My fear after Hurricane Katrina was that the vacant houses and closed projects would create the real estate vacuum that would allow Treme to be gentrified to the point that it would lose its character. At a City Planning Commission meeting Monday, a proposal was discussed that would allow 20 buildings that were once commercial property that have become residential because of disuse to once again be commercial. The catch—the new businesses couldn’t be restaurants or bars, and they wouldn’t be allowed to offer live music.

Bruce Eggler at The Times-Picayune covered the story and quotes a letter to the commission from musicians Leroy Jones and Katja Toivola-Jones, who wrote, “Treme has historically and traditionally been a neighborhood that has nurtured live music and other cultural activities related to it. It is an area that is known for its continuing contributions to jazz music, and it should not be turned into a gentrified neighborhood at the expense of original culture.”

Association President Naydja Bynum contends with perfect reasonableness that this won’t stop musicians from playing in already-approved places, and while some of the issues at stake are different, the big picture is the same as in the French Quarter, where residents very reasonably ask musicians to respect their property and sleep habits.

The problem with this logic is that making music is fundamentally unreasonable. It’s not a rational response to the world, and it’s an unlikely way to make money. Still, it’s an essential part of the city, and not just as an economic engine. One of the things that makes New Orleans music unique is that music is a cultural practice first and a commercial product second. People don’t make music because there’s a market to exploit; they do it because it’s what the people around them do and did, and it’s what the generations before them did.

These practices shape communities, behaviors and values, and the city that people love to live in is the product. To now relegate live music to music marketplaces—clubs—many of which are segregated from the places people live, takes the social and cultural elements out of the equation.

As I’ve said before, City government needs to assert that live music is one of the city’s great assets and that it must be accommodated, and the city needs to do so in terms that don’t at the same recognize other interests as being equally valuable and locked in some sort of yin-yang dance with music.

Bureaucracy favors home owners and property values. Leave the question of where live music should be in the city to neighborhood residents and they’ll always answer, “Somewhere else.” Since the arts have traditionally been hazily valued in America—while property values can have clear, crisp prices attached to them—they’ve usually been sacrificed to mundane concerns tied to property values and home ownership, with those constraints bolstered by zoning regulations and ordinances that only reinforce those values. If the city doesn’t step up and join the discussion in a positive way, we’ll find our music and culture red-taped into mewling submission.