Owen Courrèges
The City of New Orleans is sending a message, loud and clear: Free public parking lots? You’ve had a good run, but your days are over.
I worked in the CBD a few years back, and initially I opted to utilize the free parking underneath the U.S. 90/Pontchartrain Expessway overpass. Although homeless people tended to congregate in the area nearest to the New Orleans Mission, the area further down by St. Charles Avenue tended to be wide open.
Indeed, it seemed to me that the flow of traffic, with cars entering and leaving frequently during the day, tended to keep homeless encampments from forming across large swaths of the underpass. My car was never molested, and the worst fear I had was being blocked in.
That all changed a year ago. On August 12, 2014, the Health Department announced that it was closing the underpass “due to health hazards.” The city was pushing to clear out the homeless encampment, which had grown since it was last cleared out in 2012 in advance of the Super Bowl.
A couple of days later, the city issued a press release that stated as follows:
To ensure the safety and health of all citizens, the area under the U.S. 90/Pontchartrain Expressway overpass from South Claiborne Avenue to St. Charles Avenue has been closed to the public and individuals will not be allowed to sleep, camp, or park there. The City has posted notices that there will be no parking within this area until further notice and has placed barricades to prevent vehicles from entering the area. Any automobiles found parked in this area are subject to being ticketed and towed.
It was assumed that this situation would be temporary, but it wasn’t. While I haven’t kept a constant watch on the entrances and exits from the parking areas under the Expressway, it doesn’t appear that they ever opened up again. Sure enough, they remain chained up to this day.
Because the area can no longer be used for parking, the homeless now have carte blanche. Instead of being largely restricted to the area near the mission, the homeless camp out everywhere. If the goal of chaining off the parking areas had anything to do with keeping the homeless away, it was a counterproductive move.
I contacted the city to try and get an answer as to why parking was banned. After nearly a week, this is the response I received from Brad Howard, Mayor Landrieu’s Press Secretary: “The City is finalizing arrangements for managed control of the surface parking lots under U.S. 90/Pontchartrain Expressway so that they may be utilized for vehicle parking. This will allow better site control to prevent homeless encampments from forming.”
That’s an answer, sure, but it doesn’t explain why they kept the public from using the parking areas to begin with. Again, the lot allowed for workers in the CBD to have some free parking, and the presence of vehicles entering and leaving the lots tended to keep homeless encampments at bay.
The parking closure under the Expressway isn’t the only example of this. As an attorney, I represent numerous clients in matters in Municipal and Traffic Court, which is located in the government complex that starts at Tulane and Broad and backs all the way up to Interstate 10. At the end of Poydras Street, towards the rear of the complex, there is a dirt parking lot owned by the city that has traditionally been open to the public.
A couple of months ago, I parked in the lot as I had often done before. The area wasn’t roped-off and no signage at the entrance indicated that anything had changed. Alas, when I returned, I found a parking ticket on my windshield. It was then that I noticed that on a nearby pillar on the off-ramp for South Broad Street, there was a not-very-conspicuous sign that indicated parking was now prohibited in the lot.
Grudgingly, I paid the ticket.
The city did not respond to my request for an explanation as to why parking was prohibited in the public lot at Tulane and Broad. However, I suspect that the city is planning on developing the space for managed parking just as they are with the Expressway underpass (either that, or they’re planning on building something else on the site).
When the city speaks of establishing “managed control” of public parking, I assume that means they’ll be leasing the lots to private companies or contracting with them to collect parking fees and control ingress and egress from city lots. Presumably, it will be a source of revenue for the city.
I don’t entirely object to managed control of public lots, but it doesn’t explain why the city has banned public parking in the meantime while it “finaliz[es] arrangements.” If the contracts haven’t even been worked out yet, it will be some time before any managed parking elements are added (i.e. striping, numbering, entry systems, automated payment systems, etc.). In the interim, the city is simply preventing people from parking in these places for no reason whatsoever.
This may strike many of you as being a minor thing, but it’s still inconvenient and the costs fall on those who can afford it the least. I can certainly spring for paid parking, but many of those who previously parked in the underpass or the dirt lot on Poydras could certainly use the break that free public parking provided.
The city’s casual carelessness when dealing with its citizens has always been manifest. Shutting off public parking is just another aspect of that. We should all be sick of having to deal with these needless inconveniences on a daily basis.
Owen Courrèges, a New Orleans attorney and resident of the Garden District, offers his opinions for UptownMessenger.com on Mondays. He has previously written for the Reason Public Policy Foundation.
We passed by the underpass Sunday noon at Annunciation – a man was sleeping there – a few cars were parked – My old car that had been stolen and trashed in Houma and I was trying have fixed was ruined – after a few weeks of being parked in front of my house I discovered that someone was living in it at night – I had it towed the next day – I think these people feel sorry for themselves and can’t deal with it – there is so much in the city that people from nowhere are drawn too and then sleep in my car. Some make it, some don’t, some care and some weren’t raised right and today some idiot wrote “NO Parking” across the street from me for some reason – New Orleans’ is a hard place to live in but it is luring to The Good, The Bad and also The Stupid.
Sad, isn’t it, that property owned by the public is no longer available for public use.
So funny, and so true.
Instead of dealing with the homeless problem (with Harry Lee style policing instead of spending money), the local government both fails to address the original problem and simultaneously creates a new problem.
I have always parked for free under the bridge at Tulane and Broad, except for jury duty. If that is the same lot, I can conceive of no reason to close it except as a way to extort more money to be wasted on things like a higher (unearned) minimum wage and destroying priceless historical treasures, while the unlit streets and blighted homes crumble as the criminals ride by in their stolen cars and bicycles.
The city’ relentless efforts to make life difficult, expensive and dangerous are working. I moved and make it a point never to cross the parish line. Mitch and his minions form a very effective economic development team…for surrounding perishes.