New New Orleans

Oddly pretty much the same as the old New Orleans.

Seven vacant floors in the 1250 Poydras St. office tower will be converted into a 194-room Hyatt House hotel, a project that will consume the largest contiguous premium office space available for lease in the city, brokers on the deal announced Friday (Oct. 10).

The 11th through 17th floors in the middle of the 24-story tower will be converted to a hotel operated by Select Hotels Group LLC, a Hyatt affiliate, according to a news release from Robert Hand, president of Louisiana Commercial Realty, and Maria McLellan, Gulf States Real Estate Services LLC associate broker.

The knock on "old" pre-Katrina New Orleans, for those of you old enough to remember that far back, was that there wasn't anything going on downtown except for just hotels, just hotels, and more on the way.   And this was bad because hotels were dead end employment for most people and so most of us were kind of living month to month and the city couldn't afford things like schools and roads and services and such.

Now we live in the "new" New Orleans which is supposedly better.  Although I can't see why, exactly.  As you can see above, they're still turning everything downtown into hotels.  They're also turning all the houses into hotels so I guess that helps solve some of that problem of people living month to month. Who can afford to?  Are schools and roads and services any better? That depends on who you ask.

My working theory as to why no one notices the "old" and "new" cities are pretty much the same is that no one actually lives here at all anymore. We were all evacuated without our knowledge.. probably during Isaac while the power was still out.