ALICE does actually live here anymore, for now

Almost half the city.

Almost half of New Orleans families don’t earn enough to meet their basic needs.

That’s a finding of a report due out Wednesday from the Louisiana Association of United Ways. Though other United Way affiliates have released similar statewide reports, it is the organization’s first comprehensive examination of poverty in Louisiana.

The study was compiled with the input of five national researchers and a 19-member Louisiana advisory committee, including a representative from the Data Center, a local nonprofit research group that periodically examines the effects of poverty in and around the city.

It zeroes in on families who earn incomes under the federal poverty level, as well as those who live above that threshold but do not earn enough to cover basic costs like housing and food.

It describes the latter group as “asset limited, income constrained, employed,” or ALICE for short. These families often don’t receive enough public and private financial assistance, researchers said.

Meanwhile, Mitch Landrieu is at BGR this morning trying to sell his police and fire tax millage and addressing other budgetary issues.

@mayorlandrieu gets chuckle out of standard joke: if people in this state didn’t get something for nothing, they didn’t get their fair share

— Steve Beatty (@beattylensnola) January 27, 2016

Ha ha ha! You are all parasites!  Very funny. Suffice to say nobody at the BGR breakfast is likely to be among the 47% described in that report. To them, the key to eliminating poverty has always been simply to remove the poor people.  The city is working on that right now, in fact.

A plan legalizing short-term rentals to visitors throughout the city but prohibiting residents from renting whole units in residential areas throughout the year gained the approval of the New Orleans City Planning Commission on Tuesday.

The commission voted 6-1 in favor of a set of rules that largely follow the recommendations of its staff.

Because the Planning Commission’s recommendations are not binding on the City Council, Tuesday’s vote represented simply one more step in the long-running debate over what place rentals through websites like AirBnB have in New Orleans.

After council members debate and approve their own version of the document, it will go back to the City Planning Commission for another vote. After getting that approval, it’ll head back to the council for final approval.

Council has discretion to remove the whole unit ban amendment and there's little doubt they will do that. Better to have a city full of revenue generating "units" than actual citizens with needs to serve, right?