One of the Crescent City's most notable New Urbanism proponents is Pres Kabacoff, chief operating officer of Historic Restoration Inc., a development company principally known for converting unused industrial dinosaurs, such as the American Can Co. and the Federal Fiber Mills buildings, into apartment hives, with coffee shops, restaurants, dry cleaners, wine shops, workout centers, swimming pools and other on-site yuppie amenities -- a sort of old urban/New Urban synthesis.

But Kabacoff's post-Katrina vision includes more than inner-city conversions. His dreams run to a series of 10-acre, freshly built, densely populated New Urban enclaves between downtown New Orleans and Armstrong airport -- each of them a bit like one of his more controversial accomplishments: the conversion of the old St. Thomas public housing site into River Garden apartments, a mixed-income development replete with its own Wal-Mart Supercenter and, one day, a nursing home.

A lot of people don't like Kabacoff. I have mixed feelings. People don't like that his planned community done at the site of the razed St. Thomas projects co-opted with Walmart. But the architecture is at least an attempt at fitting the New Orleans look. At least he's doing something while other people just talk and bitch. However, I do like this quote from the same article, by, uh, now I can't find his name, anyway--"It's not the (New Urbanist) aesthetic that's wrong," he said, "it's the artificiality of something planned all at once. What we have in this city is something that developed over a very long period of time, with lots of incremental adjustments along the way. Sweeping utopian plans, I don't think would fit here. . . . Honestly I really fear the influx of experts."
- jimlouis 11-15-2005 4:08 am [add a comment]