But the story of “The Big Easy” is never a simple or straightforward one, and a recent survey sheds light on the underlying complexities and contradictions inherent in our progress.

On January 25, 2013, Greater New Orleans, Inc. (GNO, Inc.), Southeast Louisiana’s 11-parish economic development organization, released Bridging the Perception Gap: Results of National Opinion Survey. According to its press release, GNO, Inc. commissioned Lake Research Partners to conduct the study “to understand how the rest of America views New Orleans, through their thoughts on doing business here, moving here, and quality of life.”

The survey was conducted in November 2012 in six target media markets - Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles/San Francisco, New York, and Washington, D.C. Over 1,600 registered voters were surveyed, including an oversampling of 500 college educated young professionals.

Not surprisingly, perceptions about quality-of-life, economic opportunity, and extreme weather events continue to persist. That said, one of the key findings was that four out of ten of those surveyed would consider moving here if given the opportunity. This number increased to six out of ten for individuals who have visited in the past two years, suggesting that visiting improves perception.

Residents know that there is much work to be done to ensure that Southeast Louisiana remains a habitable and affordable region for all the citizens who call it home. According to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, water management and other issues related to wetlands loss, skyrocketing rental rates, and persistently high poverty and crime rates are some of the city’s and the region’s most entrenched challenges. As GNO Inc’s perception study shows, however, recent quality-of-life wins are evident and contribute to a sense of momentum and optimism that is not lost on the visitors who fall in love with our city every day.

You can read the full Bridging the Perception Gap study here.

You can read more recent facts and figures from the GNOCDC here.

In fact, municipalities rely heavily on the tax dollars their business community provides. But often those projections fall short, and when they do, dollars allocated to city services like public safety and street maintenance get slashed.

Why do sales tax projections regularly miss the mark? One variable often overlooked by city governments is one that business owners in sectors like electronics and book sales are well aware of: the accelerating popularity of e-commerce which has seen double-digit quarterly growth in the US since 2010.

“Cyber Monday” is the Monday after Thanksgiving that in recent years signals the beginning of the online holiday spending spree. In 2012, Cyber Monday spending in the US soared to $1.46 billion, making it the heaviest online spending day in history, and putting it on track to be the heaviest spending day of the holiday season for the third consecutive year.

Since many large e-commerce retailers skirt sales tax collection, e-commerce represents a considerable depletion of needed — and anticipated— revenue from communities. Fortunately, municipalities and brick-and-mortar stores have a number of tools available to keep revenue from being siphoned from the local economy. The best strategies to increase sales tax revenue involve coordinated efforts between independent businesses and their local government.

One strategy is to pass legislation requiring large e-commerce retailers to collect and remit sales taxes. Since 2008, statewide coalitions of business and consumer interests in ten states including California, Arkansas, and North Carolina have resulted in the passage of “e-fairness” enforcement legislation. Such legislation is often misconstrued as a new tax. In fact, it enforces collection of existing sales tax due states and municipalities by online megaretailers as brick-and-mortars are required to do.

Educating consumers about the connection between where they spend their dollar and the direct benefits to their community’s health and safety is key. City governments can work closely with their local Chambers of Commerce, merchants’ associations and independent business alliances to communicate a unified message and create a strong “buy local” culture.

Independent retailers and their local governments have a mutual interest in a thriving local economy that generates a solid tax base to adequately fund community services. By working together, they can make sure that wealth is generated and retained locally.

Crowdfunding may help individuals finally start to reverse this trend.

Crowdfunding describes a group of individuals who pool their resources to support a particular project. Having spent the past few years garnering interest as a potential way for local residents to invest in local businesses or causes they support, crowdfunding received a major boost from the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, or JOBS Act. Signed into law by President Obama in April 2012 and passed with bipartisan support, the JOBS Act relaxed various depression-era securities regulations to allow for-profit enterprises to raise funds from everyday individuals.

In New Orleans, crowdfunding is already having an impact. Rebirth Financial has been providing loans funded by New Orleanians to New Orleans businesses since 2010. Loan recipient NOLA Brewery used their loan from Rebirth to purchase the equipment necessary to get their brews in cans. And New Orleans is one the nation’s three “Kiva Cities,” along with Detroit and San Francisco. Kiva, via Accion, provides micro-loans for New Orleans entrepreneurs who have been turned down by conventional lending sources.

As the SEC continues to hammer out rules for this new game, it may be years until we find out the true impact that crowdfunding has in redirecting investment from Wall Street to Main Street.

What is certain is that crowdfunding presents a mechanism by which we can keep our investment dollars in our local economy while benefitting the businesses and causes that we want to support.

Crowdfunding is one of several local investment opportunities that will be presented at the Local Investing 101 Workshop scheduled for February 27, 2013 in New Orleans. The workshop will be led by renowned economist and author Michael H. Shuman and is hosted by The Urban Conservancy and Stay Local! with assistance from the Twomey Center for Peace through Justice at Loyola University. Generous funding for the workshop is provided by IberiaBank and the Federal Home Loan Bank of Dallas. For more information, contact Mark Strella, Stay Local! Project Coordinator, at 504-561-7474 or mark@staylocal.org.

This article was written by Mark Strella, Stay Local! Project Coordinator. Strella holds a BA in Political Economy and Environmental Studies. When not grappling with thorny issues related to the local economy, you can find him playing guitar with local band Gold and the Rush.

Massey’s Professional Outfitters

Massey’s story begins 40 years ago in 1972 when it opened as a mom and pop sporting goods store in Metairie run by current owner Mike Massey’s parents and grandparents. For 20 years, the store focused on local team sports and grew to serve the expanding population of Jefferson and the river parishes.

When Mike and his brother-in-law Bobby Johnson came into the business as third generation shopkeepers in the early 90’s, they decided to focus on the sports that they loved; skiing, hiking, paddling, camping. It meant shedding some customers, probably a lot of revenue, and putting much faith in then-relatively obscure brands like Patagonia and North Face.

As the business grew to two stores, and then to three, and began to enjoy e-commerce success, Katrina helped them recognize what was missing from their formula: New Orleans. “No matter how connected we felt to the city,” says Mike, “It just wasn’t possible to convey that love of New Orleans from a suburb. To our customers, our staff, and our reps and brands— maybe even ourselves— we were just another store on the outskirts of a big metropolitan area. They all knew we were somewhere ‘around’ New Orleans but not exactly what that meant.”

After looking for properties all over town, they decided to take their chances on a flooded building in an area that was still largely deserted with mostly shuttered businesses surrounding them, and as Mike says, “it started sloooowwww…”

Forty years since Massey’s first ribbon cutting, and almost 5 years at their North Carrollton Avenue location, Massey’s is going strong. The Mid-City store is humming every day of the week, equipping outdoor lovers with everything from clothing to camping gear, and kayaks to bicycles.

Massey’s commitment to community projects that promote active lifestyles has been constant and significant, demonstrating their conviction that collectively, New Orleanians can build an economically, environmentally vibrant city.

Recipients will receive a commemorative “Where Ya Rack” bicycle rack to be placed at a location of their choosing to recognize their contributions to the creation of livable communities and their alignment with The Urban Conservancy’s core values

On September 25, 2005, mere weeks after the failure of the federal flood control system, Michael Ignatieff published an op-ed in the New York Times. Ignatieff’s thesis was that the failures of the levees and the ensuing lack of effective government response represented a breaking of the contract between this country and its citizenry. It was an important essay in that it put our post-Katrina debacle into a larger, more philosophical context than most of the essays written at the time.

I have thought of this piece often in the days since The Times-Picayune announced its decision to unilaterally discontinue the implicit contract between the paper and its readers. We readers assumed we had a deal. If we bought the paper and supported the businesses of its advertisers, and if the revenues were sufficient to sustain the profitability of the enterprise, then the paper would continue publishing. Yet, in the fall, the paper will cease seven-day-a-week publication and replace it with a three-day-a-week printed paper and online news coverage on nola.com.

Contrary to popular myth, The Times-Picayune remains a profitable enterprise although, as a private company, it is not obligated to share with the public exactly how profitable it is. This decision to focus on a web presence at the expense of the printed paper is an experiment, a gamble on the direction in which the future of journalism is headed. It also represents a clear lack of faith in the abiding devotion of regular newspaper readers.

Capitalism, we are too often reminded, is all about the capitalists. It is their choice when or whether or how to provide their products to us, the consuming classes. Our interest in supporting a daily, printed paper be damned.

If nola.com were a decent website, if it were possible to find a needle of news in the haystack of banner advertisements and “upload your photo” links, the loss of the printed paper might not be so bad. But the sacrifice of so good a paper in favor of so bad a website is a most cynical coupling of insult and injury. Even if the website contained all the information currently contained in the print edition, it’s unlikely anyone would be able to find it. A few weeks ago, nola.com unveiled a new design. I assume that by that point, the higher ups at the company knew that the daily newspaper was doomed and thus this redesign was a step into the new world of online news. So why did they choose yellow as the banner color for a nominally journalistic enterprise? If the owners are unfamiliar with the term “yellow journalism” and its attendant implications then they are clearly ill-positioned to be the avant-garde of this new journalism.

If New Orleanians were a web savvy tribe, equipped with the skills and equipment to browse the web effectively, then this new gambit might well serve their needs. But, as reported in thelensnola.org, “Subscribers to high-speed Internet services in New Orleans are generally white and in higher income brackets, according to a new nationwide study that also found Louisiana lags the rest of the country when it comes to accessing broadband technology.” What is to become of those loyal Times-Picayune readers who happen not to be Internet-connected? Have the paper’s owners given any thought to the racial implications of a web-based news service in a city where the majority of the citizens are black and a substantial portion of those black citizens do not have internet access?

Many people, several of my close friends among them, are unmoved by the demise of The Times-Picayune. Their moods have been ruined too often by stories they found biased, ill-informed, prejudiced or mean-spirited. I’ve been angered by the paper as well. But I’ve also been heartened on those occasions when the paper investigated or chronicled stories of importance to me and my community. It is a truism that local people hate their local newspaper. This perverse hatred is often expressed in renewed subscriptions. I don’t expect that the newspaper will ever be a better reflection of my own ideals. Still, I think our community will be greatly impoverished by its reduced presence.

Jim Amoss, the editor who guided the paper through its Pulitzer Prize awards, will remain in charge of news operations. He has said that the news organization will still be dedicated to quality, probing coverage of the community. But, even if we take him at his word, is it possible to maintain daily quality with thrice-weekly frequency? That is the experiment that the Newhouse family, the paper’s owner, is engaging in. It is trying this news model of journalism at The Times-Picayune, The Birmingham News, The Press-Register of Mobile and The Huntsville Times.

Suddenly we will have more in common with these communities than ever we thought possible (or desirable). Here too, the owners of our daily paper seem to have misjudged us. Even though they brag to potential advertisers that The Times-Picayune is unique, enjoying as it does a higher percentage of readership in its coverage area than any other paper, it undermines this claim to the uniqueness of this community and the paper’s relationship to it by foisting upon us a one-size-fits-all model that hasn’t even been proven effective in other communities.

As the novelist John Biguenet told us shortly after the storm, the great enemy of New Orleans culture is American culture. The Times-Picayune used to understand this. Its coverage, even its very name, suggested a somewhat idiosyncratic perspective in keeping with our idiosyncratic community. It’ll be hard to maintain such relevant coverage if decisions like these are made in New York.

Long before the internet, the daily newspaper was the virtual water cooler. Citizens from various walks of life and regions of the circulation area were brought together daily by a shared, though imperfect, vision of what was news, what was important, what was interesting. This thirst for community cannot be satisfied on a thrice-weekly basis.

I can’t imagine what daily print newspapers will look like a generation from now. But I remain convinced that newspapers will continue to exist and to be relevant in some form. Seen in this light the demise of our daily paper is less a result of the murderous forces of the Internet than it is a result of the suicidal inclinations of a company that has lost faith in its product.

Godspeed be unto all of us who have, depite all, kept the faith.

Read more about recent changes at The Times-Picyune.
—
Lolis Eric Elie is a New Orleans based writer and filmmaker. Most recently, he joined the staff of the HBO series Treme. Working with the award-winning director Dawn Logsdon, he co- produced and wrote the PBS documentary, Faubourg Treme: the Untold Story of Black New Orleans.

From 1995 to 2009, he wrote a thrice-weekly column for the New Orleans’ Times-Picayune.

A contributing writer to The Oxford American, his work has appeared in Gourmet, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Bon Appetit, Downbeat and The San Francisco Chronicle among other publications.

Follow Lolis on Twitter @LolisElie, and on Facebook.

Watch and Learn: “New Orleans Claiborne Corridor”, courtesy Level 3 Digital Media.

The City Planning Commission (CPC) announces the opening of a Master Plan amendment application period. According to the City Charter “at least once every five years, but not more often than once per calendar year… the Commission shall review the Master Plan and shall determine, after one or more public hearings, whether the plan requires amendment or comprehensive revision.” This year’s application period will run through August 5, 2011. The Master Plan can be reviewed and downloaded from the CPC website or the Master Plan website: www.nolamasterplan.org. Please review the following information pertaining to the amendment process.

1. What are the different types of amendment requests?
Proposed amendments may include changes to policies, the Future Land Use Map (FLUM), appendices or other components of the Plan.

2. Who may propose an amendment?
Anyone may propose an amendment to the Master Plan’s text. However, changes to the FLUM must be submitted by the owner of the property for which the change is requested. More sizable areas for possible amendment may be requested by a City Councilmember. An application form can be obtained from the City Planning Commission at 1340 Poydras Street, 9th Floor NOLA 70112.

3. When must a proposed amendment be submitted to the City?
According to the City Charter, the City Planning Commission may consider plan amendments once every year. As part of the first annual review, Master Plan amendments will be accepted June through August 5, 2011.

4. How is an amendment submitted?
A proposed amendment is submitted in writing to the City Planning Commission. A pre-application conference is required prior to submitting an amendment request to confirm that the request is germane to the Master Plan.

The proposed amendment must consist of at least:
a. A reference to the Master Plan chapter that is proposed for amendment and/or a map of the boundaries
b. Proposed amendment language
c. An explanation of why the amendment is being proposed
For more information on submittal requirements please refer to the application
packet.

5. What is the cost for filing an amendment?
In 2011, the first year of accepting applications, the City Planning Commission will not charge a fee for amendment requests or submissions.

6. What will happen once the amendment is proposed?
Once the amendment application packet is submitted for review, the City Planning Commission will schedule a public meeting and publish a notice in a local newspaper of general circulation at least fifteen days in advance of the meeting. For public benefit and convenience, these meetings may be combined Revised: June 14, 2011 with meetings to revise the Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance. In addition to the public meetings, the City Planning Commission will hold a formal public hearing. A staff report evaluating the requests according to criteria noted in the application will be available to aid the discussion. The Planning Commission’s recommendation will be forwarded to the City Council for final disposition.

The original document is posted here

This year, 15 walkers from as far away as Toronto and France and as close as around the corner joined The Urban Conservancy’s Dana Eness for the third annual “Only on Oak Street” walk on Saturday, May 7. Other New Orleans walks took place in the Irish Channel and on Freret Street. See photos from Jane’s Walks throughout the US.

About Jane’s Walks
Jane Jacobs was a brilliant urban proponent with a simple philosophy: if a city isn’t walkable, it isn’t functional. The more people-friendly a city’s streets, the safer and more dynamic they become.

Each year thousands across Canada and the US celebrate Jane’s work and vision with neighborhood walks the first weekend in May.

The Indie City Index also ranks cities within their region and within their population class, identifying those that outperform their peers.

Perhaps most useful for civic and community leaders, the index identified 36 metro areas that outperform their peers in both their region and their population class. While this list includes many of the leading scorers overall, there are a number of additional cities that rank as top performers by this measure, including New York; New Orleans; Portland, ME; Poughkeepsie, NY; Tucson; Louisville; Boston; Asheville, NC; and Charleston, SC. Read more.

To find out how your organization or business can volunteer, email lafittegreenway@gmail.com.

Over the past few weeks, in the wake of the fifth anniversary of Katrina, there has been particular focus on New Orleans’ relationship with water.

We have been hearing of innovative ways to provide increased flood and storm protection, not only with gates and pumps, but by more fully incorporating water into our city environment. But reactions to these insightful plans have also shown that there is a significant fear of water, in particular a fear of drowning, and this is affecting our ability to embrace these ideas. We need to address our collective fear of water in order to be in a stronger position to make the best decisions to protect our city and her people.

A first step in accomplishing this is to understand that providing access to water can be safer then trying to only protect ourselves from it. We need to have safe, comfortable, and fun ways for the people of New Orleans to engage with water. This, specifically, brings the example of the reconstruction of the revetments in Chicago along Lake Michigan to mind.

Chicago has the wonderful resource of Lake Michigan, in which many people swim. The continuous park that extends 20 miles along the lake’s edge has a combination of revetments and beaches. The old revetments were large stones that were stacked like a staircase coming out of the water. This provided a place for people to sit and get into the water, if they wanted. As these old revetments fell into disrepair, the Corps of Engineers came up with new designs for the revetments that consisted of large terraces of concrete ending abruptly at the water’s edge with a seven-foot drop-off to the water below. This caused a huge uproar as the citizens preferred the design of the old stone staircase revetments.

The primary concerns were comfortable and safe access to the water. With this new design, it wasn’t possible to sit with your feet in the lake, and it was very intimidating to get in the water. There was no place to hold onto if you got into trouble and only an occasional ladder to get out. And with the abrupt edge of the lowest terrace, it was much easier to fall in the lake by accident. One argument for the new design was that people should only be getting into the water at the beaches anyway, but if deterrence was the intent, clearly the only solution wasn’t to make it more dangerous in these other areas.

Neighborhoods that had the political will (Hyde Park specifically) were able to get the revetments redesigned to address these concerns. The revetment built here is based on the stone staircase approach and the benefits of thoughtful design at the water’s edge is notable. While it provides comfortable safe access for swimmers, it also does its job in creating an anxiety-free relationship with the water for the non-swimmer. People can comfortably sit on the edge without the concern of what may happen if they fall in. They can safely touch and engage the water, even as non-swimmers.

Here in New Orleans, Audubon Park, Bayou St. John, and City Park are good examples of places where you can walk up to the water’s edge and engage the water. And if you happen to fall in, you can get out with relative ease and minimal peril, as some young over-eager duck feeders can attest.

While there is a tendency to protect people from themselves, the way to do this is not to create barriers that are potentially more dangerous, but to give citizens safe access where they can be in control of their situation.

Before we are able to teach the majority of people to swim (which we need to do), we need to provide safe, comfortable, and fun ways for the people of New Orleans to engage the water where they are in control and feel like they are in control. And much of this can be accomplished with design and engineering that is sensitive to this issue.

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Taylor Galyean is a principal of Feldmeier Galyean, a New Orleans based architecture and design firm whose projects include: campus design, resorts, spas, and aquatic centers. Watch Taylor’s 2010 TedXnola talk on this subject here.

A concise video summary of The New Orleans Index at Five released by The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center (GNOCDC) and Brookings Institution urges cautious optimism. The Index includes a report called Measuring New Orleans’ Progress Towards Prosperity which provides 20 indicators (such as wages, affordable housing, public safety, coastal wetlands) in four broad categories (economic growth, inclusion, quality of life, and sustainability).

The indicators do in many cases suggest progress towards prosperity, with improvements in school performance, neighborhood quality, and median household income. But the report also acknowledges areas that need our continued attention, including overall population decline, displaced residents, lost housing, deficiencies in public transportation and crime rates. Read the full report here.

A new and sobering report from the Bureau of Governmental Research (BGR), titled The Price of Civilization, alerts us that the $67 million operating budget shortfall our city faces is a drop in the bucket compared to the billions needed to shore up and maintain our deteriorating street, drainage and sewerage systems. “Without prioritization and coordination,” says the report, “New Orleans risks making substantial investments in streets, only to have the work undone by leaking subsurface infrastructure. The city could end up with leafy neutral grounds flanked by neighborhoods that flood too easily.”

Even so, it is imperative that we analyze these challenges within the context of all that is right in post-Katrina New Orleans for two very important reasons. First, the good news stories are not merely window dressing or wishful thinking; we are seeing long-fought and hard-won profound, historic, systemic change in our city affecting access and equity, transparency and consistency. They show us what successful citizen-led transformation looks like when projects are indeed prioritized and coordinated. Second, recognizing these extraordinary victories for what they are strengthen our resolve to maintain our forward momentum through whatever challenges lie ahead.

In that hopeful spirit, the Urban Conservancy presents its “Top 10 Post-Katrina Victories List.” The items come in no particular order. We’d love to hear yours.

1. Master Plan and CZO. In early August, the City Council adopted the Master Plan that was developed with community input; creation of the Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance is underway. Both documents should provide assurances for developers, businesses, and residents of transparency and consistent application of rules and regulations. “The rules won’t change in the middle of the game,” says Councilwoman Jackie Clarkson. “You will not be able to just whimsy and whamsy change zoning.”

2. Engaged citizenry. This has been evident since Katrina, as individuals, neighborhood associations, and small nonprofits worked together to rebuild and renew their home town. The Master Plan, the Lafitte Corridor, the streamlining of assessor, levee board, and sheriff departments, the creation of the Inspector General’s office and the general vibrant localism all come from the passionate devotion of New Orleanians to their city.

City Park’s renaissance is another example of citizen engagement. Who can forget the ragtag volunteer brigade of residents living around the park, self-deprecatingly dubbed the “Mow-rons” who provided their own lawnmowers and labor to keep the park grounds under control when the Park staff had been decimated? Remember the Mow-rons fondly next time you visit this cultural and recreational jewel among urban green spaces. The New Orleans Museum of Art is surrounded by acres of playgrounds, bike trails, boat-friendly lagoons, and beautifully refurbished iconic mainstays like Storyland, Botanical, Sculpture and Carousel Gardens, as well as new amenities like the dog park and the Great Lawn.

3. Trees. Newly planted trees on South Claiborne, St. Claude, Louisiana, and other avenues are an important investment in future air quality and general quality of life. Starting with the guerrilla gardening in 2005 and 2006 - people planting in neutral grounds and sprucing up public spaces when the city was MIA — there has been a renewed focus on the benefits of greenspace, the tree canopy, and walking paths by individuals, nonprofits like Hike for Katreena, and the City.

4. Engaged city government. While we haven’t yet seen enough of Mitch Landrieu’s administration to judge it, early evidence suggests that there is much more focus on public policy, reform and fiscal accountability than we saw during C. Ray Nagin’s tenure. Mayor Landrieu has demonstrated that he is listening and thinking and actually doing. His emphasis on transparency, his commitment to opening the hospital in New Orleans East, his advocacy for better hospital design for the LSU-VA complex (link), and his administration’s functional working relationship with the City Council are all examples of a responsive City Hall. Many of Landrieu’s 100 Projects reflect the priorities of New Orleans’ citizens.

5. Transit improvements. Support for biodiesel busses, additional bike lanes and bike racks, pedicabs, and expansion of streetcar service are all indicators that alternative transit options are multiplying. We still have far to go to make New Orleans a bike friendly community, but it’s progress. And organizations like the New Orleans Metro Bicycle Coalition the NolaCycle Bike Route Project are keeping the biking community connected, informed, and engaged.

6. Education. While quality education options continue to fall far short of demand, the gap is perceptibly narrowing as innovative charter schools open and capital improvements in school facilities get underway, creating new learning environments.

Not every school has been or will be successful, but performance indicators suggest that we have made dramatic improvements over the dysfunctional school system that prevailed before the storm. These improvements coupled with Louisiana’s commitment to improving early childhood services through programs like Bright Start could result in major changes in our city’s PK-12 educational systems.

7. Cultural offerings. New galleries are popping up along commercial corridors like Oak Street, Freret Street, and St. Claude Avenue and 18 other areas throughout the city that have been designated Cultural Products Districts, enabling works of art to be sold tax-free and providing historic tax credits to stimulate commercial and residential investment. It is not coincidental that the music and theatre, restaurant and art scenes along these corridors are also vibrant.

8. NOLA Awareness. Both locals and the rest of the world increasingly see and appreciate our unique and fragile city and its surrounding region through a more nuanced lens. Part of this burgeoning awareness comes from the media saturation post-Katrina and post-Oil Spill, but if skyrocketing numbers of applications for slots in Tulane University’s freshman class are any indication, the attention is on balance good for the region.

9. Capacity for disaster response. There is still a long way to go before an effective coordinated disaster response plan is in place, but there is a growing recognition of the need for a coordinated response at federal, state and local levels in the case of a major event. Businesses are demonstrating growing awareness of the importance of planning for disruptions and New Orleanians have become skilled at developing persona disaster plans as well.

10. Criminal justice. Reform-minded Chief of Police Ronal Serpas doesn’t mince words; his new “You Lie, You Die” zero-tolerance campaign to rout out and immediately dismiss dishonest police officers is an example of reforms underway at tne NOPD. Development of advocacy organizations like Safe Streets/Strong Communities, creation of the office of the Independent Police Monitor, and top-to-bottom reform of the public defense system are all steps in the right direction.

What- we’ve hit 10 already? Well, here’s your lagniappe:

11. The World Champion New Orleans Saints. Enough said.

If there is a leit-motif to all of the documentaries, reports, memoirs and retrospectives on New Orleans five years after Katrina, it is this: we are a city that is at once rich in excess and desperately in need.

Both the Price of Civilization and the New Orleans Index at Five reports highlight a second, less headline-grabbing but equally resonant theme for residents shoring up our infrastructure, our levees and our coastline: prioritization and coordination. Between Katrina’s aftermath, the Great Recession, and the BP Oil Disaster, New Orleanians have developed organizational skills that make us a particularly scrappy and self-reliant tribe. Let’s reflect on our victories and revel in them for a moment, and then get back to work. There’s a lot left to do.