News -> INDReporter FRI, JUN 29 10:58AM by Walter Pierce

Downtown complex re-branded

 

uptown
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.

uptown_2
        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.


Walter Pierce
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Comments (3)add
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written by Tim Supple , June 29, 2012 - 07:21 pm
What wrong with this project is it would have been cheaper to give people vouchers so that they could live anywhere they wanted. If the idea is to help the poor, then the most efficient way to do this is not to build apartments, but to give them vouchers. This allows them to leave in the are most convenient for them, (closer to schools, work, whatever)and it integrates them into the greater population. Now what you have is the same social economic class all located in 1 area. I thought one of the objectives of smart growth was to end that. Oh, did I mentioned these apartments are twice a expensive as they could have purchased an apartment complex for?
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written by Krista Fontenot , June 30, 2012 - 12:56 am
why does greg gachassin get to build a housing project with federal money and make profit without risk? isn't this one of things we found so distateful about stewart?

they're still ugly, pig in prom dress.


why didn't they build affordable houses and sell them to people at a low rate. then there could be pride in ownership and not just warehousing.

By they way where are all these people walking to? the bars downtown. they gave the only grocery store location to greg to build more ugly crap. why don't they put in resources, where people can get jobs instead of just stacking them. Oh wait, I know, greag need to make more money without risk

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written by Marie Broussard , July 06, 2012 - 04:39 am
I like the new name, but seem to remember from a coterie meeting in this neighborhood that the salary for a tenant would not only have a maximum salary requirement, but also a minimum salary requirement. Your article says nothing about a minimum salary. I was open minded about this project in the very beginning, but with so many changes including Greg G. involvement, I can never trust a project of this kind again. I like the idea of vouchers for poor people. The LEED building idea is very good, but the exterior of this complex, just does not compliment the historic neighborhood... I now see this as very bad project for so many reasons...
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