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| Attendees at Thursday's re-branding event get a closer look at Uptown Lofts. |
Joie de Vivre, the mixed-use development rising on Congress Street across from the IberiaBank building, is no more — in name anyway. A campaign to re-brand the residential/retail development — and, no doubt, put some distance between the project and the controversies that have followed its progress — began Thursday evening with live music, free beer and soft drinks and a new name for the development: Uptown Lofts.
A performance by The Mercy Brothers punctuated the casual event. A website for the newly renamed development, which is principally an urban residential project for medium- to low-income people, is also up and taking applications. Residents cannot earn more than 60 percent of the area median income. For Lafayette, that means a single resident must earn less than $25,740 annually; a family of four must be below $36,720.
According to the project’s website, potential applicants and occupants at Uptown Lofts must also undergo a criminal history screening. Anyone with a felony conviction or two misdemeanor convictions in the last five years, or any conviction/plea for a violent crime, will be rejected. The project is designed to appeal to young, hip urban dwellers and, truth be told, renderings of the apartments depict living spaces with a certain Euro-Bauhaus cool.
Uptown Lofts is going up at the edge of Mills Addition, a historic neighborhood adjacent to downtown proper, on land acquired from Acadiana Outreach Center. The project has been met with steady and at times robust resistance from a small but committed group of Mills Addition residents who view the sleek, modern structure as an intrusion in their neighborhood of mostly single-family homes.
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| Uptown Lofts is roughly 50 percent complete. |
Now a project of the Lafayette Public Trust Financing Authority, Uptown Lofts, nee Joie de Vivre, is rising after fits and starts grown out of the financial collapse of Acadiana Outreach. The development consultant for the $16.5 million project, Greg Gachassin, was hit with ethics charges by the state Board of Ethics earlier this month for two unrelated projects.
MAY 17 Here's a column from James Gill, this time in the Advocate. Gill, who has jumped ship from the Picayune, writes about the absurdity of dueling polls in this post. The numbers are so wildly different, it is obvious that both sides are "cooking the books," he writes. In particular, he looks at Sen. Mary Landrieu, and how her recent actions in DC have been received by those polled. Gill's acerbic, amusing prose is a welcome addition to a paper so conservative as to be occasionally lacking in personality.
MAY 17 Blogger Tom Aswell continues delivering bombshells about the state education department and Gov. Jindal's education "reform" efforts. In this post, he reports that students in the Shreveport area have been signed up for a charter school without their knowledge or consent. Most interesting to Aswell is how this Texas-based charter (with ties to GOP types) got the personal student information it has, if the students didn't give it.
MAY 17 This post by JR Ball in the Baton Rouge Business Report is an interesting tongue-in-cheek look at recent Baton Rouge economic development efforts. Among the items he examines is the idea that gaining a Costco makes BR a "world-class city." (Really? All you need is a different brand of Sam's? MK!) This effort, and other recent ones, are all built on the taxpayer's back, with tax zones, tax incentives and tax rebates, Ball writes.
MAY 17 Blogger CB Forgotston is critical of the legislature's reliance on a revenue-estimating committee's decision to include projected tax amnesty income in this year's forecast. That's a problem, CB posts, because the deadline for these people to pay their taxes is June 30, 2014. So when do you think these people who haven't paid taxes in years are going to pay their taxes? Surely not before June 30, and that means the money won't be there for this year's budget, he argues.
MAY 17 Here's an interesting blog out of California by a Hollywood writer, attorney and academic named Brian Alan Lane. He blogs about higher ed, and was a whistle-blower in a scandal over false credentials. In this post, he takes aim at LSU's new top dog, King Alexander. It's convoluted and a little confusing, but it sure makes Alexander a lot more interesting than he was yesterday.
MAY 17 Blogger Robert Mann writes about the LSU Board's refusal to allow Dr. Fred Cerise to testify before the legislature about Gov. Jindal's plan to close down all the state's charity hospitals and dump the poor on the private system. It's hard to imagine anyone more qualified than Cerise to testify about that, so why would anyone try to prevent him doing so? Mann thinks it is because the powers that be aren't interested in hearing any truth about the plan.
MAY 17 This post on the Louisiana Sinkhole Bugle, a blog that notes developments in the Bayou Corne and Jefferson Island salt domes, talks about a proposed expansion of the salt dome storage under Lake Peigneur in Iberia Parish. Residents are working against it for several reasons, including two biggies: the sinkhole disaster in Bayou Corne and the continuing, unexplained bubbling on the surface of the Lake.
MAY 17 NOLA police arrested more people Thursday accused of either being involved in the Mother's Day shooting or hiding the suspect afterward, this Gambit story reports. The NOLA police chief said he suspects the whole thing was gang-related and throws out a challenge to the gangs: he's got informants now, he says, and he knows a lot more than the gangs want him to know. The people who live in the neighborhoods terrorized by gangs are ready to talk, he says.
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