"Has attempted"

Is that what they've been doing?

This year, Louisiana state legislators could consider bills that could bring tighter regulation and enforcement to the state’s short-term rental industry.

New Orleans housing advocates say the proposed bills are a step in the right direction in controlling an industry they claim negatively impacts housing stock and affordability for residents by taking homes and apartments off the long-term market and renting them to tourists.

For nearly a decade, the city of New Orleans has attempted to regulate the short-term rental industry through a myriad of local ordinances. The regulations, which have largely focused on short-term rentals in residential neighborhoods, apply to properties that are listed on platforms like Airbnb and VRBO. Airbnb and short-term rental operators have struck back, repeatedly challenging the city’s permitting rules in court, and New Orleans City Council President JP Morrell has subsequently threatened to ban short-term rentals altogether.

As someone who has watched closely each of these "attempts," I guess it's marginally fair to call them attempts "to regulate." But that's not the same as saying they have been in any way good faith attempts at limiting or even mitigating the harm STR rent seeking has done to life in the city. Rather, the city has simply continued to tweak at Mitch Landrieu's original framework for legitimizing (and drawing revenue from) the practice of converting houses to hotels that has gutted New Orleans's most culturally significant neighborhoods during the period of hyper-exploitation some have cynically termed a "recovery" from Hurricane Katrina. 

 

Predictably, this strategy tended to leave people unsatisfied. So much so that, occasionally, City Council has been moved to take on the appearance of trying to do something about it. They never get it right, though. Now state lawmakers are trying their hand at it.  The above article references bills by Barbara Carpenter, Royce Duplessis and Stephanie Hilferty. Carpenter's bill is intended to grant municipalities clearer authority to impose regulations. Royce's bill would allow neighbors to sue operators of unlicensed STRs in their area. Hilferty's bill raises the maximum tax rate that the city can collect.

 

Royce's is the most aggressive here. According to this article, there are as many as 3100 unlicensed STRs currently operating in New Orleans. But JP Morrell keeps promising city council will affect an outright ban on STRs in Orleans Parish someday.  Should we hold our breath? Or do we have bigger worries on the horizon?  According to that same article, for example. 

At the same time, there are signs that demand for rooms — whether in short term rentals or traditional hotels — has been softening. As of last week, there had been about 13.6% fewer short term rental bookings during Jazz Fest than there were by the same time last year, according to AirDNA. 

Tourism groups are expecting a drop-off in hotel stays as well. New Orleans and Co. is expecting hotel occupancy to be between 72% and 89% each night during Jazz Fest this year, based on a survey of hotels that collectively have about 26,000 rooms in and around downtown and the French Quarter. Last year, the occupancy rates were between about 84% and 95%. Hotel bookings were up during Mardi Gras, when occupancy reached 95%. But at the same time, short term rental units were booked for about 8.5% fewer nights, according to AirDNA.

Usually when we talk about Airbnb, the immediate problem is nobody actually lives here anymore.  Now, come to find out, nobody actually tourisms here anymore either. 

Over the rusty rainbow bridge right into Galt's Gulch

Oh no! A Bywater hotel project ran into some minor pushback from the neighborhood. What will we do when all the real estate vampires good entrepreneurs are driven away by the negativity of the pesky residents? Who will "create and build" all the STR hotels for destination weddings then?

In an email to council members early Friday, Fuselier said the city has "rigged the process against developers," and blamed neighborhood groups for being "manipulative" and driving economic development from the city.

"All of our good entrepreneurs and people that aspire to create and build leave. People that want to do business here leave. They are forced to shut down or not even try, and we are left with these negative types that don’t really add much to the equation," Fuselier wrote.

Anyway, what he's mad about here is City Council told him he could not build his hotel 4 feet taller than he originally said he would. Also he is still going to build the hotel. He's not actually being driven away anywhere.

Fitting way for all of this to end

Over a decade of struggle to protect what's left of New Orleans's neighborhoods from having the life sucked out of them by Airbnb; all of the research, the planning commission studies, the overheated social media debate, the marathon city council meetings, the good times, the bad times, the shit times; is about to be brought to an abrupt end on Monday in the state legislature. 

Just as cities and parishes across Louisiana such as New Orleans, Lafayette, and St. Tammany Parish have been ramping up their enforcement of short-term rentals, HB 591 would make AirBnB immune to important oversight. Rep. Lyon’s bill, which will be heard in House Commerce Committee Monday morning, would destroy local government’s abilities to enforce city regulations, which are critical to ensure bad actors cannot continue to illegally operate short-term rentals in our neighborhoods.

Jeff Landry says he wants the city to "operate like Charleston." Charleston is one of the fastest gentrifying cities in America, thanks, in large part, to the conversion of neighborhoods into clusters of vacation rentals. 

New Orleans, as we all know, has already been bled nearly to death by the phenomenon. And, yet, every turn in the long saga has left us with some hope that we'd finally get our local electeds to listen to us even a little bit. The most recent twist found a judge (after an extended delay) finally upholding the current version of our not quite restrictive enough ordinances. But since then, nothing has happened because 1) the administration has neither the capacity nor the inclination to enforce the rules and 2) the landlords are appealing the ruling anyway. In the meantime, it's back to business as usual.  Nobody actually lives here. The rent is too damn high. And homes continue to become hotels while city leadership looks the other way.  

And now comes Marrero Democrat Rodney Lyons with the Deus Ex Machina, a bill that finally takes the entire question off of the desk of anyone in local government.  You can bet that they're all hoping Lyons's bill passes for that reason alone. It makes their lives a lot easier if all they have to do is say they feel bad that you got evicted and no one expects them to do anything about it anymore.

The rent is too damn high

The median individual income in New Orleans is about $27,000.   That almost gets you somewhere to live comfortably... but not quite. 

NEW ORLEANS (WVUE) - A new report released by the real estate marketplace website Zillow says people who want to rent a home in New Orleans need to bring in over $64,000 a year.

The information was released in a January 2024 report from Zillow.

The “income to afford rent” is a new statistic published by Zillow Research. It measures the minimum household income needed to afford typical rent in metro areas across the country.

"Typical rent," according to this Zillow survey in New Orleans is $1600.  Can the typical New Orleanian actually afford that?  Not really, but that isn't who we waste our housing stock on anymore. It's too valuable for that. Which is why the court battle over, even the very mild ("reasonable" in their telling) City Council restrictions on short term rentals, is never going to end. 

Lemelle's ruling is not a guarantee the new rules will survive, however, since plaintiffs' lawyer Dawn Wheelahan said she will appeal. But it will allow Mayor LaToya Cantrell's administration to once again ramp up enforcement. The rules have been suspended over the last five months since Lemelle granted the plaintiffs, who are largely out-of-state owners of short-term rentals, a temporary injunction.

The last appellate ruling that struck down the earlier law came two years after the district court's initial ruling.

This isn't to say the city is any particular hurry to resume enforcement in the meantime. There's too much money at stake for landlords. They won't say it that way, of course. Instead they'll say gobbledygook. 

The city's next steps were not clear as of Wednesday afternoon.

"The Department of Safety and Permits is currently working with the Law Department to understand the full implications of the judgment and chart a path forward. The department will be releasing additional guidance for the public on enforcement and licensing very soon," spokesperson John Lawson said.

The court-ordered halt on enforcement has spurred a rise in non-permitted rentals in residential areas, where they outnumbered those with permits by about six to one earlier this month. Council members JP Morrell and Joe Giarrusso urged the administration to quickly resume enforcement.

Just gonna drag their feet until the next appeal garners a new injunction. Then nobody has to do anything until the next ruling. And even then maybe not.  

In the meantime, the rent is too damn high.

Not In Freddie's Backyard

It's difficult to know where, in New Orleans, Freddie King even wants people to be able to afford their rent.  We already know he doesn't want them in the parts of the city he's reserved for tourists in their Airnbnbs. Now, come to find out, he doesn't want them moving to the outskirts either. At least, not too close to the gated community he lives in, anyway. 

The intensifying fight has been brewing since the spring of 2022, when Zhang’s design team submitted its development proposal to the Planning Commission for the 17-acre wooded plot Zhang acquired the previous year. The land, while undeveloped, is already zoned to allow for multifamily development, but public hearings are still required as part of the permitting process.

English Turn residents, whose ranks include some notable names in politics and business, came out in force against the project at the first meeting in August 2022. King then moved to freeze the permitting process by introducing the interim zoning district, which is considered an emergency measure to strike zoning rules in any geographical area and replace them with temporary rules.

In this case, the measure prohibited multifamily development to allow the Planning Commission to study the impacts the development would have on drainage, roads and emergency services. 

King removed his name from the motion and chose not to vote on it to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. However, he did vote to uphold the measure in subsequent votes and he drafted the final ordinance implementing the temporary construction ban, which was approved by the council in March 2023.

Also, speaking of the STR rules, we had been expecting an "imminent" ruling from the judge considering the most recent version of the regulations. (The version that Freddie already torpedoed with his loophole.) But that was in December. And still nothing. Maybe the judge is waiting until after Jazzfest.

The best bet is nothing will fundamentally change

It's been over a decade.That's a whole lot of holding out hope that our political leadership plans to do something about the exploitative violence of short term rental proliferation as soon as "the data comes in" or "the stakeholders"have their say, or a judge tells them what to do.

It's not clear when Lemelle might rule, or how he might come down. But more changes for the city's rules could be ahead. City Council leaders have threatened to pass an outright ban on residential short-term rentals if the latest law is ruled unconstitutional.

An ordinance to impose a ban was introduced by the council’s at-large members, Helena Moreno and JP Morrell, in September, within a week of Lemelle's restraining order. It has been repeatedly deferred as Lemelle has presided over hearings over the fall and winter.

The council members have said little about the proposal since introducing it. They declined comment for this article.

Blossom and others want more clarity on what comes next.

“They threatened to do this really big thing and haven’t said anything since they threatened to do it — or promised to do it, depending on who you are — and nobody knows what to expect,” said Blossom, who supports the ban. “Are they going to follow through? Are they going to back down?”

The "really big thing" should have happened 15 years ago.  There comes a time when we have to understand these politicians all work for the landlords. If we want something big to happen, we aren't going to have their help getting it done.

Still pretty far from getting it right

This could be the week we get a ruling on the latest legal challenge to the latest attempt by City Council to rein in the plague of short term rentals on our city where nobody actually lives. We keep saying the only remedy for this is a full ban on these in our neighborhoods. When we say that we mean a full ban on the residentially zoned AND commercially zoned parts of the neighborhoods.  Which means we've got a long way to go with all of this. But it does like we're about to get one step closer. 

In September, U.S. District Court Judge Ivan Lemelle suspended the city’s regulatory system governing STRs. As a result, there are essentially no rules governing the industry while the city awaits Lemelle’s decision on a suit filed by the industry in May. Although the judge hasn't explicitly said which way he's leaning, his suspension of the rules, apparent skepticism of the compromise and a lack of movement on the issue since then has opponents of the industry increasingly convinced he'll strike them down. Lemelle is expected to make a decision during a Nov. 2 hearing.

I don't care for the way John Stanton frames things in that article. In lines like this one, he buys into a bullshit myth that the app-i-fied STR business is merely a noble purpose corrupted. 

What originally started as a gig economy style way to temporarily rent out a spare bedroom has turned into a multi-billion-dollar, global industry dominated by large corporations.

He also goes heavy into flourishes about the aesthetic consequences of STRs, "predatory packs of bachelor and bachelorette parties," and so on. And while that's unpleasant, it's just a symptom of the more fundamental illness. A community is being destroyed for the benefit of capital. 

This "gig economy" Stanton seems neutral about is just a new name for an old process. STRs, rideshares, delivery apps, all of these arbitrage businesses that turn workers into independent contractors or demand that people commodify their private living space just to get by, all of this is just the same logical progression of unfettered capitalism we've always seen. The alienated subjects of this regime have always been vulnerable to more intrusive and efficient extraction of value from their time, their bodies, their privacy. The "innovative technology" here is really just a means of circumventing existing rules protecting us from these intrusions.  This is why we've always needed to band together and work out ways to protect ourselves. That's democracy.  And so we need new rules to keep the beast in check.  Hopefully we can still get there.

Or maybe we won't.  Democracy is hard to accomplish but easy to subvert.  It often comes down to identifying the most venal or willfully ignorant political power brokers and buying them off; sometimes with bribes, but also with bullshit if they're stupid enough. 

The one major exception is sales tax collections, which have been below projections in the second half of this year. Cantrell’s budget anticipates a slight decrease in sales tax collections, about $3 million, next year from what was budgeted this year. During her speech, Cantrell appeared to blame the shortfall, in part, on the council’s attempts to rein in short-term rentals, on which the city collects taxes. Cantrell has repeatedly expressed frustration with recent council-backed restrictions on the industry, saying in September that she felt the city’s original short-term rental law — passed in 2016 and criticized as being too lax — “got it right.”

From the looks of things we're still years away from getting it right. Maybe by that time there will still be some city left to save. But it's slipping away fast. 

Commercial STRs in the queue now

After a decade of dealing with this, we have reached the point now where City Councilmembers can no longer pretend they do not understand the problem. But they can still pretend they are trying to do something about it. Until they don't. 

The New Orleans City Council on Thursday took another step to rein in short-term rental permits in commercial areas, passing a temporary ban along some busy corridors abutting residential neighborhoods.

The motion, which passed unanimously, aims to close a loophole that critics say lets investors build what are essentially hotel suites next door to full-time residents. It prohibits renewal for a more than one quarter of the New Orleans' 1,200 commercial short-term permits, although permitting officials said they will make exceptions for those issued within the past six months.

It's the same process as what is happening now with residential STRs.  The new regs will inevitably grandfather in everything that currently exists and create new language by which the problem can continue to expand even as councilmembers claim to be "reining it in." Then in another couple of years we will "discover" that the new system is still bad and tweak it some more.. but grandfather in the next batch, of course. Repeat forever. Or at least until nobody actually lives here. 

A parade of picture books

So I'm on Day 10 of COVID protocols today.  According to the medical science practitioners I've consulted this means that I'm basically, pretty much, almost, okay-ish.  I know I'm among the last people on Earth to have encountered it at this point but it's been an experience. Even when you have all the shots and stuff, this is not a fun thing to get. There's a couple days of knock-you-on-your-ass fever followed by a lot of sniffling and coughing. Then you just don't have any energy for a few days. And finally, when you think it's almost through, there's a knock-you-on-your-ass migraine that sends you back to bed for a day.  In the meantime, also, your spouse tests positive and begins a similar cycle so you can sing this in a round if you like. 

The other thing that happens, inevitably, is Mardi Gras comes along right in the middle of all this. That's been disappointing for us. We were hoping this year would get us back into something like our pre-COVID pattern of cooking and hosting friends on (at least some) parade nights.  But we're not going to be able to do that now.  In a way, though, this is what Carnival is about; understanding we are all subjects to an impenetrable chaos and adjusting accordingly.  And that's what I've been doing.  Stepping out when and where I can to catch whatever vibe is there and then begging off to recover for the coming marathon.  I feel like that is paying off.  I'm definitely better now than I was. And medical science says by this point I'm probably not contagious anymore either so I'm trying to trust that as well.  Cautiously, though. 

Last night I went out by myself with the chair, the camera, and a couple of diet cokes.  They pull a sign at the front of this parade that says, "Carnival Begins When Babylon Rolls" so, really, it's as if I hadn't missed anything. 

Babylon's floats always look amazing. Their theme this year was Wonders of the World or some such. I think this float was the Hanging Gardens. 

People don't like to hear this but the Chaos floats also always look good. Sure, their content can go in some unpleasant directions. This year there was a Hunter Biden laptop float, a float that depicted Paul Pelosi drunk driving, and a particularly racist float about Ron DeSantis sending immigrants to New York.  On the other hand, when they come off the right wing cable news schtick and do something local, they can nail it. 

This one, for example, was about local developer Joe Jaeger and the various troubled properties he currently holds, including the Jung Hotel, the defunct Poland Ave Naval Station, and, of course the crumbling Plaza Tower. 

The linked article above says the Plaza Tower is now up for sale. 

NEW ORLEANS (WVUE) - Developer Joe Jaeger has decided to give up efforts to bring one of New Orleans’ tallest buildings back into commerce, opting instead to try selling the deteriorating Plaza Tower, a City of New Orleans spokesman confirmed Tuesday night (Feb. 14).

Jaeger told the New Orleans Advocate he was “disappointed” to be giving up on the 44-story tower at 1001 Howard Ave. But Jaeger has owned the vacant skyscraper since 2014 with little progress and come under fire as it has fallen into a hazardous state of disrepair.

Jaeger has enlisted the real estate advisory and brokerage firm HREC (Hospitality Real Estate Counselors) to help find a buyer for the property, though no asking price has yet been listed.

A spokesman for Mayor LaToya Cantrell said City Hall hailed Jaeger’s decision and was eager to find a new steward for the property.

“The city is eager to be a co-investor with any development team that can bring this potentially catalytic project back into commerce, including Mr. Jaeger,” city spokesman John Lawson told Fox 8. “What the city has made clear is that we will not continue to let the property languish.”

The city still can't wait to "co-invest."  I'm sure we're all very confident in that prospect. It's sad to see the city use that language, though. Because it is true that whatever transaction takes place will involve a lot of public money.  In a better world, that would mean the public should have a real stake in how that property is used and for whose benefit. What the Cantrell spokespeople actually mean, though, is they are happy to just give our money away to help their rich friends do land deals. 

With the protective netting shored up, Jaeger’s real estate agent Lenny Wormser says he’s confident of a sale soon.

“If you take advantage of the tax credit, you could almost buy the building for free because of tax credits of up to $25 or $30 million,” said Lenny Wormser, with HREC Investments.

You could get it for free! What are you waiting for?  Okay well, what would you do with it? Let's ask the "experts."  Or maybe let's not ask them because, Jesus! 

Real estate experts say the building could be a natural for Air BnBs, especially since the city has been encountering resistance from residential areas that don’t want them in their neighborhoods.

“It’s got the best views in the city of New Orleans because there’s a five-story height limit in the warehouse district. No one will ever block those views and you have the Superdome,” said Wormser.

The Downtown Development District is eager to see a new buyer come in and restore this long-vacant property and rejuvenate a section of the CBD that needs a lift by utilizing new incentives which are now before congress.

“We’re working with legislators in hopes of Congress passing a ‘revitalizing downtown bill,’ which would provide tax credits for these developments,” said DDD Public Policy Director Alexis Kyman.

Downtown real estate is hot, with several new buildings recently constructed and rapidly filling up.

With state and federal tax credits amounting to nearly 40% of construction costs, Wormser is confident that a new buyer can put together a package that would help restore this long-blighted property and make it an asset in a section of the CBD that they believe is ripe for redevelopment.

Trapolin says Air BnB development could be a big part of the Plaza Tower’s future. He says the return on investment for such properties is nearly double what you can get if you rebuild as apartments.

Terrific, more public subsidies for these guys.  Also the specific thing we are putting our money in to help them do is make "nearly double" what they would make building housing while turning downtown New Orleans into a tourist sacrifice zone. 

The huge impact of the so-called sharing economy on the tourism sector is currently a well-recognized reality [29,30,31,32]. Beyond the effect on other activities (such as automobile transport or tourist guide services), the phenomenon with the highest economic, social, and spatial impact doubtless corresponds to the rapid and massive expansion of housing rentals for use by tourists supplied via online platforms (Airbnb, HomeAway, Housetrip, etc). Indeed, it can be stated that it has become the decisive phenomenon in the functional transformation of central zones of the world’s major cities, which have shifted from being residential and commercial to becoming spaces devoted to tourist lodgings with higher intensity depending on the tourist attractions present in each city. 

The fundamental moral issue here, as always, is a city belongs to its people. There is no section of it that we are obligated to sacrifice to rent seeking leeches just so that they can turn it into a theme park. This is especially germane when public money is subsidizing the development.  There has to be public benefit.  Downtown is a neighborhood. The French Quarter is a neighborhood.  Residents come first in neighborhoods.  If you want Disneyworld, go to Disneyworld.

There's a clear line of division happening here between people who want to live in a healthy community and the monsters who want to suck the profits out of the land.  After Mardi Gras is over, the people  who style themselves our "representatives" on the City Council will, once again, consider the city's regulatory regime around these issues.  Let's all watch which side of that division they choose to place themselves on. Sounds exciting. 

Anyway, where were we?  Oh yeah, it's Mardi Gras and we're trying to watch some parades. When I planted my chair and sat my pathetic COVID ridden grandpa self down last night, I wasn't sure how long I'd be there. It's chaos weather season now and the temperature just dropped 30 degrees overnight. When that happens they always called for rain.  I was afraid Irma Thomas might be forced to sing the hits while riding in the Muses shoe.  Turns out, though, she wasn't. 

The rain did come, though.  But it was polite enough to wait until after we found out who this year's Dead Rock Star was.  (It was Jam Master Jay) After that I figured I could go on in and rest. 

Before that, though, I was delighted to watch a parade about picture books. 

This is something of an area of expertise for me. Would you like to see a thread of favorite picture books of 2021 curated by me?  What about one from 2022 that is even longer?  The point is, I read a lot of these. Some of the classic titles riffed on by Muses are among my favorites as well. Here's Mo Willems's famous Pigeon, for example. 

The Very Hungry Councilpillar, here, is supposed to be the City Council "eating into" the mayor's authority over city budget and staffing matters. Pretty clever.

I don't care for the way Muses lets its business class MSNBC brain get in the way of having an actual thought sometimes. This take on 'The Day The Crayons Quit' (really good book, by the way) got into some embarrassing "Third Way" can't we all be purple nonsense. 

But, it's the little things that you still have to appreciate. I like the "#LookAtThisFuckingFloat" touch on this roadwork float. 

All in all, pretty neat.  And even though I'm not going at it hard, it's still possible to catch a bit of a vibe out there. Tonight I'm going to try and approximate the normal rituals and make a pot of jambalaya before walking out.  We'll see how it goes.

Jaeger vs Sonder

They've been fighting for a while over Jaeger's decision to back out of leases he'd granted them on some of his hotels.  It's worse now, though, because (according to Jaeger's new lawsuit) Sonder has also ruined the Jung. Apparently even the visionaries have difficulty predicting sometimes. 

It seemed like an ideal arrangement. At the time, Sonder New Orleans’ general manager Peter Bowen referred to Jaeger as a “visionary.”

Four years later, and after dozens of scathing online reviews, the deal has soured.

In a lawsuit filed last week, Jaeger asserts that Sonder has damaged the Jung’s reputation and value, costing him untold millions of dollars in lost revenue, by failing to address critiques on the Sonder website describing dirty guest rooms, soiled linens, stained furniture and public safety issues, including gun battles on the property.

Anyway so some of the worst people in New Orleans are fighting over the scraps of the mess they've left us again. Nothing new, there. 

And since this is a story about Sonder, we should mention also that, yes, we are aware the city council is about fail once again to effectively rein in short term rentals.  So brace yourselves to watch those rip through the neighborhoods one more time. It's the only thing that can happen anymore. Capital is like water in our gilded age town. Unbounded, it finds its own level and wipes people out in the flood.  Nothing new there, either. 

On the other hand, today's story does offer us a new insight as to the effect STRs have on hotels. 

While it’s too soon to draw conclusions about the specifics in either court case, industry analysts say the disputes illustrate the challenges that can arise when hotel owners and short-term rental operators try to marry their interests amid a changing New Orleans tourism landscape.

"This points to some of the pitfalls of these arrangements and also for the need to have stricter regulations of short-term rental operators around safety codes," said Lenny Wormser, executive vice president of HREC Investment Advisors.

The problem, Wormser said, is that platforms such as Sonder do not have the on-site staff of trained employees who can tend to guests expecting an experience similar to that of a hotel.

"Short-term rental people really do not pay attention to the guest services, the guest satisfaction as much as they should," he said. "You potentially end up with a degradation of the property and after three or four years; nobody wants to stay there."

Turns out short term rentals not only make neighborhoods shittier by turning apartments into poorly maintained hotel rooms, they also make hotels shittier by turning them into poorly maintained apartments.  Neat.

Hello, and welcome to a fabulous New Year of blogging yellowly

Unfortunately this new year is still among the 2020s which, as we all know, are categorically bad. Anyway, I know I've been saying it is time to get the Yellow Blog back into running shape for a while and I know that every time Twitter starts to die, it seems like that is the time to crank it back up over here. But I really do mean it. Maybe this will finally be the thing that does it. 

Twitter CEO Elon Musk has confirmed that the character limit for tweets will increase from 280 to 4,000 characters early next month.

The feature, which was first proposed in December, is one of a number of changes to the social media platform that the tech billionaire plans to roll out over the coming months after purchasing it for $44 billion last October.

The increase in character length will be only the second time in Twitter’s 17-year history that it has changed the limit, having previously boosted the original 140 limit to 280 in 2017.

As the big social media sites have absorbed and siloed off the whole internet over the course of the past decade, so has Twitter eaten up more and more of my blog posts. That's mostly because I am incredibly lazy and it's easy to just tweet a half-baked thought out and let it go. But, when I'm doing it right, a blog post shouldn't be longer than one or two tweets anyway. Ideally, this is where the half-baked thoughts are supposed to go. 

But, also, this is supposed to be where I put stuff that I want to remember later. And a chronological, taggable, searchable web log of annotated bookmarks is far better for that purpose than the increasingly unreliable instant gratification machine currently being dismantled by a chaotic billionaire.  And if the tweet stretches out to blog post length anyway, (I just checked. So far this post isn't even over 2,000 characters.) it might as well be posted over here instead.  So this time, we mean it. We're gonna try and put the stuff that happens this year on the Yellow Blog so that it doesn't all blow by in a confusing haze this time. Besides, 2023 makes 20 years of posting here so we need to have a nice round archival number. 

I think what we'll do for a while is try to get at least one post up every day or so that collects some of those annotated bookmarks I mentioned. There are a couple of drafts of longer form writing that have been lingering for a while which I would like to finish but let's wade back into this a step at a time.

With that in mind, here is today's stuff I wrote down so I might remember it later. 

The Louisiana Democrats will need to find their own loser candidate for governor instead of borrowing a Republican loser

Late last year, there was a parlor game discussion going around trying to parse whether Dem-aligned power brokers and/or centrist establishment media would rally around a Bill Cassidy campaign for Governor in 2023. Cassidy is a "weird dude" and a perpetual darling of the Advocate editorial page. But that's not exactly an unassailable coalition to ride up against the Jeff Landry juggernaut. The last reporting we've seen has Landry wielding a $3 million war chest plus the official endorsement of the state Republican Party and multiple Super PACs all of which multiplies his fundraising capacity many times over. Anyway, Cassidy decided it wasn't worth it. Much better to sit around in the World's Greatest Deliberative Body doing nothing forever than to take on that headache. His fellow Senator John Kennedy (although he theoretically might have posed a stronger challenge to Landry) reached a similar conclusion last week.

When Bill said he wouldn't run, all of that speculation about Democrats and media picking a favorite Republican shifted over to Lt. Governor Billy Nungesser. For a long time it seemed like Billy and Jeff deserved each other.  For example, we know they both have a problem with librarians. Landry is on a typical "anti-woke" crusade to burn them all while Billy is retaliating against them for blowing the whistle on his corruption. Heck, since the day they were elected to their current positions, we've had them neck and neck in a pool to see which of the two would be the first one indicted and whose scandal would be the stupidest.  Maybe this is just a sign of the times, since despite the fact that each has had his share of doozies over this term, neither has yet landed in jail. Guess we should have bet the over.

And like any pair of like alpha dunces vying for the same space, Jeff and Billy clearly do not like each other.  Nungesser hasn't been shy about saying so. In December, Nungesser said that he had to run against Landry if Kennedy didn't because "Jeff is a bad person." That's was after a long summer of scrambling for endorsements and pre-announcing that he was planning to announce a candidacy.  

And yet, today, Billy says, nevermind all that. 

“But the worst pandemic in our lifetime and a series of devastating storms leaves me with unfinished business to bring tourism back to its peak performance, especially for the near 250,000 families who rely on this industry for their livelihoods. For that reason, and after much thought and prayer, I have decided to seek re-election to the Office of Lt. Governor"

Those devastating storms and the pandemic did not happen just this last month, though.  So who knows what really got Billy to back down? The upshot is the Democrats no longer have an easy way to just quietly sit out a Governor's election they had clearly been planning to just quietly sit out.  Can't wait to see what they come up with. They don't seem to be generating a lot of excitement these days, that's for sure. 

Ad-hoc garbage service

This Sunday morning, we were stunned to see a Richard's Disposal truck picking up on our block. Turns out they're dealing with a "backlog" maybe? What is going on here?

In a statement Monday night, Richard said the company is addressing the backlog with 70 additional personnel, pulling from crews in Baton Rouge and Jackson, Miss. Richard said he and the company "look forward to working cooperatively with the city council, mayor and all of city government to address the market conditions and other circumstances that affect timely trash collection,” according to the statement.

The statement did not address the administration's decision to turn over some routes to different contractors. 

Those "other contractors on some routes" is confusing. Apparently the city is juggling the routes that contractually belong to Richards among Waste Pro and IV Waste, the companies who recently took over Metro's territory. Now they're encroaching on Richards bit by bit as well. But it all seems to be happening according more to whim than a comprehensible scheme. 

Richard’s contract expires in March, 2024, though the city can terminate it for cause or "convenience," which essentially means it can be ended at the city's discretion. Officials have previously said they want to rebid the contract this year, but they have not laid out a time frame. 

Asked how long he expects his company to supplement Richard’s, Torres said officials had advised him “to be prepared to do it until they put it out to bid.”

Meanwhile, they're just making it up as they go. And paying a premium for it. 

My FNBC jury duty notice was sadly lost in the mail

 I didn't even get invited to the tailgate party.  Anyway, the trial is kicking off. 

A jury was seated Monday in the federal bank fraud trial of First NBC Bank founder Ashton Ryan, Jr., as lawyers readied for what is expected to be a weekslong trial probing the actions of Ryan, other executives and bank borrowers ahead of the institution's stunning 2017 collapse.

I have said many times there is probably a good book someone could put together centered around this bank collapse that might tell a broad story about the post-Katrina era of New Orleans politics, real estate, education, and non-profit corruption.  I don't really see this trial telling that whole story but... I may have liked to take a look at this list.

Lawyers involved in the case have said the prosecution's witness list initially was between 100 and 200, though it will call far fewer over the next few weeks. Witnesses are likely to include at least some of those who have taken guilty pleas in the case, including Gregory St. Angelo, the bank's former top lawyer.

Speaking of post-Katrina failures and corruption...

This is part of a series the T-P has been running about "changing streets" or some such. I think the idea here is to frame the massive displacement and dispossession New Orleanians have endured as just "inevitable progress" or whatever. But some of this stuff you can't gloss over. 

According to statistics from the New Orleans Data Center, since 2000, the area encompassing the Marigny, Bywater, St. Claude and St. Roch neighborhoods has gone from 61% Black and 32% White to 17% Black and 72% White. The number of households with annual income over $100,000 a year rose from 3% to 19%.

The article trots out familiar apologists CW Cannon and Rich Campanella to sigh and shrug but at least Cashauna Hill is here to point out that these aren't just natural forces at work. They are deliberate policy choices.  

Many of those pushed out crossed St. Claude Avenue, where the process continues today, said Cashauna Hill, executive director of the Louisiana Fair Housing Action Center. 

Hill said population changes and demographic shifts are often inevitable, and said opposing gentrification does not mean opposing investment.

The problem, she said, is that the city’s leaders have consistently favored policies that encourage gentrification — pouring millions into Crescent Park and the Rampart-St. Claude streetcar line and failing to rein in short-term rentals — while neglecting policies that would prevent it — primarily funding affordable housing.

No need to catalog all of the atrocities right now. But I will point out that the City Planning Commission is once again this month rolling out yet another round of STR regulation that looks on track to once again favor wealth over residents.  We'll catch up on that later. But seeing this picture of where our neighborhoods are today, reminded me of this remark from Mitch Landrieu when he took office as mayor. 

In August, when Mayor Landrieu announced his plan for spending New Orleans’ hard-won recovery dollars he warned a famously tradition-bound city that the time had come for change. “It’s especially important that we stop thinking about rebuilding the city we were and start creating the city we want to become,” he said, echoing his inaugural address.

This is the city we chose to become.  

When the "cyberattack" eats your homework

Amazing story from over the weekend. Let's see if we can sum it up in under 4,000 characters. I think we can. 

So, to start with a cop shot a dog. Apparently this was not the first dog this cop shot either. Which is why the owners of the dog that was shot (the second dog) requested the Public Integrity Bureau file on the first shooting as documentation for their lawsuit against the city. The city agreed to hand over the document. Except  WHOOPS it turns out the city cannot actually produce it because it is locked away in the Iron Mountain. 

Document storage company Iron Mountain is withholding hundreds of boxes of files it is storing for the city of New Orleans because of an ongoing financial dispute with Mayor LaToya Cantrell's administration, a City Hall spokesman confirms.

So, according to this report, the city hands over "hundreds of boxes" of public records (which departments and types of records is unknown although clearly NOPD is one) to a private contractor who can, apparently, hold them up for ransom in the (seemingly inevitable) event that the city falls behind on its bill.  That's very interesting! We'd love to know more about that situation. But, WHOOPS guess what. 

But there is no record of a contract to store old paper files for the NOPD or any other department. Iron Mountain’s local administrator, Robert Leamann, spoke to a reporter in early December and declined to provide information about the company’s scope of services for the city. He also said at the time he was unaware of a dispute with the city or the subpoena. After being sent a copy of the court records, he referred subsequent requests for comment to a corporate email address, which did not respond to multiple emails.

The company’s local attorneys, Kellen Matthew and Kathleen Cronin, also failed to respond to emails seeking comment.

Joseph could not say why the city purchasing office could not locate a contract with the company, but noted that all contracts and purchase orders contained in the city's BuySpeed and AFIN databases were lost in a 2019 cyber attack.

Oh man that "cyberattack" sure did a number on public records, huh. Man that is a shame that nobody can get anything from those databases. Unless, somebody... looks it it up and gives it to them... wait.. what? 

What?

Here are Buyspeed purchase orders the city pulled for @misaacstein last year. https://t.co/jffDInLBzN https://t.co/KuGGmE7HWD

— Charles Maldonado (@Maldonado_CB) January 9, 2023

Sometimes the cyber attacks and sometimes it doesn't, I guess. Just a mystery we'll never fully get a grip on. I wonder if it is going to attack those unwritten garbage contracts next.

Keep Doing What You're Doing

Honestly, I have no idea what Saints fans are so upset about this week. They're all ready to fire Dennis Allen after one season as Head Coach even though that one season was the greatest of his entire NFL career to date. In three prior seasons with the Raiders, the dude had never won more than 4 games. This year he won three whole games more than that. That's a 75 percent improvement! 

I'm never clear on what it is Saints fans are really after these days. We already won football in 2009 so there's no need to stress over that anymore. From that point until the time when the brutal criminal enterprise that is the NFL collapses under the weight of its own contradictions,  I just want to see as many interesting things happen as possible. A lot of interesting things happened to the Saints in 2022.  We listed some of them here. Whether those things are "good" or "bad" is really a matter of taste. 

All pro football teams are pretty evenly matched talentwise. Most games are decided according to a combination of dumb luck and which team is the least injured that week. Most of the jawing about whose fault that is or is not is just how fans have fun. NFL fans are basically conspiracy theory hobbyists constructing grand bullshit theories to draw certainties out of what is essentially unknowable. You feel a lot better about it all once you understand this.  Not everybody wins the Superbowl every year. Most teams, in fact, do not! Hopefully fans of the teams who do not don't see this as a complete waste of their time. How sad, that would be if they did. 

Anyway, I can't have strong feelings about Dennis Allen one way or the other.  He seems like a pretty boring middle-management guy. That's probably why he's risen to this particular point of mediocrity.  I definitely don't think the Saints got the most out of their offensive players this year. That seemed like a coaching issue to me. But, again, I'm just spinning theories like anybody else there. Whatever they do, I hope they don't bring those awful black helmets back.  I don't think those helped matters one bit.

Actually, the consequences are very much intended

Despite the Planning Commission's 6-2 vote against, there is little reason to believe that City Council won't turn around and just approve this "accessory dwelling" scheme anyway. No doubt, someone will argue with a straight face that this has something to do with "affordable housing" that seems to be what Kathleen Lunn is saying here.

Commissioner Kathleen Lunn voted for Wednesday's accessory dwelling proposal, while acknowledging it would lead to “unintended consequences” involving short-term rentals. She said zoning laws throttle multifamily development to an “outrageous” degree; only about 5% of New Orleans' land is zoned for multifamily housing, according to a Planning Commission staff report.

“There is no question that we need to incrementally begin to address how this city serves people who actually do live and work here,” Lunn said.

Now I know we all love to hear them "incrementally begin to address" something. But this argument doesn't make any sense.  The housing crisis in New Orleans is not merely a supply problem caused by restrictive zoning. It's a structural problem of a real estate market dominated by asset speculation, corporate power, and a relentless profit incentive that runs counter to the principle of housing as a human right. 

In that context the only possible purpose of this proposal is to create more STRs. 

Staff recommended banning short-term rentals in accessory units. But Commissioner Robert Steeg said he feared the ban would be on paper only, given the Cantrell administration’s failure to enforce short-term rental regulations. Even the accessory units dedicated to long-term tenants would do little to address the affordable housing crisis, as most would require new construction, Steeg said.

“That’s going to lead to construction costs, and that’s going to lead developers - or individuals - to rent at the highest rates they can rent for,” Steeg said.

This is not an affordable housing measure. It is a plan to allow the growing STR market to exploit new territory as New Orleans returns to "normal" now that we've been told to stop caring about the pandemic. And for the Cantrell administration, "normal" means maximizing profits for tourism and real estate investors. The "unintended consequences" are very much the intended consequences.

Will we ever Make It Right?

We have to say it's a remarkable trip the City of New Orleans has been on with short term rentals for the better part of the last decade only to end up right back where we started. We've been through years and years of hearings, hotly debated regulations that don't work, hotly debated revisions to those regulations that continue to not work, at one point we even decided to go the whole nine and turn enforcement responsibility over to an industry profiteer.  A whole lot of things have happened. But also nothing has changed.  This article says it's "inexplicable" but is it?  

With New Orleans' spring tourism season in full swing, the Cantrell administration’s stated plan to crack down on illegal short-term rentals is inexplicably stalled, leaving scofflaw operators to freely list unpermitted rentals on Airbnb and other online booking platforms.

Pinning down just how many unpermitted rentals are available is nigh impossible, but data provided by the technology firm Granicus, combined with City Hall's short-term rental registry, suggests they outnumber legitimate ones at least 3 to 1.

There's probably a very simple explanation, actually. Helena Moreno seems pretty close to getting it right here. 

Council member Helena Moreno said she is baffled by the administration’s flagging enforcement efforts. 

 “With the lack of enforcement and slow-walking of accountability measures, it makes me wonder whether this is purposeful,” Moreno said.

It's hard not to think that. Otherwise, it would be difficult to explain why the city would be leaving so much money on the table. As Moreno also points out, the city has somehow never managed to give anyone a straight answer as to how much money it actually collects in fees and fines under the current STR enforcement regime. Strange behavior for an administration that has been otherwise diligent in chasing down drivers ticketed by its robots or shutting down any street parade or music venue not able to pay the premium fees. We know the city wants to collect its money.  It's just particular about who actually has to pay. 

Now I'm not honestly recommending that any normal person with actual things to do tries this, but, for those who really must, you can view last Wednesday's meeting of the city revenue estimating conference here.  Watching these meetings one gets a (rather grim) feel for what this administration's ideas are about the city's economy and who it is supposed to serve. For example, during a discussion on employment numbers, Gilbert Montano briefly references the "Great Resignation" to signal his sympathy with the "people don't want to work" myth popular among bosses these days. (Actually the labor participation rate is nearly back to pre-pandemic status now. But that isn't going to stop the ownership class from demanding we continue to shred what's left of the social safety net just in case any workers out there feel even the slightest hope.) At the REC, the Cantrell administration generally sound like they are the corporate board of a big hotel. Almost all of the metrics highlighted in their presentation are based on how well the tourism business is going; how many visitors fly in and out, how many hotel rooms are occupied, etc.  The first time I saw LaToya Cantrell speak publicly about short term rentals her comments were already very much shaped by a hospitality management mindset. Even while she assented to the point that they may be raising housing costs, she basically looked past that to assert that New Orleans is a "destination city" and that STRs are a source of revenue.

But Cantrell is "the mayor right now" and somehow all that revenue isn't finding its way into city coffers. Property values are up, rents are way way way up,  but according to city projections, property tax revenue is down slightly.  At the meeting, much of the discussion about that centered on assessor Erroll Williams. In September, Williams granted across the board breaks to property owners following Hurricane Ida.  The fact that Williams's office has apparently granted some invalid corporate exemptions was also mentioned. 

Near the end of 2020, three local government agencies denied tax breaks for planned improvements to the Folgers coffee plants in New Orleans East. But only now, more than a year later, has the assessor put the properties onto the tax rolls, making the company liable for $5.1 million in real estate levies.

Assessor Erroll Williams blames the Louisiana Department of Economic Development for the delay. That agency blames Williams.

That T-P story details circular arguments from the assessor and from LED about who is supposed to inform whom about ITEP denials. But, I dunno, I think one thing an assessor might do in a case like this  is call somebody and ask?

Williams said his office was following its standard practice: Don't put properties on the rolls while their applications for tax breaks are still pending. He said his office asked the state about Folgers in February because the state database did not yet show the tax breaks were denied and he had received no formal paperwork from any agency saying a decision on the breaks had been made.

"This office hasn’t gotten a letter from the School Board, city of New Orleans or the Sheriff’s Office that they’ve decided to vote the contract down, so I can’t put a taxpayer on the rolls based on what I read in the newspaper," Williams said.

The status was not changed to “denied” until March, at which point Williams said his staff began working to put the properties on the tax rolls.

The state agency said it “does not notify local taxing authorities about the actions of local government entities involved in the ITEP application review process. Questions about when and how the exemption is applied at the local level are best directed to each local taxing authority.”

Hard to believe these people can't all get together and talk one way or another. This just isn't that big a town.  Especially now that nobody actually lives here. Who can afford to, anyway?

Anyway, not to give the REC any more work to do but it turns out there are other places to dig for lost property tax money if they're feeling hard up. 

In total, Make It Right owes $14,972.81 in back taxes and fines, which are added to a property’s tax bill once they become delinquent. Most of that debt was accumulated in 2021, when the foundation failed to pay taxes on any one of its properties. And It’s possible that number will grow even higher for unpaid 2022 taxes, which are due today, March 31. 

According to the city’s online tax records database, the foundation owes $9,493 in 2022 property taxes. But The Lens was unable to confirm that the foundation has not paid that down. It appears that the city’s digital property tax records haven’t been updated to show whether property owners have yet paid their 2022 taxes. Officials did not respond to questions about the group’s 2022 property taxes.

Or maybe this is another thing where they've got to wait on Erroll to update the spreadsheet. 

One last point about the REC. Montano et al are still being extremely cautious with their use of the American Rescue Plan dollars by projecting it out over the course of a five year hypothetical revenue gap instead of applying it toward the addressing the city's numerous critical human services and infrastructure needs. (Notice how they are not shy about throwing that money at police as fast as they can, however.)  Back in August, we wrote more about how this administration's ideological conservatism informs its approach to budgeting.   On Wednesday, the projections we saw did not account for the next tranche of ARP dollars promised to cities because there was still talk in Washington about clawing those funds back in the next spending authorization.  As of this writing, though, it looks like that money is still coming.

Under the emerging deal, Mr. Romney, said, most of the $10 billion would be repurposed from the $1.9 trillion pandemic law Democrats muscled through without Republican support last March. But direct funds for state and local governments would likely not be touched, after Democrats balked at this money being clawed back. Mr. Romney said negotiators had discussed taking back some funding from a program that allowed states to give grants to local businesses.

That's pretty good news. But it could be better.  The way it looks right now the primary benefit of the federal bailout is it allows the city to keep letting wealthy property owners slide on their responsibility at the current rate. Without it, they'd still do that, of course. But they'd have to crack down even harder on the poor than they currently do to make up the difference.

Nobody actually lives here

 Happy Holidays

Erath took over the business from the previous owners after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 with a pledge to keep the shop open. And he kept that promise, keeping the store open for the last 16 years. However, as time progressed, Erath says that less people are walking the French Quarter.

"We're totally dependent on tourists. Over the years, fewer and fewer locals because fewer and fewer residents in the French Quarter," Erath said.

Erath's fondest memories are seeing people reminiscence when they enter the shop for a visit.

"Most gratifying thing is year after year, people coming in with their kids. We have adults in here saying they come with their grandparents," Erath said.

Erath is encouraging people if they would like a Santa's Quarters ornament to do so before Christmas before inventory runs out.   

The other night there was a forum featuring the two candidates competing in the city council runoff for  District C. This district includes Algiers, Bywater, and the French Quarter so naturally the short term rental plague is an issue.

Speaking to a crowded room at the Omni Royal Orleans Hotel on St. Louis Street, the two District C candidates agreed that Mayor LaToya Cantrell's administration has not adequately enforced city laws aimed at curbing the rentals and keeping noise at bearable levels in the district. 

Bridges said she would use the council's power over the city's budget to compel Cantrell to do so. Neighbors also need to bring their complaints to City Hall, she added.

"I can hold public hearings from here to Timbuktu, but unless I have the community behind me, nothing will be changed," she said.

King said he would require the city's code enforcement department to regularly update the council on its operations. He would also allocate money for more code enforcement officers. "Every month, they need to give us an update on what they are doing," he said. 

But the pair disagreed on what changes to existing laws were needed.

"I believe in a capitalistic society, and I think you should have short-term rentals in commercial areas," said King. Specifically, the retail and entertainment strip that faces the Mississippi River in the quarter would be ideal for AirBnB listings, he said. 

Even at this late stage in the process, where the damage done and the need for action are plainly evident, our politicians are capable only of maintaining the status quo or backsliding.  Neither of those answers is acceptable.

The problem now is not, as Bridges asserts, that the law is being poorly enforced. The problem is with the law itself.  We went into greater detail about this at the time the regulations were passed, but to summarize, the types of STR licenses it creates and the way those licenses are tied to zoning, actually allows..  a lot of high density short term rentals in a lot of  places a layperson might assume are "residential neighborhoods."  Also, the real heads will recall that because the City Council decided not to freeze permits for the few months time between the passage of the law and the date it went into effect, the gold rush on irrevocable permits during that time have left us with a large number of STRs that are now grandfathered in.  So any current councilmember or candidate who won't commit now to a new and stricter STR ordinance, is not serious about limiting STRs. 

That, of course, means none of them is serious about it.  Instead we have self-described believers in "a capitalistic society" like King who not only doesn't seem to know the current law already allows STRs in commercial zones but also doesn't seem to know how capitalism works.  Real estate speculators haven't been turning the Seventh Ward and Treme into blocks and blocks of de-facto hotels because they've been barred from the French Quarter. They're doing it because that's where they can get the highest return on their initial investment. That isn't going to stop unless we stop it.  But from the looks of things the next District C councilperson won't be in much of a hurry to do that. 

Update: I typed up this little blurb about District C candidates before I saw that this week's Gambit has a long feature story on the state of STR enforcement.  There are comments from current and future councilmembers as well as some people in the mayor's administration. The article looks at how other cities in the US and around the world are dealing with the problem and hints at the reasons some of those solutions might or might not apply here. Also, there is this. 

Only a few months after the new regulations went into effect, the pandemic struck New Orleans. With travel restricted amid stay-at-home orders, the bottom fell out of the STR industry around the world, making it difficult to fully understand the impact the city’s new regulations have had. Housing groups, like JPNSI, have been focused more on fighting evictions during the pandemic, but they certainly are keeping an eye on the STR issue, particularly as tourism builds back up in New Orleans.

“Through 2020, we saw a decrease in license registrations for new short-term rentals, and that’s been creeping back up through 2021,” says Russell Moran, JPNSI’s program and operations manager. “But I think one of the things that we did see is as cities were in lockdown, folks who operate short-term rentals were actually then renting those apartments to tenants and converting them to long-term tenants.”

But that trend is already reversing as Covid restrictions have eased, Moran says. 

"Sadly, now we’ve started to see in eviction court, landlords evicting tenants so they can return to short-term rentals,” Moran says. “[Landlords] aren’t outright coming to say that — we have tenants who have called us and said specifically that my landlord is putting me through the eviction process for whatever reasons but has made it clear that they’re going back to short-term rentals.”

The first of the month is coming again next week...

The first of the month is coming again

There is one every month.  The next one is going to be a bloodbath.  

Courts across the country are reopening, but during the  pandemic lockdowns I spent more than a year watching landlords try to evict tenants in virtual hearings. These hearings went on, even with a federal eviction moratorium in place, one that is scheduled to end next month. 

I’d estimate that in about a quarter of the hearings I watched, the tenants  kept  freezing or lagging due to poor internet connections. Tenants without reliable internet access had to go to the courthouse in person and wait to argue their case in front of the court’s computer. Every day, poor people who were  behind on rent and didn’t  have internet access had to attend court in-person, during a pandemic, so they could  join a Zoom call and potentially be kicked out of their homes. Many of them didn’t even have a lawyer to help them through the hearing.

Next week in New Orleans is qualifying week for the upcoming municipal elections.  Rest assured not a single person filing to run for any of these offices gives a shit about the people who are about to be pushed out of the way so that real estate developers can run their "renaissance" such as the one Tyler Bridges is breathlessly celebrating in this article.  You can, however, scan this article up and down to find the names of the people who will be funding those campaigns. What is it they want permission to build and maintain? Game changers.

“The game changer was short-term rentals,” said Mohamed “Hammy” Halum, who, with his father, is one of the pioneers on Canal Street on the same block where the Hard Rock Hotel collapsed in 2019.

Dozens of short-term rental rooms have opened on Canal within the past year. Dozens more are planned in a change that is injecting life and economic vitality into the historic avenue.

“You’re centrally located a few blocks of where you want to be: the Superdome, the [Harrah’s] casino, Bourbon Street,” said developer Aaron Motwani, another pioneer along with his father, Kishore “Mike” Motwani.

The developments will likely have wider significance for New Orleans beyond just the old retail area.

“Canal Street is where Mardi Gras happens,” architect John Williams said. “All of our cultural events happen around Canal Street. Every sidewalk on Canal Street is 21 feet wide. It invites masses to be downtown. As Canal Street goes, so goes the city. It used to go that way, and I believe it will be that way again.”

"All of our cultural events.."  Whose cultural events?  Not "ours" so much. We don't actually live in the theme park you are building there anymore.

Nobody actually lives here

 It's funny because it is true.

They did have the option of voting no

Tons of fun watching City Council completely throw up its hands last week at the prospect of having to vote for the STR tax.  There were objections from the public comment but those were met with typical condescension from our elected friends about how poorly the public supposedly understands the background details.

But that's bullshit.  New Orleanians have been following this story for the better part of the past two years that it has dominated the local political news. We know what it is and why it does what it does. The deal was bad enough even for "normal" times. It offered insufficient and mostly one time funding to shore up failing city infrastructure in exchange for authorizing permanent publicly funded slush funds for the convention center and for a private tourism promotion board called New Orleans and Company.  

The STR tax is only one piece of the deal authorized by the state legislature and then by local ballot measure. It has been criticized for two reasons. The first reason is it creates a perverse incentive for the city to promote the proliferation of short term rentals despite their destructive impact on New Orleans neighborhoods and housing costs. Residents have spent several years now fighting to rein in the STR boom but political leadership has repeatedly demonstrated its indifference. Recently, the former executive director of Sonder, one of the largest and most damaging purveyors of STRs was hired by the Cantrell administration and put in charge of city permitting and land use policy; a shocking development for the thousands of New Orleanians now threatened with the prospect of eviction. 

The second criticism of the tax is that it hands millions of dollars over to a private non-profit tourism promotion agency so that it can produce dogshit tweets like this. These were the complaints presented to City Council last week.  Members responded by shrugging and talking down to people about the "ballot language."

“This council was also not involved in the negotiation of the fair share deal when this was broken down,” Councilwoman Kristin Palmer, one of the council’s most vocal opponents of short-term rental expansion, said on Thursday. “The ballot language was what was passed by the voters, we have to adhere to that ballot language, and that’s why we’re here today. And I’m referring, of course, to the 25 percent of the tax that is to be given to New Orleans and Company.”

The ballot initiative approved by voters last year gave the Council the ability to levy a new short-term rental tax. But it didn’t require them to. And while the City Council couldn’t create the new tax unilaterally, it can create new fees for city permits and licenses, like short-term rental licenses. Prior to the fair share deal, council members had floated a fee structure on short-term rentals that would have raised an estimated $20 million for affordable housing projects.

They didn't actually have to vote for it.  Since the time that the Fair Sham deal and the ballot language of some of its component parts was finalized,  many things have changed. New Orleans is going to be hit harder than most places by the pandemic/depression/mass eviction crisis we are dealing with now.  City Council had an opportunity to at least try and force a reconsideration of the bad deal which had become far worse. Instead they chose to pretend it was out of their hands.

The Dread Index

A little over a week ago, in keeping with the (obviously very well thought out, very safe and successful) "Phase 2" reopening process, the First and Second City Courts of New Orleans once again began accepting evictions filings from landlords. The response was...  impressive.

Last week, some courts and justices of the peace accepted eviction requests, but didn’t begin assigning them court dates. Badon waited until Tuesday, the first full day after Edwards’ order lifted.

Badon said his clerks on Tuesday received 63 requests for evictions, compared to about 25 on a normal day.

And that's after having turned away an apparently sizeable number of landlords who are still constrained by the federal rules that pause evictions on certain properties until August 25.  The city courts had been urged to push back their moratorium to match the federal guidelines but they decided to move ahead anyway.

It's hard to know what the reasoning is there. But there has obviously been pressure from property owners. We know they've been talking to the mayor, at least. In this interview back in April she was already talking about the coming eviction crisis in terms of having to "find a balance" with the needs of "our landlords."

She must have still been thinking about "our landlords" this week when she extended the deadlines for short term rental license applications and permit extensions. This extension even applies to STR licenses that were set to expire anyway due to a recent change in city regulations. It's basically using COVID as an excuse to keep STRs operating even while we are allowing people to evicted from their homes. That's one hell of a way to strike a "balance."

Anyway thanks to these policy decisions our leadership has made on purpose, a wave of evictions is coming soon.

NEW ORLEANS, La. (WVUE) - As the coronavirus pandemic persists it is feared that many low-income families in Louisiana and around the country could face eviction soon and as a result homelessness.

The Center for Planning Excellence of Baton Rouge and Urban Footprint released their analysis of the housing crisis amid the pandemic.

Camille Manning-Broome is President of the Center for Planning Excellence.

“In Louisiana, our development patterns are increasing the likelihood of this, of homelessness and high-risk burden because many areas your combined housing and transportation costs had up to more than 50 percent of your income,” Manning-Broome said.

The analysis found that Louisiana ranks 3rd in the nation for having a high risk for evictions due to job losses. Further it says 130,000 households across Louisiana are at risk of evictions and it shows the parishes most in need of rental assistance beyond July 31 when federal protections and assistance expire are in order of need, Orleans, Jefferson, East Baton Rouge, Caddo, Lafayette, St. Tammany, Tangipahoa, Calcasieu, Ouachita, and Bossier.

For further context, here is a cheering analysis of the Census Bureau's "Household Pulse" survey which finds:

Based on the Household Pulse Survey results released on June 17, which examined responses between June 4 and June 9, almost one-third of all households expect to experience a loss of employment income over the coming four weeks. Fully 10 percent of American families—that’s 25 million, half of which have children at home—did not have enough food to eat in the prior week. Even more disturbing, one in five households—over 50 million in total—are doubtful that they will be able to afford sufficient food in the coming month. And of the nation’s 65,000,0000 renters, almost 20 percent were unable to pay their rent last month and an even higher percentage—close to 30 percent—doubt that they will be able to pay their rent in the coming month. 

This week, another one million plus new unemployment claims were filed.  So it's staggering to think how many households are currently trying to calculate, according to their savings if they have any, how much time they might have between the day they are laid off and the day they are evicted. Call it the Dread Index.  And it's a frighteningly short number now that the courts are ready to hear evictions again.