It was a sad Mardi Gras in the winter of 2006. Tens of thousands of New Orleans residents had yet to return to the city following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. The cleanup efforts were bogged down in destroyed neighborhoods. The mayor was clueless. Abandoned cars were piled up under Interstate 10 downtown. Tourists were scared to make the trip to the Crescent City.
What a difference a decade makes. I was in New Orleans for two nights last week, and it was hard to ignore the progress. Construction is taking place all over downtown. New hotels and restaurants open on almost a weekly basis. I spent a lot of time there in those slow recovery years of 2006-09 in my role as a presidential appointee to the Delta Regional Authority. I was with my family on vacation in Florida when the call came in August 2005 that I had received the DRA appointment.
We had planned a stop in New Orleans on the way back so my wife and I could show our two sons the city where we had honeymooned. We attended Mass on a Sunday morning at St. Louis Cathedral and followed that with breakfast at Brennan's. We pulled out for Arkansas the next morning, exactly two weeks before the levees broke and people around the world watched the destruction of an American city on live television.
I continued to work in the Arkansas governor's office through the end of September 2005. All of us there were consumed with housing thousands of evacuees from Louisiana. I went to work Oct. 1 for the DRA, a regional planning and economic development organization whose territory includes much of Louisiana and Mississippi. As I traveled to New Orleans on a regular basis, I was among those who doubted the city would ever recover.
Then, something amazing began to happen. Talented entrepreneurs saw opportunity where others only saw only destruction. Here's how the New York Times put it in an article last year: "Old-school Southern men of commerce can still be found here heading to work in seersucker suits in the heat of the hurricane months. They still swap gossip at the private Boston Club and sip Friday-afternoon sazeracs at Galatoire's, the white-tablecloth grande dame of Creole cooking, just across Canal Street in the fabled French Quarter. But in the post-Katrina reality of the Central Business District, these proud and timeless creatures co-exist with a small band of entrepreneurs and techies who lounge, in the glow of laptops, on Swedish-style furniture. ... The start-up scene here is, to a great extent, a deliberate construct, built by a small, aggressive group of boosters who believe that this city, so careful to honor its past, must innovate its way to a future that isn't so reliant on the old standbys of the oil, gas and hospitality industries."
Michael Hecht, president of the economic development agency Greater New Orleans Inc., explained: "New Orleans attracted some of the best and most passionate people in the world after Katrina to help rebuild. You just had a talent influx. A lot of people saw New Orleans as the Peace Corps with better food." Richard Campanella, a Tulane University geographer and author, estimates that 15,000 to 20,000 young professionals migrated to New Orleans after the storm because they saw opportunity there. Forbes reported that the years after Katrina saw the influx of "YURPS, or Young Urban Rebuilding Professionals--urbanists, environmentalists and social workers who headed south to work in the recovery efforts, in nonprofits and government programs, seeking to be part of something important. After that came a wave of well-educated professionals, who saw personal opportunity in the city's rebuilding economy. ... Along with them, says Campanella, have come a fair number of artists, musicians and creative types seeking to join in what they perceived to be an undiscovered bohemia in the lower faubourgs of New Orleans."
The population of college graduates in the New Orleans metropolitan area increased by 25 percent--almost 44,000--from 2007-12, doubling the national average for growth. Even Louisiana natives caught the entrepreneurial spirit. Take, for example, New Orleans lawyer Trey Fayard. He's the man behind GLO, the New Orleans-based regional airline that launched in November with daily flights to New Orleans from Little Rock, Memphis and Shreveport. Mike Maulden of Entergy Arkansas is among those who has to travel frequently to New Orleans since Entergy Corp. is headquartered there. Maulden told Forbes: "This is the single biggest opportunity for Entergy. For us, there will be an increase of productivity and decreased expense."
Or take brothers Marviani, Zeid and Richy Ammari, who transformed a small group of daiquiri shops into a company now known as Creole Cuisine Restaurant Concepts. Creole Cuisine operates a dozen full-service restaurants with more on the way. The lineup includes such well-known names in the French Quarter as Broussard's, The Bombay Club and Café Maspero. Zeid Ammari recently told Biz New Orleans magazine: "The city is growing at an unbelievable speed. ... The business community is feeling a tremendous growth, and you have to react to that."
New Orleans, like many urban centers, has its challenges. But as I walked around the French Quarter, the Central Business District and the Warehouse District last week, I marveled at the difference a decade has made. As we head into Fat Tuesday next week, there's much to celebrate in a city that long has been a favorite of visiting Arkansans.
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Freelance columnist Rex Nelson is the director of corporate communications for Simmons First National Corp. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.
Editorial on 02/03/2016