A year later, New Orleans fights ‘planning fatigue’

New urbanists converged on the New Orleans area this fall for four more planning charrettes. One was a follow-up on an earlier charrette in St. Bernard Parish, to design a new town center. The others were part of the Unified New Orleans Plan for Recovery and Rebuilding (UNOP), a process intended to guide investment in infrastructure and other improvements throughout the city.
Goody, Clancy & Associates led planning for three districts: one containing the Central Business District, Warehouse District, and French Quarter; a second consisting of Gentilly and surrounding neighborhoods; and a third covering the Bywater/Marigny section. New urbanists from firms such as Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co., HDR, and HOK also worked at aiding the slowly reviving area.
“It was surreal how few people showed up at meetings this time,” says Ann Daigle, who has devoted herself to new urbanist rebuilding efforts in Louisiana and Mississippi for over a year. “We went from 800 to 1,200 in a meeting a few months ago down to eight to 12 these past weeks. The people of NOLA [shorthand for New Orleans, Louisiana] are totally burned out.”
Daigle summarized some of the progress as follows: The group in Gentilly focused on making sure the original plans were right, establishing a Neighborhood Planning/Resource Center, planning a town center, and creating a nonprofit community development corporation with land-banking capacity to redevelop vacant land. In other districts, discussions concentrated on overcoming sewer and water infrastructure problems, instituting mobility and parking management plans (including a parking benefit district), increasing the number of permanent residences, and enhancing transportation options (especially streetcars).
In the Central Business and Warehouse Districts, much of the attention centered on how to manage new infill building and its form and height, thus maintaining character and vastly improving the pedestrian experience. “We recommended the adoption of a form-based code with teeth, to improve the streetscapes and create predictable development,” Daigle says.
As residents seek higher ground and newcomers arrive, some areas are expected to do well. “The [French] Quarter and downtown are going to be strong in the future,” The Times-Picayune quoted David Dixon of Goody, Clancy as saying. Downtown neighborhoods, now home to about 4,000, could have more than 10,000 residents in a decade, he predicted. The Times-Picayune said roughly $80 million in tax incentives will be awarded by the state in December, setting off a housing boom that could produce 12,000 apartments in the city and the suburbs. Although residents joining in the planning sessions were reportedly committed and enthusiastic, many others suffered from what some called “planning fatigue.”