News Roundup

Planning board OKs Home Depot: But panel rejects proposal for sign

Times-Picayune
October 02, 2006
By Bruce Eggler

Plans for the largest addition to the New Orleans retail market since Hurricane Katrina have won the endorsement of the New Orleans City Planning Commission, with one significant adjustment.

In approving construction of a giant Home Depot store at Earhart Boulevard and South Claiborne Avenue, the commission voted to reject Home Depot’s request for a waiver that would have allowed a sign 75 feet in the air, aimed at traffic on nearby elevated roadways. The site’s zoning limits signs to heights of 12 feet.

The final decision on all aspects of plans for the store is up to the City Council. The site is in Councilwoman Stacy Head’s district.

With thousands of home and business owners repairing or rebuilding their properties in the wake of Katrina, demand for home-improvement supplies is at record levels in the New Orleans area, retailers say.

Of Home Depot’s 750 stores in the Southeast, three of the top 10 in sales are in Jefferson Parish. Each of the three is on track to generate about $100 million in sales this year, or about twice as much as a typical Home Depot outlet.

Home Depot’s chief rival, Lowe’s, also is looking for additional store sites in the area. Weekly sales volume at the Lowe’s on Elysian Fields Avenue climbed by 200 percent to 300 percent after Katrina, making the store one of the 10 highest-volume Lowe’s outlets in the United States, manager Joe Banks said.

Besides the planned Earhart store, which would be even larger than Home Depot’s standard outlets, the chain recently opened a half-sized store at the site of a former Winn-Dixie supermarket at 500 N. Carrollton Ave.

The Earhart store would have 116,000 square feet of interior floor space, about 14,000 square feet more than the typical Home Depot, plus a 34,600-square-foot outdoor garden center.

It would be built on a 12.3-acre site bounded by Earhart, Magnolia and Erato streets and the Claiborne Avenue overpass. The store would face Magnolia but would be built closer to Claiborne, with the garden center next to Earhart.

The site, between the Guste and B.W. Cooper public housing complexes, is zoned light industrial and covers six blocks. It formerly held several houses and a scrap metal yard. Home Depot has spent about $3.5 million to buy the land. It also expects to buy the streets and rights-of-way that cross the site.

The city’s Housing Conservation District Review Committee voted in July to authorize demolition of 13 houses on the site, most of them deteriorated and many of them vacant. Much of the demolition has been completed.

Home Depot’s plans call for a 535-space parking lot between the store and Magnolia, but the Planning Commission recommended reducing that to 502 spaces and including a pedestrian walk through the lot.

According to a report by the Planning Commission staff, “the developer proposes a building facade that is slightly upgraded from the standard prototype. It features split-face concrete masonry units in contrasting colors of beige and brown.” Corniced columns, indentations and projections would break up the long, flat walls, and the site would be surrounded by hedges, trees and iron or masonry fences.

Although the city’s design standards for big-box stores limit detached signs to heights of 12 feet in inner-city neighborhoods, the planning staff recommended letting Home Depot have a single 75-foot-tall pylon topped by two 17-by-17-foot signs. The staff said the waiver was justified because “the applicant is proposing only one detached sign where there is the potential for four” and because “there are several raised roadways in the vicinity.” But the commission disagreed, voting 6-0 to deny the sign waiver when it approved the overall plans Tuesday. Chairman Tim Jackson said he would prefer to see more small signs than a single towering pylon.

A similar issue arose this summer in the case of a proposed Lowe’s home-improvement store on part of the site of the closed Lake Forest Plaza shopping mall in eastern New Orleans. The Planning Commission recommended that a proposed pylon sign 60 feet in the air and directed toward traffic on Interstate 10 should be limited to 35 feet, the highest elevation for signs allowed in that part of the city. But at the request of Councilwoman Cynthia Willard-Lewis, the council agreed to let the company have the higher sign.

The Planning Commission did not hold a public hearing on the Home Depot proposal because it was considered as a “design review,” not a zoning petition.

The store is expected to open in late 2007