Land Use Tour

The Land Use Tours are using two separate routes this year. Please fill out the form below to select your route.

The tour will run on Saturday 10/18 from 1:30PM to 4:30PM.

Bus Only Tour:

• Hilton Riverside (Start)
• Four Seasons (WTC redevelopment)
• Governor Nicholls—Esplanade Wharves and Crescent Park
• NSA (height and redevelopment)
• Saint Claude back to Lafitte Greenway
• Lafitte Greenway (need for EDD and affordable housing)
• Canal Street (BioDistrict; Theater District; upper story redevelopment with fire code and floor plate challenges; pressure from tourism economy; retail attraction)
• Loyola Avenue (Plaza Tower; surface parking lots)
• Brown’s Dairy redevelopment (H3C vs. STRs)
• River District (Finish back at Hilton Riverside)

Walking Tour:

The participants will get picked up from the Hilton Riverside and be taken via bus to the start of the walking tour. The bus will also pick up participants at the end of the tour and bring them back to the Hilton Riverside.

Walking Tour starts at Cafe Reconcile on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard, which hosts a delicious menu of local cuisine and an innovative workforce development program preparing 16-24 year olds for a career in the restaurant industry, while also serving as a community hub. We’ll continue down historic Oretha Castle Haley Blvd, learning about the history of the area, a major center of African American commerce in the City and a hub of civil rights action, as well as a the redevelopment of the area and gentrification issues attendant thereto. Next, we’ll stop at H3C apartments, where the former Browns Dairy processing plant parking lot has been transformed into 192 affordable rental homes and 12,600 square feet of health and wellness facilities. H3C has received national recognition for its Health + Housing innovation providing care to residents and neighborhood residents. We’ll continue through the other portion of the former site Brown’s Dairy site, a project that serves as a cautionary tale for cities, initially proposed as affordable housing and currently a large bloc of commercial short-term rentals. We’ll end our tour on Harmony Circle, where we’ll see Tivoli Place, an historic 1917 hotel converted to apartments in the 1970s. Tivoli Place was redeveloped in 2024-2025 and received the Novogradac 2025 Historic Rehabilitation Award for Residential Development that Best Exemplifies Major Community Impact. The building contains 163 units set aside for low-income seniors and recently underwent a complete renovation. We might even get to step inside to view the Conrad Albrizio fresco, originally commissioned by Pan Am Southern Corporation in 1951 that was uncovered in the renovation, and thought to be lost in Hurricane Katrina. We’ll also discuss the history of Harmony Circle, formerly known as Lee Circle, which housed the City’s monument to Robert E. Lee until May 2017, after the City Council declared the four Confederate monuments in the City to be a public nuisance. During the tour, we’ll point out other local areas of interest in this vibrant corridor and provide additional information about the City’s Inclusionary Zoning program, including state preemption challenges and how we ensure ongoing feasibility.