Regardless of who’s to blame in the wake of the debacle that was the proposed barge cleaning facility on the Mississippi River by Texas-based Tubal-Cain Marine Services, there’s plenty of lessons to learn going forward, says Business Report Editor Stephanie Riegel.
“New maps prepared by the Planning Commission staff at the request of Metro Councilman John Delgado show the Tubal-Cain site is far from the only tract of industrial property in the heart of the city,” Riegel writes in her latest column. “In fact, most of the city’s riverfront property is zoned M2 or heavy industrial.”
Specifically, more than one mile of the downtown riverfront from just north of the State Capitol to North Boulevard is zoned M2—including property adjacent to the new IBM office building and its adjoining multifamily complex, 525 Lafayette. The M2 zoning breaks for about 1,200 feet around the Louisiana Art and Science Museum and USS Kidd then resumes for more than two miles downriver to West Chimes Street.
“What’s particularly troubling is that a neighborhood called College Park—which is roughly bordered by West Chimes and Aster streets, Nicholson Drive and River Road—sits within the industrially zoned area,” Riegel writes. “Houses there were developed before existing zoning regulations adopted in the 1980s prohibited residential development in areas zoned industrial.”
Irrespective of any potential development on the property that could pose a hazard to the nearby residents, Planning Director Frank Duke says the real technical problem with having residential neighborhoods in an industrially zoned area is that the houses constitute what is known as a nonconforming use. If any of the houses, say, burned or if residents needed to get a permit to rebuild or renovate, they would not be able to because of the zoning restrictions.
“It’s a problem that needs to be fixed, and there are other problem areas as well,” Riegel writes. “BREC’s Farr Park is also zoned industrial, as are several acres surrounding it. Though the Metro Council last month rezoned the port-owned property that Tubal-Cain wanted to lease, the measure didn’t apply to the adjacent BREC property. Property near Southern University is also zoned M2 and should be changed, according to Duke.”
Read the full column. Send your comments to editors@businessreport.com.
