I guess I should be happy about what’s going on in New Orleans.

Remember when Ed Blakely, Executive Director of Recovery Management for the City post-Katrina predicted a speedy recovery for the city? He said (and I paraphrase) that we’d be seeing cranes across the skyline of New Orleans, rebuilding the city?

I guess he didn’t understand that New Orleans is a slow-slow town, and it was beaten up pretty badly; it’s taken almost a decade to fee the fulfillment of that prediction.

Everywhere you look, there’s construction. It’s getting impossible to find a reasonably-priced placed to buy a home or even to rent.

The city is booming.

I don’t believe I’ve ever lived in New Orleans when there were so many new people moving to the city, and when there was so much economic activity, and of course, that’s a very good thing for the economy and the city…ostensibly.

Because OffBeat is based in promoting music, the arts and culture, I perceive our situation in the city as a very mixed blessing. One of the reasons New Orleans has always been a “fertile crescent” for creatives is that artists (and I’m counting musicians as artists), could live here relatively cheaply.

But, as Benny Grunch has said: “Ain’t dere no more.”

Try finding a decent one-bedroom apartment for under $1,000 a month. Of course, I guess that’s cheap by New York City or San Francisco standards, but New Orleans businesses don’t have the economy to pay people a lot of money. We’re still based in the hospitality industry, for the most part, and last time I checked those jobs didn’t pay that well, unless you’re in management.

The housing market is just off the charts, at this point. Our dear neighbor, who died over a year ago, left a house that was repossessed by the bank; it recently went on the market, and the real estate agent who was handling the sale told me there were 15 offers on this house (two bedroom, one bath, old kitchen) within a couple of days. This is in Central City, which is still being touted as being “dangerous” and place you don’t want to live (funny, we’ve lived there for close to 20 years. Love it). Central City is now on its way to becoming a premier place to live. Just look at Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard’s development.

In a way, it’s sort of like Katrina all over again: back then the housing stock had been destroyed, so there was no place for people to live, literally. I remember that many of us in music wondered what would happen to our musical culture if all the musicians—who often struggle to make ends meet—were forced out of the city. We know that they did leave because they were forced to, but many did come back.

It’s a whole different kind of displacement now; there are people moving into the city who have more money to spend, which is driving the cost of housing way, way up. People who don’t make a lot of money (artists!) have to move because they can’t afford the rents. Where are they going to go?

Gentrification. Gotta love it, gotta control it, gotta keep New Orleans affordable. Gotta look to keep our creative cultre, which means making room for people of every socioeconomic stripe.

Someone needs to figure out how to create affordable housing in New Orleans for the people who already live here. We need to create a sense of community between the people who have lived here for years and the new folk who are moving in.