Residents shouldn't live here

The public services aren't designed with locals in mind anymore.

There’s also the fear this project — designed to appeal to downtown tourists — is using money that might have been spent on streetcar projects with greater benefits for struggling neighborhoods. For years, plans for a streetcar to run down St. Claude Avenue into the city’s older immigrant neighborhoods have been foiled.

“If the priorities are directed to the local resident and the local economy and not the tourist economy, then you strengthen your real city, and you keep it strong for tourism, versus creating a downtown that is increasingly like Disneyland,” said Roberta Brandes Gratz, a New York writer and urban critic who recently bought a house in New Orleans. “If tourism is your most important economic driver, you have a bankruptcy of ideas.”