Developer plans new complex of apartments and retail spaces in downtown New Orleans
Rebecca Mowbray, The Times-Picayune
Spurred by the future Loyola Avenue streetcar line, a local development firm plans to transform a sea of downtown parking lots into 450 apartments and 125,000 square feet of shops and restaurants that it calls the South Market District.
The Domain Cos., a New Orleans- and New York-based firm that developed successful mixed-income housing along Tulane Avenue, has four blocks of parking lots under contract in the area between Loyola Avenue and Baronne Street, Julia Street and Lafayette Street -- a largely empty area of downtown that was cleared in the mid-twentieth century to help increase automobile capacity downtown.
Matt Schwartz, principal of the Domain Cos., said he hopes to turn the area back into an intimate, pedestrian-friendly zone. His company began looking at the area in thinking about the need for upscale housing for the estimated 7,000 jobs that are expected to come with the biosciences district in the coming years, but Schwartz said it was the streetcar expansion that sealed the deal.
http://www.nola.com/business/index.s...omplex_of.html
We've been talking about this area being transformed but this would be amazing. Great to hear Domain is involved too.