Public money driving slow New Orleans downtown

A deal approved this week to fill up an empty skyscraper and keep the city’s pro football team raises the bill of taxpayer-funded redevelopment projects in downtown New Orleans to $300 million. And those projects are almost the sole source of rebuilding in the city that was devastated four years ago by Hurricane Katrina. Most of the big private investment plans have stalled since the nation sank into a recession. Among the casualties: Donald Trump’s proposed $400 million hotel and condominium high-rise and another developer’s $60 million condominium project in the riverfront Warehouse District. The evaporation of private development is troubling in a city where good-paying jobs tied to white-collar professions are too few. Commercial investment was tough to come by even before Katrina, and now it’s clear the post-storm recovery will likely take years longer than once thought. The unemployment rate in the New Orleans metropolitan area rose to 6% in May, up from 3.4% the year before following the loss of 3,800 jobs over the year. “The recovery rate has been slowing down, rather than picking up,” Economist Loren Scott says. Without construction jobs aimed at $14 billion worth of levee repairs and improvements and two major bridge projects—the widening of the Huey P. Long Bridge over the Mississippi River and the rebuilding of the Interstate 10 spans over Lake Pontchartrain—the city’s economy would be moving even slower.