On a recent evening, Denis McDonough, President Obama’s chief of staff, walked in the dark calling out, “Male, over 25; female, 18 to 24.”
Homeless people rarely have the privilege of having an audience with the president’s right-hand man — much less, one on their own turf. But that’s exactly what happened on a recent evening when McDonough and a crew consisting of Secret Service agents, White House staffers and San Francisco’s Mayor Ed Lee took part in the point-in-time count of homeless people living across America. (Within 90 minutes, the team counted 144 people in eight square blocks around San Francisco’s city hall.) The participation of a high-ranking Cabinet official drew attention to this little-known tool that provides essential direction for governments and service providers. It also brings focus to a population that’s often hidden out of sight, forgotten on vacant doorsteps, under freeway overpasses and in emergency shelters.
“What I see here, what we just walked through, this is a problem. But this is the same sort of challenge we face all over the country,” McDonough says. “The numbers tell the story. And that’s why this count is so important.”
WHAT ARE POINT-IN-TIME SURVEYS?
Here’s the formula: Sometime during the last 10 days of January (with a few exceptions), thousands of volunteers fan out across towns and cities across the U.S. to take a census of unsheltered street people. Equipped with clipboards and flashlights, they’re often assigned a small geographic area to avoid duplicates. The counts began in 1983 in 60 municipalities, as an increasingly visible population became homeless due to poverty, drug use and the closure of state-run mental institutions. Standardized methods for the counts were firmed up in 2005 and have since been refined. Along with figures from homeless shelters and transitional housing, numbers from the point-in-time count are submitted to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). From there, the data gives a local and national snapshot of the homeless population that guides service providers, Congress, HUD and other agencies.
HOW OFTEN ARE THEY CONDUCTED?
HUD requires shelters to submit their data every year, but point-in-time surveys only happen biennially, usually in the odd-numbered years. Many large cities, however, choose to complete the census annually to keep abreast of the latest trends. “When we get an accurate count, the numbers tell us what to do,” Mayor Lee tells the San Francisco Chronicle. “Data drives action. That’s what this night is all about.”
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IS THERE MORE TO THE SURVEYS THAN JUST COUNTING PEOPLE ON THE STREETS?
Since the federal government introduced its long-term plan to end chronic and veteran homelessness by 2015, as well as youth and family homelessness by 2020, HUD has requested detailed data on those subpopulations. Some surveys require nothing more than approximate age and gender, but others, like Los Angeles’s survey, consists of a seven-page questionnaire asking things like, “Where have you been spending most of your nights?” “Do you have ongoing health problems or medical conditions?” and “How many times have you been housed and homeless?”
In Connecticut, for the first time, volunteers will ask the homeless about their specific housing, medical and employment needs to add to a registry. “In the past, each program kept its own waitlist for housing and other important services…Under that old system, providers and public officials had no way to gain a global view of the total needs to end homelessness in their community,” Lisa Tepper Bates, executive director of the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness, writes in an op-ed. A “community-wide by-name registry,” she adds, allows nonprofits “to target the right kind of assistance to the right person.”
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HOW DO VOLUNTEERS FIND THE HOMELESS?
It’s not easy. Organizers target known homeless encampments, but there’s always the chance of missing some. Because of its huge area, Los Angeles has been one of the leaders in improving its methodology. To supplement a count that takes place over multiple nights — from the posh neighborhoods along the ocean (some of which had their first count this year) to deep into the San Gabriel Valley — the city also conducts a random telephone survey of the “hidden homeless,” which added an additional 18,000 to the 36,000 people already counted on the street or in shelters.
Even if volunteers are able to locate people they suspect to be homeless, answers are not always forthcoming. (“None of your goddamn business” is how someone rebuffed two women who work for the Department of Veteran Affairs in D.C. when they asked him.) Many cities equip volunteers with gift bags and resource lists, small incentives that may prod someone to answer a few questions.
WHAT DO OFFICIALS EXPECT FROM THIS YEAR’S RESULTS?
A year ago, HUD reported that 578,434 people were homeless on a given night, a 2 percent decline from 2013. Exact figures from last month’s count won’t be known until municipalities release them later this year, but so far, experts aren’t optimistic about another decrease. (Already-released figures in Seattle show an alarming 21 percent jump from last year.) Why? Gentrification is driving up rent and decreasing the number of vacant apartments up and down the West Coast, says Katy Miller, regional coordinator for the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. Add to that lingering poverty and unemployment from the recession, a dearth of affordable housing and limited mental health care infrastructure, and it’s suddenly clear why so many are losing their homes.
But it’s not all bad news. Expect some bright spots in the declining numbers of homeless veterans, which has already dropped one-third from 2010 to 2014, thanks in part to First Lady Michelle Obama. Mayors across the country responded to her call to end veteran homelessness this year — a goal that’s well within reach, as New Orleans has demonstrated. The chronically homeless population should also decrease as well, continuing the 21 percent decline from 2010 to 2014. As Salt Lake City has shown, putting the homeless into housing can bring these numbers close to zero. Look for the common-sense solution of “Housing First” to once again prove its effectiveness when totals debut.
HOW ACCURATE ARE THE FINDINGS?
Many in the field believe the counts far underestimate the actual number of people experiencing homelessness. For one, the count occurs during the bitter freeze of late January, when many homeless aren’t living on the street. The calendar assumption seems to be that the homeless will be more likely to enter the shelter when it’s cold outside and thus be counted, but they could also take refuge in a vehicle or seek protection in a church basement. The head counts are “hit or miss,” says Paul Boden, director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project, a homeless rights group. “Those whom they could see, they counted,” he writes in an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle. “Point-in-time counts are a minimum number, always. They undercount hidden homeless populations because homeless persons are doubling up with the housed or cannot be identified by sight as homeless.” A quick look at other studies support Boden’s claim, including data released by the U.S. Department of Education, which reports that the number of homeless students has nearly doubled since the 2006-07 school year, to 1.2 million.
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WHICH GROUPS ARE OFTEN MOST EXCLUDED FROM THE CENSUS?
Point-in-time surveys do provide a snapshot taken at roughly the same time, a HUD official notes, which can “benchmark progress” with some confidence every two years — assuming that the face of homelessness is not changing. Some advocates fear that the largest new population of homeless — families who’ve lost their homes in the recession and are bouncing between couches, cheap motels and other temporary residences— are not being identified since they don’t “look homeless” to survey volunteers.
In addition to families, youth are most often among the undercounted, Boden says. Unaccompanied homeless youth are referred to as an “invisible population” because they’re particularly difficult to count. Studies attempting to estimate the total range from 22,700 to 1.7 million, a huge disparity. To improve count accuracy, HUD has partnered with a number of other agencies for a program called “Youth Count!” Since 2013, these groups have tried to attract youth homeless into shelters for the one-night counts with free meals and activities. They also approach homeless youth earlier in the day, when they’re likely easier to find at hotspots for young people like malls or recreation centers, LGBT-focused agencies and schools.
Unfortunately, while this system counts those down-and-out on the streets, it does little to track those who are grappling with housing insecurity — the very people which may be counted among this country’s homeless during the next point-in-time survey.
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This City Thought It Would Take Five Years to House Homeless Vets. They Did It a Year Ahead of Schedule
Standing at a podium before New Orleans’s bigwigs was an unusual place for a homeless veteran — or as he corrected the presenter at the press conference, “a former homeless vet.” Now living in permanent housing, he thanked the audience “for possibly saving my life, cus I don’t know if I could have survived another night on the street. … On behalf of all homeless veterans, I want to thank you.”
This month, New Orleans succeeded in becoming one of the first major U.S. cities to house every single homeless veteran.
In a collaboration unprecedented in scope, government agencies and nonprofits united around one common goal of housing at least 193 veterans, the number of homeless in New Orleans that were counted at the last point-in-time survey. Together, almost a year ahead of schedule, they exceeded that goal, placing 227 veterans into apartments in 2014.
“Veteran homelessness is an important and challenging issue, and we are very proud of our accomplishment today in New Orleans,” Mayor Mitch Landrieu said at the city’s World War II Museum. “We owe our veterans our eternal gratitude for their service and sacrifice to this nation and making sure they have a place to call home is a small but powerful way we can show our appreciation.”
New Orleans’s undertaking began in 2011 with the creation of a 10-year plan to end chronic and family homelessness and a 5-year goal for ending veteran homelessness. (In May 2012, there were 570 veterans living on the streets.) The city was still reeling from Katrina’s destruction: nearly 11,600 people were living on the streets in 2007 and many neighborhoods had yet to rebuild. One of the key advances was the formation of an interagency council, a centralized effort that would unite all five-dozen partner agencies and service providers — from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development all the way down to Ozanam Inn, a local shelter — in what New Orleans refers to as a “continuum of care.” It also includes a committee of active duty military (a group that could quickly establish trust) who scoured the streets locating homeless vets and helping those in transition make the move into new housing.
This collaboration streamlined services for veterans, particularly after a referral center, which served as a day shelter and offered case management, opened up inside the V.A. hospital in 2013. Locating assistance in the hospital not only made it easily accessible for struggling vets, it also advertises its services for those who may one day need help. It’s still the only center of its type in the country.
“This initiative, which has addressed the immediate needs of our city’s homeless veterans while creating a structure for the future, is a testament to the strength of the partnerships that have been forged among government, nonprofit, and private entities as we work together to rebuild a stronger, more sustainable New Orleans,” says City Councilmember Susan Guidry.
In 2013, almost $5 million became available through HUD’s HOME program, which pays for the construction of affordable housing or rental assistance for low-income tenants, and the city earmarked much of that money to combat overall homelessness. Using those funds and vouchers provided through the Department of Veterans Affairs, New Orleans asked landlords to list affordable rentals in one online database. Veterans were given homes without any conditions since the city endorsed “Housing First” and “No Wrong Door,” which aligns caregivers with shared information to help them obtain any needed service, regardless of which door they show up at first.
Since then, New Orleans has pushed local businesses to prioritize hiring veterans and has set up a criminal court that can respond to their unique situation, among many other cutting–edge innovations.
“To be able to give so many homeless veterans a forever home — most of them disabled and a quarter of them elderly — in such a short period of time was extremely challenging but incredibly exhilarating for all of the many partners in this effort,” says Martha Kegel, the executive director of UNITY of Greater New Orleans. “That so many veterans who have risked their lives to serve our country are left homeless, especially in their later years, shocks the conscience. To bring them home, once and for all, has been very rewarding.”
Although veterans may continue to experience homelessness because of poverty or disability, New Orleans has reached a “functional zero,” which means every known homeless veteran has been housed permanently or is on the way to a designated apartment.
Last summer, after First Lady Michelle Obama issued a challenge for cities to end veteran homelessness by 2015, all the New Orleans’s groups involved redoubled their efforts. While Binghamton, N.Y., (pop. 46,400) was technically the first, New Orleans’s feat has yet to be replicated in a major metropolis.
“Quite simply, the men and women who have defended our freedom deserve to return to the American Dream. Far too often we as a nation have failed them in that regard,” says Jared Brossett, another city councilmember. “The fact that New Orleans is on the leading edge of ending veteran homelessness is something of which we should all be proud.”
While Phoenix and Salt Lake City ended chronic homelessness last year after a friendly competition (spoiler: Phoenix won), both western cities are still working towards eradicating veteran homelessness altogether. Los Angeles, Chicago and Wichita, as well as 300 other mayors, six governors and some 70 county officials across the nation are all hoping to house all the homeless veterans in their towns by the year’s end.
Some observers have doubted whether New Orleans’s recent veterans housing push is a sustainable solution, stressing that preventive measures like counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder could keep them off the street in the first place. Those groups want to see a shuttered hospital reopened as a facility to treat mental illness.
Mayor Landrieu readily admits, “The work of ending veteran homelessness is never really done.”
But in response to the huge task, Landrieu announced a new “rapid response model” at the same time he celebrated his city’s hard-won success. This system will centralize “all available local, state and federal resources” and link veterans on the brink with active duty and former soldiers, essentially “utilizing veterans to help veterans.”
There’s also a structure now in place to ensure no vet will fall through the cracks: The mayor promised any veteran who loses his housing will be housed within an average of 30 days.
The city’s milestone has galvanized advocates across the country, far beyond this corner of southern Louisiana. As of the last count on a single January night last year, veteran homelessness nationwide has declined by one-third since 2010, but 49,933 vets still lacked safe and stable housing.
“This remarkable achievement is significant to the entire nation — to every state and community that has the will to end veteran homelessness before the end of 2015,” says Laura Green Zeilinger, the executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness who’s coordinating policy among 19 federal agencies. “New Orleans, by answering the call that it must be done, proved to all of us that eliminating veteran homelessness can and will be done.” And after that? Let’s “build on this success to end homelessness for all Americans,” Zeilinger adds.
Rebuilding New Orleans’s Lower 9th Ward, One Bag of Groceries at a Time
New Orleans native Burnell Cotlon has spent the last five years on a mission. He’s turning a two-story building that was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (along with most of his Lower 9th Ward neighborhood), into a shopping plaza. Already, he’s opened a barber shop and a convenience store, and as of last November, is providing the neighborhood — identified as a food desert — with its first full-service grocery store in almost a decade.
The Lower Ninth Ward, which experienced catastrophic flooding during Hurricane Katrina, has had a much slower recovery than most New Orleans neighborhoods. Before Katrina, the area had a population of around 14,000 and boasted of the highest percentage of black homeownership in the country. According to the last census, however, only around 3,000 people live in the neighborhood. Many of its roads are still torn up, it lacks basic resources and the closest full-service grocery store is nearly 3 miles away in the neighboring city of Chalmette.
Burnell’s merchandise is still mostly limited to non-perishables and fresh produce, but he hopes to add poultry, bread and dairy this year.
Minorities Should Want To Be Police Officers
One of the first facts people noticed after a white police officer killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., was that only three of the 53 cops on the local force were black. That’s nowhere near the city’s racial composition, where two-thirds of residents are African-American.
Though the number of minority cops has grown over the past two decades, this lack of diversity is the norm in hundreds of departments across the country, while the key to recruiting and retaining minority officers remains elusive for most departments. As demands for reform echo across the country, we examined the latest research and contacted experts to find the best methods for hiring police forces that better reflect the neighborhoods they serve.
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DON’T MISS: This Is What Community Oriented Policing Looks Like
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The Plan to Save Louisiana’s Wetlands
Southeastern Louisiana is vanishing.
Two thousand square miles of wetlands have already been submerged in the Gulf of Mexico, and the state’s shoreline is receding quicker than anywhere else on Earth. A chunk of marshland as big as a football field washes away every hour — meaning that 16 square miles are erased from the map every year. Much depends on the Bayou State’s changing contours not only for the 1.2 million residents of greater New Orleans, threatened by violent storm surges, but for the entire country: half of the nation’s oil refineries, the mainland’s largest commercial fishery and the Western Hemisphere’s largest port all hinge on the region’s viability.
In response, Louisiana is implementing a $50 billion plan to save its coastline over the next half-century. Some call it ambitious; the rest say it’s a “moon shot.” But it’s the state’s only chance to reverse a manmade environmental catastrophe before it’s too late, says a two–part series by ProPublica and The Lens.
“What we had here was a paradise — a natural paradise,” Lloyd Sergine remembers. He’s describing the swamp village of fishermen, trappers and farmers where he grew up, just a couple dozen miles south of the Big Easy. “But when I try to tell the young people about this, they just stare at me like I’m crazy. They just can’t imagine what was here such a short time ago. And now it’s gone. Just gone.” When Sergine looks out onto the fields of his childhood, he sees only saltwater drowning the landscape. Derelict boats and ice chests float in on a high tide that soon washes over concrete foundations and wooden pilings where his neighborhood once thrived. “Everything we had was based on the wetlands,” he says. “When the wetlands started going, we were done for.”
At the heart of Louisiana’s Master Plan for the Coast is the restoration of the Mississippi Rivers’s natural process of depositing sand and mud along the delta, sediment that built up extensive wetlands over several thousand years. The mighty river once picked up 400 million metric tons of sediment before spitting the brown water into an ecosystem that depended on silt to avoid sinking into the ocean.
But after engineers attempted to limit the river’s devastating floods by constructing a network of dams, levees and dikes, annual sediment deposit dropped by 60 percent. Around the same time, in the 1930s, oil drilling and dredging of canals cut into the swamps. Deterioration accelerated as saltwater intrusion choked freshwater plants that had held the ground together and powerful hurricanes battered the vulnerable clumps of land.
Louisiana’s short-term fix is pumping sediment back into the crumbling marshes. Pipelines collect sand and mud from the riverbed and from offshore to add to flooded basins and to create new barrier islands. So far, at a cost of $105 million, two projects have restored 1,600 acres. But those gains are small compared to rapid loss: the same amount is being swept away every two months.
A long-term solution will require mimicking the Mississippi’s historical flow by diverting water in controlled surges. In an unprecedented experiment, the plan suggests building a system of gates that will open when the river runs high, flooding the area and restoring much-needed silt. “The one advantage this delta has over the many others that are in trouble is that we still have a river delivering the material to help get us out of trouble,” Denise Reed, chief scientist at the Water Institute of the Gulf, explains. “As long as that river is bringing the sediments to us, we have a chance.”
There’s still many unanswered questions for the project’s researchers and engineers. “Their solutions must fit within constraints imposed by how much sediment the river can deliver and must anticipate future sea-level rise and land subsidence. Somehow, they must balance the need for restoration with the needs of the shipping, energy and fishing industries,” Bob Marshall, of The Lens, writes.
Replicating North America’s largest drainage system will be no easy task, but the state thinks they can catch up by 2042.
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The Big Easy Has a Bright Idea to Curb Violence
In a seemingly miraculous feat, New Orleans has managed to drop its notorious murder rate by 20 percent this year — to 155 deaths — the lowest number the city has seen in almost 30 years. Interestingly, however, it wasn’t because police got tougher on the streets, but because city officials got organized.
Under Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s NOLA for Life program, launched in 2012 to rethink the city’s murder reduction strategy, New Orleans’ Innovation Delivery Team led the charge in finding new approaches to curb violence.
New Orleans was one of five cities selected for the pilot program, which was funded with a $4.2 million grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies in 2011. The team was comprised of eight people using the nonprofit’s innovation delivery method, which helps mayors create and implement big solutions to local problems. The team serves as an in-house consultant firm for City Hall while tapping into global resources and experts provided through Bloomberg Philanthropies.
The team worked with the New Orleans’ police department to analyze data relating to murders, while also looking to strategies from other cities such as Memphis, Chicago and New York. It also met with academics to help comb through the data more deeply while hosting focus groups with at-risk young men, providing a new path for a better murder reduction strategy, according to Fast Company.
“The biggest thing that went against common belief is that a lot of our violence was related to groups and gangs,” says Charles West, who lead the innovation delivery team. “We were always told that we didn’t have a gang problem. But we had gangs of significant size, and people just weren’t talking about it. More than anything, there wasn’t a specific form of policing strategy for groups and gangs.”
The team came up with 130 different initiatives to approach the violence problem according to West. NOLA for Life now operates a multi-agency gang unit which has helped the city ramp up prosecution of gangs.
Other initiatives involved agencies such as the Department of Sanitation, which can train and hire ex-prisoners to receive a commercial driver’s license in an effort to prevent recidivism and find a job.
“Everyone has found a place in it … and everyone is accountable,” West says.
But what made it work was the amount of coordination and organized approach in which city officials tackled the problem. If the city continues on this track for reducing its murder rate, it would be the first four years in a row that murders have dropped.
The Big Easy is currently making room so it can continue to fund the program with tax dollars, which will include more initiatives to step up economic opportunities for African-American men. Meanwhile, Bloomberg Philanthropies is expanding the program with $45 million and has called for more than 80 American cities to apply for funding.
MORE: Can $45 Million Worth of Data and Technology Improve U.S. Cities?
Can $45 Million Worth of Data and Technology Improve U.S. Cities?
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has long supported civic innovation, but the philanthropist is ramping up efforts to help local governments through his charitable foundation’s Innovation Delivery grants.
Bloomberg Philanthropies pledged $45 million to American cities looking to use big data and digital tools to help municipalities solve urban issues like economic development or infrastructure.
“We’re asking cities to do so much more,” says James Anderson, who heads up the innovation programs at Bloomberg Philanthropies. “We need cities to come up with bigger, better ideas more often, and we don’t want to leave innovation to chance.”
More than 80 prospective cities were invited to apply for a grant, which can range from $250,000 to $1 million annually for three years. Candidates must have at least 100,000 residents and a mayor in office for at least two years.
The Innovation Delivery grants will also come with a team of experts to help roll out the charity’s data-driven model, which has been developed based on programs in Chicago, Louisville, Atlanta, Memphis and New Orleans. The teams will serve as an in-house consultant agency for the recipients.
Touting success in the aforementioned cities, Bloomberg notes that using the Innovation Delivery model has led to Atlanta moving 1,022 homeless individuals into permanent housing and New Orleans reducing its murder rate to 19 percent in 2013. Meanwhile, retail vacancies in Memphis’s central economic corridor dropped 30 percent while Louisville was able to cut back the amount of ambulance responses redirecting 26 percent of 911 medical calls to immediate care centers or a doctor’s office.
“Innovation Delivery has been an essential part of our effort to bring innovation, efficiency and improved services to our customers,” Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer says in a press release. “Philanthropy can play an important role in expanding the capacity of cities to deliver better, bolder results. Bloomberg Philanthropies is one of few foundations investing in this area, and it has truly been a game changer for our city.”
Bloomberg Philanthropies will also fund any research, technical assistance and partnerships with other organizations that could expand the foundation’s model, according to the release. For cities that may not qualify or other interested lawmakers, the foundation has also compiled the Innovation Delivery Playbook, which outlines the approach through successful examples in the pilot cities.
Grant winners are expected to be announced this fall with the initiatives planned to kick off in spring 2015.
MORE: Watch: Rachel Haot on How Governments Should Adopt New Technology
Cities or Suburbs: Which Area is Seeing a Population Boom?
Close your eyes and picture idyllic tree-lined streets in a cheery suburban neighborhood. If you open your eyes, however, you might still see that image — only there might be a lot of “for sale” signs posted in front yards or dark houses due to vacancy.
That’s because cities are now seeing a population influx. According to census analysis by William Frey of the Brookings Institution, this could be the decade of big-city growth.
Analyzing data from 2010-2013, Frey was able to figure out that cities themselves — not just their metropolitan areas — grew at a measurably faster rate than suburbs, with “primary cities” (those with a population over 1 million) growing 1.13 percent from 2011 to 2012. At the same time, suburban areas grew at only .95 percent.
While the difference (and growth rate itself) may seem minimal, it reflects more significant changes that are happening in a select number of cities such as New Orleans; Washington, D.C.; San Jose, California; Austin, Texas; Raleigh-Cary, North Carolina; Denver; and Seattle. All those cities have even faster growth rates even faster than the national average!
Although there are a variety of reasons that people may be migrating back to cities, one that we’ve mentioned before is the rise of the innovation district – urban areas that are easily accessible and combine a variety of organizations and people advancing ideas and promoting ingenuity. These areas attract not only jobs, but because of their cosmopolitan and integrated feel, residents too.
Another specific driver of growth could be the new transportation initiative in Minneapolis-St. Paul, another booming city, according to City Lab.
So, does this mean the demise of white picket fences and two-car garages? Hardly. As the study points out, the suburbs are continuing to grow, albeit at a slower pace. But with growth, comes innovation — giving cities the upper hand.
Idea Village: 5 Things We Can Learn From the Folks Bringing Startups to New Orleans
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Can a Quieter New Orleans Still Be Fun? City Officials Are Betting Yes
Can a city play the role of parent? After former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s earnest public health efforts like curbing large soda sales and banning smoking in restaurants and workplaces earned him the dubious nickname “Nanny in Chief,” it would seem the answer is no.
And yet New Orleans, known as much for its rollicking bon temps atmosphere as it is for its Cajun flavor, is trying to lower its laissez-faire music reputation a bit. The New Orleans City Council introduced revisions to the city’s noise ordinance on Dec. 19, setting new limits on decibel levels, and with this year’s annual Mardi Gras parade filed away, it’s trying to strike a delicate balance between fun and order.
“It may be one of the biggest challenges anybody could imagine,” David Woolworth, a nationally-known sound expert with Oxford Acoustics in Oxford, Mississippi, who presented a report commissioned by the council on how best to revise the city’s noise ordinance, told The New York Times. In the wake of last week’s Mardi Gras, Woolworth is taking decibel measurements on the French Quarter’s infamously raucous Bourbon Street. “People just take for granted that that’s the way it’s going to be,” Woolworth said of the noisiest place in the city, and the biggest target for complaints by the neighbors.
Challenging (and nebulous) as it may be, the noise ordinance has some concrete points: Enforcing a maximum decibel level of 85 on the popular eight-block stretch of Bourbon Street, and maintaining a maximum level of 75 decibels in commercial areas between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. In perspective, the current ordinances puts the ceiling at 10 decibels above the ambient noise level, or 60 (whichever is higher) on Bourbon Street, and 80 in other commercial areas. Those five or ten decibels make a big difference when you’re trying to get a good night’s sleep.
Interestingly, business owners on Bourbon Street are willing to participate. Robert L. Watters, who owns Rick’s Cabaret and Rick’s Saloon on the strip, is so invested that he’s now the chairman of a state agency that manages the French Quarter. Though civic activists like Nathan Chapman doubt club owners’ ability to permanently enforce rules, Watters is intent on getting the “wild and woolly” band of Bourbon Street proprietors involved in the city’s power structure.
All that should placate locals like Glen David Andrews, a trombone player who has led a parade in the City Council chambers. Tamping down noise on Bourbon Street sounds tantamount to removing lights from Times Square, but both landmarks have something in common — they’re beloved by tourists, but they can be a nuisance to city residents, particularly ones who live near the ever-expanding tourist districts.
“The problem with Bourbon is you have a bunch of these new clubs and they’re not the essence of the city,” Andrews said. “They got jam bands and they’re just blasting music. At least in the ‘80s you still had classy joints.”
The ordinance doesn’t touch the nature of the clubs, but it has a chance to keep them under control. A well-managed, fun party scene may be the Bourbon Street of both tourists’ and locals’ dreams.