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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 24 Blogger Robert Mann posts this entry about the Baton Rouge Chamber's recent report on Louisiana's higher education system. It's critical to economic development, and yet our system is facing a "funding crisis" with no way to resolve it, the report says. The Chamber says control of tuition and fees must be returned to the higher ed governing boards.
MAY 24 Here's a NBC33 story about Tyrann Mathieu. He has signed with the Arizona Cardinals, inking a $3 million, four-year deal. He gets a signing bonus of $265K, but gets another, larger bonus if he doesn't get cut from the team for doing drugs. The deal reportedly includes mandatory tests and meetings for the player.
MAY 24 Jarvis DeBerry posts here about the redonkulus rhetoric that would have us believe NOLA is a safe city with a murder problem. Maybe the city's crime stats don't compare with its murder stats because you can't manipulate a murder, he says: a dead body's a dead body. It just doesn't make sense, he says, and his readers agree: a poll asks if they believe the city is safe, and more than 90 percent say no.
MAY 24 Jindal administration officials announced Thursday that the privatization of public health care is going to cost a lot more than they budgeted for, the Advocate reports here. "I'm so surprised," said no one. Anywhere. The cost they're projecting now is more than $1 billion - a lot more than the $626 million budgeted for it. And, it's more than it cost the state to operate those hospitals. So why are we doing this again?
MAY 24 Blogger CB Forgotston ridicules the recent PR campaign by the state GOP in the wake of a legislative auditor's request to both major parties. The GOP (apparently unaware that the Dems got the same request) started yammering about being targeted because it had "killed" a tax increase. CB finds that laughable, but it's also pretty funny that the GOP was comparing this episode to the IRS scandal (Because the President has so much to do with our state auditor. Right?).
MAY 24 Politico details some recent fund-raising efforts by Sen. David Vitter, which have raised the question of his future political plans. This time, it is a $5,000 per head "bayou weekend" that includes "Cajun cooking" and an all-caps "alligator hunt," the story reports. Funds raised go to a super PAC that can spend money to support Vitter in federal or state races, the story points out.
MAY 24 The pink building on Royal in the quarter was sold at a sheriff's sale Thursday, this Picayune story reports. An injunction that would have halted the sale wasn't enforced because the family failed to post a $150,000 bond, the story reports. So the owner of the mortgages on the building bought it, for nearly $7 million. Now the feuding family will have to negotiate with that company to get a lease on the building that has housed their business for close to 60 years.
MAY 23 This post in Louisiana Voice tells us about a bill by a Winnsboro lege that would require all public high school students to take at least one Course Choice online class in order to graduate. (What?) Blogger Tom Aswell says it's a monument to "waste and corruption," especially in light of the problems he's exposed with the program in recent weeks. Idaho had a similar program, but voters removed it by a 2-1 margin, Aswell says.
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