Quote:
Originally Posted by Blitzen
No, you're absolutely correct, but there's nothing stopping it from looking picturesque in the future.
A development of homes, condos, boat docks, and retirement communities could be interconnected with linear parks, trees, bike paths, and have a stunning view of ship/barge traffic. Furthermore, if the bridges along the canal were repainted regularly (the legislature has voted to entirely replace the Florida Ave. bridge), the view has the potential to be stellar. I think another big catch would be the fact that your boat could be in Lake Pontchartrain, Lake Borgne, the Gulf of Mexico, or the Mississippi River within a few minutes.
The main point is that New Orleans has no true waterfront property, except for one half of Bayou St. John - which is end to end multi-million dollar homes. Developing some of the Industrial Canal/Intracoastal would allow for large waterfront developments with enormous lots.
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Why can't the Industrial Canal be used to, you know, support
industrial uses?
New Orleans' old standbys of oil and tourism will not be able to bring this city out of poverty. Neither will the bio-medical sector, despite all the hype (every other city is moving in the same direction; NOLA is decades behind the curve).
I'm pretty confident that the only way to generate stable job growth of well-paying jobs is through the manufacturing sector, so I'd like to see clean industries populating the Industrial Canal area. Not clean in the make-believe sense of "green jobs", but clean in the sense of "non-polluting". Milwaukee has launched a similar strategy for its Menomonee River Valley, and they've been really successful at luring businesses and jobs in.
I'd also like to see the Mississippi River lock enlarged and the France Road container terminal re-activated (also, replace Claiborne/St. Claude with tunnels and Florida with a high bridge). Container shipping should be a huge growth industry for us, since we're the closest US port to the Panama Canal except Miami, and we have better rail access.
Maybe residential uses could be built on the canal side of the Lower 9th, but generally you don't want to mix pleasure craft and massive container ships in the same narrow channel. I do support the Reinventing the Crescent plan to build a cluster of high-rises at Bywater Point, though.