0 / SPK / specialcollections@tulane.edu

0 / SPK / specialcollections@tulane.edu

0 / SPK / specialcollections@tulane.edu

This paper is a case study of the redevelopment of the Naval Support Activity East Bank site located at 4400 Dauphine Street in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans, Louisiana. Since Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, the City of New Orleans and the federal government have been trying to find the highest and best use for this federally owned site, which has since been subject to BRAC legislation, or Base Re-­Alignment and Closure. The City created the New Orleans Advisory Task Force (NOATF) in November 2011 to oversee the process and come up with a plan for the acquisition, redevelopment, and operation of the new facility. Their plan is to create an international disaster management, recovery, and resilience center that could serve as a hub for not only disaster preparedness for the region, country, or potentially the world, but also a place for innovation and evolution of the disaster management industry. With these goals in mind, the NOATF has taken on a massive engagement of public and private partners that should help with the complex financing mechanisms, the ownership and management of the property, and the sustainability goals expected to be reached upon completion. / 0 / SPK / specialcollections@tulane.edu

0 / SPK / specialcollections@tulane.edu

0 / SPK / specialcollections@tulane.edu

0 / SPK / specialcollections@tulane.edu

0 / SPK / specialcollections@tulane.edu

Affordable housing has been a predominant issue in New Orleans. The demand of affordable housing units in the city far exceeds the supply available. HousingNOLA established the demand of 33,600 of affordable housing opportunities in New Orleans. There are various challenges to increasing the supply of affordable housing from project scale, design and construction, complexity of financing, building regulations, and land use policies. Moreover, funding available for affordable housing at the federal and state level have negatively impacted developer's willingness to pursue this project while forcing the developer to create more with less. These challenges manifest themselves in additional costs and time. In partnership with HousingNOLA, the investigation revolves on how construction costs in affordable development could be reduced to increase the supply to meet the demand. First, the investigation focused on clarifying if construction costs were high in the City of New Orleans. In addition, it identified factor that increased construction costs within New Orleans. Thirdly, through the study of new building technologies, provide alternative construction methodology with the potential to create more affordable housing units. Lastly, propose recommendations for next steps in the creation of affordable housing in New Orleans to HousingNOLA. / 0 / SPK / specialcollections@tulane.edu

Because of its trademark racial diversity, historians have often presented New Orleans as a place transformed by incorporation into the American South following 1804. Assertions that a comparatively relaxed, racially ambiguous Spanish slaveholding regime was converted into a two-caste system of dedicated racial segregation by the advent of American assumption have been posited by scholars like Frank Tannenbaum, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, and a host of others. Citing dependence on patronage, concubinage, and the decline in slave manumissions during the antebellum period, such studies have employed descriptions of the city’s prominent free people of color to suggest that the daily lives of non-whites in New Orleans experienced uniform restriction following 1804, and that the Crescent City’s transformation from Atlantic society with slaves to rigid slave society forced free people of color out of the heart of the city, known as the Vieux Carré, and into “black neighborhoods” on the margins of town. Despite the popularity of such generalized themes in the historiography, however, the extant sources housed in New Orleans’s valuable archival repositories can be used to support a vastly divergent narrative. By focusing on individual free people of color, or libres, rather than the non-white community as a whole, this paper seeks to show that free people of color were self determined in both public and private aspects of daily life, irrespective of governmental regime, and that their physical presence and political agency were not entirely eroded by the change in administration. Through evaluation of the geography of free black-owned properties listed in the city’s notarial archives, as well as baptisms, births, deaths, and marriages listed in archdiocese ledgers, I show that the family and community lives of free people of color in New Orleans’ oldest neighborhood appeared alive and well throughout the territorial period.