sake, to do something rather than nothing. Perhaps the council believes that whole houses constitute the bulk of short-term rental properties in New Orleans and if legalized, would pay for an enforcement program and generate city revenues. Perhaps it was a condition imposed by the booking platforms like Airbnb that hold the data that City Hall needs if rules are to be enforced effectively.

As Eness points out, there is zero transparency regarding the negotiations process between the city and "the platforms" these regulations apply to. But we do know the voices of "the platforms" were heard by councilmembers even if those of the public were not.  Guidry's homestead exemption amendment would have gone the furthest toward allaying the fears of residents that their neighborhoods would be scooped up by STR investment companies by the blockfull.  "The platforms" made it clear to councilmembers that was a non-starter. Guess who they listened to.

Head: there's no question having a homestead exemption is a good thing ... but it won't happen if we want to get platforms on board.

— The_GambitLIVE (@The_GambitLIVE) October 20, 2016

In exchange, The Platforms agree to share data with the city for enforcement purposes. At least that's what they say. Nobody actually trusts them to do that.  Maybe Ryan Berni does. Maybe.

Berni says the city has worked out a plan for Airbnb and other platforms to share their data through quarterly reports. Opponents are skeptical, as the industry has been reluctant to share data despite similar attempts in cities across the U.S. — and the city will be relying on four-month-old data in a city where STRs continue to mushroom. The companies are happy.

The companies are happy and that's what counts.  Well, also, LaToya is happy.

Cantrell: Made sure the neighborhood housing investment fund would get enough money (from platforms) to fund improvements

— Jeff Adelson (@jadelson) October 20, 2016

The Neighborhood Housing Investment Fund, in case you are wondering is LaToya's pet blight reduction project. 

Money from the fund has traditionally been used to pay for code enforcement, supporting city inspectors and attorney costs in addressing blighted structures around the city. The change the council made Thursday dedicates the fund to actual home improvements and affordable housing efforts. It would help owners pay to correct potential code violations, rather than fining them.

Councilwoman LaToya Cantrell authored the amendments to the NHIF ordinance.

"By updating the ordinance, we have two tremendous opportunities. First, we can begin to follow the law and use money as intended by voters ..." she said. "Second, we can use this opportunity to tie badly needed resources to affordable housing and special needs housing that are right now being identified in the (New Orleans Consolidated) Housing Plan.

The "affordable housing" language there is basically just platitudes. NHIF only touches that insofar as it funds the ongoing and thus far inconsequential process of developing a housing plan, though not necessarily any specific policy. What NHIF does mostly is help cover some of the cost of code enforcement.  That can be nice. But it doesn't do anything to alleviate the housing crisis. It does secure funding for Cantrell's project and the friends and supporters of hers who take an interest in its operation.  The Platforms did right by her. And now they can continue to do right by her father-in-law, no doubt.

And this brings us back to the point we made earlier this month when we figured we could see the writing on the wall.  What that writing says is they don't care about you. That's why we lost. We were always going to lose. We lost because the political process we think we are participating in does not regard us as stakeholders. The actual players are the elected decision makers, their wealthy friends and family, and the business interests affected by the policies they choose.  The rest of us are all just cannon fodder. 

Stacy gonna Stacy

The City Council has begun its annual series of hearings leading up to adoption of the 2017 municipal budget. The mayor's proposed operating budget is available for review via the city's website here.  The hearings schedule is available on the council's site. As usual there are several points of controversy contained within this document all of which will be argued over in council chambers this week for your entertainment.

One of the primary disputes involves the mayor's scheme to nearly double the number of traffic cameras around town.

Jeff Hebert, Landrieu's chief administrative officer, mentioned the additional safety cameras Wednesday (Oct. 26) during the first day of budget hearings for the city's 2017 spending plan. Revenue for traffic cameras is projected to increase nearly 50 percent next year to $24 million. Hebert said the city will see $5 million in new revenue after figuring in the $3 million cost of adding the new devices. 

Traffic cameras are one of the many measures by which New Orleans is one of the most regressive cities in the country. As far back as eight years ago other cities had already begun to abandon their experiment with the questionable practice of depending on traffic violations to fill budget holes.

When a law enforcement function is repurposed as a revenue generating scheme, an obvious conflict of interest arises. Which is how we find municipalities trying to trick people into violations, or partner with unscrupulous private contractors in order to squeeze money out of the citizenry. It has also been well documented that this sort of predatory behavior falls most severely on the poorest, often "ruining the lives" of those who cannot afford to pay up.

New Orleans, of course, is moving full steam ahead with its program. Because the expansion is the mayor's decision and not the council's, some councilmembers felt free to express their skepticism yesterday.  Not all of them cared to, of course.

Cantrell also asked Hebert for information on unpaid traffic camera tickets, with the idea that it could show lower-income drivers are more adversely affected.

"Speeders are disproportionately affected," Councilwoman Stacy Head interjected, expressing her support for the cameras.

 Never change, Stacy.

All we did was build nice things for rich people

When all you do is build nice things for rich people, you run the risk of creating a glut in the market for nice things for rich people.

That split between the high and low markets represents a key issue for the city. James Amdal, a senior fellow at the University of New Orleans' Transportation Institute who has studied the Warehouse District, said both the undersupply of lower-income housing and the oversupply of higher-end properties result from development patterns since Hurricane Katrina.

"Citywide, it seems as if affordable housing has become an absolutely critical in-demand commodity, and there just isn't any," Amdal said. "I think it dates to Katrina and post-Katrina and no one really understanding or knowing what needed to be done. Everyone decided that the low-hanging fruit was upper-middle, upper-class housing."

Not only did we focus on the upper end of the spectrum, we actually used funds designated for affordable housing development to do it.

We found short-term listings that appear to be in four developments subsidized with HOME Investment Partnership funds, one of several federal programs that fund affordable housing:

• Bienville Basin, on the site of the former Iberville public housing complex near the French Quarter
• Blue Plate Lofts, at the foot of Jefferson Davis Parkway in Gert Town
• The Muses Apartments in Central City
• A house at on Carondelet Street in Central City

Most of the listings were for an entire apartment.

This doesn’t mean that tourists are recovering from nights on Bourbon Street in low-income housing. The developments have a mix of market-rate apartments, affordable housing and, at Bienville Basin, public housing.

“My rent was $1,400 a month,” wrote Mark, an AirBnB host whose listing appears to be in Bienville Basin. “Let me know when that’s affordable.”

$1,400 is not affordable for anyone who actually lives here.  But it appears to be well below the price point at which the nice things for rich people are profitable for their management companies. In that Advocate article about the "cooling" of the rental market we find a Cotton Mill condo manager bellyaching that she recently had to take only $4,500 a month from a tenant.

Unfortunately it is this upper bound "crisis" and not the affordable housing problem that is likely to generate a policy response.  The market for nice things for rich people had been held afloat thanks to our gross public subsidy to the film production industry. It also appears to have benefited from the unrestrained encroachment of short term rentals.   One can easily envision policymakers acting to relieve the "glut" by either restoring the Hollywood South tax credit, further liberalizing STRs, or both.

As for helping the rest of us afford a place to live... well there really isn't much in the works.  The mayor's much praised affordable housing plan, for instance, is heavily dependent on so-called "inclusionary zoning" requirements.  But inclusionary zoning is an insidious and ineffective approach  based in trickle-down economic theory.  Basically it supposes the only way to build more affordable housing is to first build more nice things for rich people.

Inclusionary zoning is a fatally flawed program. It’s not just that it doesn’t produce enough units, or that the apartments it creates aren’t affordable, though both observations are undeniably true. The real problem with inclusionary zoning is that it marshals a multitude of rich people into places that are already experiencing gentrification. The result is a few new cheap apartments in neighborhoods that are suddenly and completely transformed.

Any political leader who asks us to believe in bullshit solutions like this isn't really trying to help. Instead they're looking for easy ways to appear to help which won't piss off their real friends.  Here's what happens when they actually try to help in ways that make their friends uncomfortable.

New Orleans City Councilwoman Stacy Head on Friday joined a small but growing crowd objecting to Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s plan to build a “low-barrier” homeless shelter in Central City and calling for a new location with more comprehensive services.

The low-barrier shelter concept, pitched as a cornerstone of the city’s 10-year plan to end homelessness, has evolved since it was first proposed more than a year ago.

Stacy and Latoya Cantrell (who also opposes the shelter) are worried because a charter school executive told them it's located too close to his territory.  So much for inclusionary zoning, in spirit, anyway. The homeless shelter doesn't do anything to subsidize or finance any nice new high end apartment developments so it's a no-go. We're trying to build and maintain a nice city for rich people to visit where nobody actually lives. The dip in the market for luxury housing stalls that a bit. But I'm sure the leadership team will come up with some way to help.