Town-Like Mall in New Orleans Would Boast High-Density Residences, Retail
Leslie Williams
Times-Picayune
May 18, 2007
A mall that looks like a small town could rise from the rubble of the aging, flood-damaged, 80-acre Lake Forest Plaza.
A preliminary sketch from a prominent planning firm offers the first peek at the project in eastern New Orleans: the Renaissance Town Center.
Lowe's Companies Inc. announced this week that it will begin building a 140,000-square-foot home improvement store at the site near Interstate 10 and Read Boulevard in the next 30 days. Other construction probably will begin in the first quarter of 2008, said Gowri Kailas, majority owner of the site. Most of the Plaza buildings already have been demolished.
Kailas said he's putting together a financial package of at least $120 million to begin construction of roughly 850,000 square feet of retail space -- just one element of the plan for the Renaissance Town Center, a work in progress integral to city recovery czar Ed Blakely's redevelopment vision for the city.
A sketch of the plans, prepared by noted Miami architect Andrés Duany, shows a high-density mall of mixed uses: residences, retail stores, restaurants, offices, a cinema and a hotel.
"The hotel will have at least 120 rooms," said Kailas, who added that he expects work to begin on detailed construction drawings in the next month or so.
Duany -- who has received both praise and criticism for his part in the design of Seaside, a traditional-looking, dense, mixed-use resort community in Florida -- said there have been discussions about his future role in the project, which might lead to him becoming the supervisor of design for the Renaissance Town Center.
The Renaissance already has stirred some interest. Kailas said he's "in talks with at least 20 retailers: clothing, electronics, shoes and department stores."
While he's busy with that, city workers -- led by Lavon Wright, the community development specialist on Blakely's team -- are fine-tuning a land-use survey of the businesses and other structures surrounding the Renaissance site, said James Ross II, a city spokesman.
Blakely, who was hired to help run the city's recovery effort, recently designated the mall site and the surrounding area as one of 17 initial target zones in the city's post-Katrina redevelopment blueprint. The Blakely plan calls for investing millions of dollars of public money in each zone to attract private investment.
Land-use information from the survey "is critical to the creation of a development plan," which, Ross said, will define how the city can best stimulate economic activity in that area.
"As part of our development planning, we are working to identify which governmental agencies should locate there," he said, noting that the addition of those agencies will increase public access to services while also boosting foot traffic at the Renaissance Town Center.
Since Hurricane Katrina, more than 35,400 people -- about 37 percent of eastern New Orleans' population -- have returned, said Greg Rigamer, chief executive officer of GCR & Associates, who relied on a count taken in March and compared it with the 2000 census.
"The rate of repopulation in eastern New Orleans is among the higher resettlement rates in the city," Rigamer said.
According to his data, the eastern New Orleans population grew more than 50 percent from July 2006 to March 2007.
A resurging population should increase the odds that the Renaissance will succeed, as well as "location, location, location," Kailas said. A draft of a brochure promoting the Renaissance Town Center boasts that the site is highly visible from Interstate 10, easily accessible, 10 minutes from downtown and five minutes from the University of New Orleans.
The site also is within a tax increment financing district, said David Robinson-Morris, a city spokesman. A tax increment financing district allows a local government to capture new tax revenue generated in a designated area and reinvest in that area to finance improvements.
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Leslie Williams can be reached at lwilliams@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3358.