The Great Works of David Waggonner

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Next City
J. David Waggonner III, FAIA

David Waggonner was born in Shreveport, Louisiana. He graduated from Duke University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1971 and Yale University with a Master of Architecture in 1975. Employed previously by the Architect of the Capitol, Bechtel Corporation, and DMJM/Curtis and Davis, he has been principal in the present firm and its predecessor since 1981. He has taught Architectural design at Tulane University and the University of Oregon, is a fellow of the American Institute of Architects, and is a member of the Association for Preservation Technology and the Society of Architectural Historians.

In Forefront this week, Sarah Goodyear asks whether rain gardens, detention ponds, bioswales, porous pavement and the like represents the way forward for a perennially cash-strapped and tradition-bound New Orleans.

David Waggoner is a slight man, with a soft voice and self-effacing demeanor. Thanks to his involvement with the Dutch Dialogues and the Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan, though, his influence in the way the city thinks about reconfiguring the post-Katrina landscape is profound. His firm, Waggonner & Ball Architects, is also deeply involved with another coastal reconstruction project, the post-Sandy Rebuild by Design competition in the New York-New Jersey area.

Waggonner, 63, comes from Louisiana political royalty. His father, Joe, was a congressman from Bossier Parish, just up the river from New Orleans, for 18 years. The younger Waggonner, who trained as an architect at Yale, has spoken admiringly of his father. But his own worldview is one that looks away from typical political solutions, and he talks about the challenges facing New Orleans in a way that explicitly rejects conventional forms of power.

“The issues that politicians talk about, those aren’t the real issues of the voter,” Waggonner says. “Politics — that’s when I despair, because politics should support the best, but politics plays of what’s divisive.”

As an architect, Waggonner has built projects all over the world. But ask him nuts-and-bolts questions — about, say, garnering public support for the water plan, or the feasibility of reversing generations of poor engineering decisions, or the decades of corruption both perceived and proven in New Orleans — and the conversation quickly becomes abstract. This isn’t an attempt to evade such questions. It’s simply his characteristic way of thinking about and tackling the underlying problems.

“The discussion is at once practical and esoteric, and it needs to be,” Waggonner says. “The real questions that leaders need to be solving are much deeper than the daily chatter. How do we become relevant to our own time? Our inability to grasp where we are in history, our inability to grasp our mythic place and the forces impinging on ourselves, leads to catastrophe.”

The only way to mitigate that catastrophe, in Waggonner’s estimation, is to fundamentally shift the way we manage the intersection of the built environment and the natural environment. And New Orleans, he says, is the perfect place to do it. “This is a vital river delta,” he says. “Are we going to give up on it?”

The plan’s architects imagine a New Orleans that not only deals with its own water problems gracefully and efficiently, but also serves as a model for other cities around the world. If the plan is executed as outlined, New Orleans will be able to serve as a sort of laboratory from all the most up-to-date thinking and design in stormwater management. These days, cities like Seattle and Philadelphia are on the cutting edge of green infrastructure treatment of water in the U.S. Plan backers in New Orleans want to put their city at the head of the class.

To that end, the water plan includes a number of demonstration projects that put “living with water” principles into action on a neighborhood scale. One of these is the Lakeview Floating Streets project, which calls for rebuilding buckling streets in a few square blocks near Lake Pontchartrain; paving them with pervious pavement; planting bioswales that will allow stormwater to percolate slowly into the underlying soil; bundling and burying utility lines; planting trees; and reconfiguring the street to allow for different modes of travel, including biking and walking. In significant downpours, this configuration would enable a “slow, store and drain” effect that would prevent the water from overwhelming the roadway or threatening homes.

Another, more high-profile demonstration project on the table is the “Lafitte Blueway,” a complete redevelopment of a strip of abandoned, derelict land connecting Lake Pontchartrain with the French Quarter. Where there are now fenced-off, abandoned industrial wastelands, the project envisions a linear park that focuses on an excavated waterway, complete with kayak launches, bike paths, playgrounds, community gardens and other amenities.

The benefits of the Blueway, according to planners, would not simply be environmental, but also economic. They envision it as creating a redevelopment corridor not unlike the one around New York’s High Line, or the area along the Chicago River. This economic angle is important because, again, none of this will come for free. Implementation of the plan as outlined would cost $6.2 billion, and while its backers say that financing options have been identified, the dollars have not yet been secured. Will it happen? “That’s the $6.2 billion question,” says Morris of the Royal Netherlands Embassy.

Article courtesy NEXT CITY —> http://nextcity.org/infrastructure/entry/forefront-excerpt-the-recovery-that-wasnt

 

Thank You Jeff Schwartz

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How One Determined Urban Planner Built a Job-Generating Lefty Foodie Xanadu in New Orleans

New Orleans | 02/07/2014 9:47am | 0
Bill Bradley | Next City

wholefoodsschwartz
Schwartz speaks at the Whole Foods grand opening Tuesday Credit: MIT School of Architecture and Planning Facebook

Conversations abound, some of them perhaps in dark bars, about what to do with abandoned buildings in urban cores. It’s less common when someone like New Orleans native Jeff Schwartz takes a pipe dream — transforming a vacant, 60,000-square-foot grocery store in the Mid-City neighborhood into a food hub — and makes it a reality.

Schwartz, 32, is executive director of Broad Community Connections (BCC), a non-profit working to revitalize a neighborhood marred by decades of disinvestment. On Tuesday, Whole Foods, the anchor of BCC’s ReFresh Project, finally opened its doors to customers.

ReFresh, which occupies a part of New Orleans where the median household income is $27,826 and 22.6 percent of residents are on SNAP, has many goals, from providing better food access to education. For this latest project, Whole Foods, Liberty’s Kitchen (a non-profit program offering culinary training to youth and meals to local public schools) and Tulane University’s Goldring Center for Culinary Medicine will occupy a former Schweggman’s grocery store, which has sat vacant since Hurricane Katrina.

The site before the ReFresh project came to town. Credit: Broad Community Connections Facebook

Whole Foods was the linchpin and name brand that tied the whole project together. But it almost didn’t happen. The Austin grocer balked at first. So Schwartz, an affable graduate of the city’s beloved magnet public high school, spent the majority of 2011 courting a dozen grocers. Then, in late December 2011, he scored an interview with the company’s co-CEO Walter Robb.

“I got dressed up in a suit for the first time at BCC. They all walked in wearing jeans and fleeces,” Schwartz told me. “I was like, ‘Okay, they’re more approachable than I thought they would be.” Schwartz and BCC expressed their vision for not only a grocer in an underserved area — something Whole Foods has been bullish on — but a broader food education effort. They wanted to make it a food hub for the entire neighborhood. It was an easy sell.

“That day, Walter [Robb] was like, ‘We’re doing it,’” said Schwartz, an urban planner who returned to his hometown to help with post-Katrina recovery after completing his degree at MIT in 2008.

The Broad Street Whole Foods will be the chain’s second store in the city. The first opened in 2002 in the city’s posh uptown shopping district, not far from Tulane University.

Broad Community Connections used various financing methods to make ReFresh a reality. Like the recently reopened Circle Foods in the Seventh Ward, the group received a $1 million loan from the city’s Fresh Food Retailer Initiative, half of which is forgivable. Another $900,000 comes from the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority’s Corridor Revitalization Program. Various streams of private investment (including Goldman Sachs and Chase) and, like many businesses in low-income areas, New Market Tax Credits (NMTCs) made the deal possible.

It’s the latter where Whole Foods’ savvy helped BCC make the ReFresh Project work.

“Really, the biggest subsidy in the project was NMTC,” Schwartz said. (Goldman Sachs provided a $10 million NMTC allocation and Chase another $8 million.) “And Whole Foods, rather than keeping their money in their own sort of pot, they actually put their development dollars in with all of ours. That increased the amount of NMTC that we were able to get by over $1 million.”

Liberty’s Kitchen and the Goldring Center are set to open in the next two or three months. Liberty is already making 12 bulk food products daily for Whole Foods — part of the grocer’s focus on local products — which will drastically help increase revenues.

“Jeff has really built Broad Community Connections from the ground up,” said David Emond, Liberty’s executive director. “He’s been a real visionary and has been committed to this project from day one, when most people thought it would never really have a chance at all.”

Schwartz said he’s nut sure how heavily BCC might involve itself in future projects in the corridor — its hands are full with ReFresh — but hopes it will jumpstart other investments. “It’s going to have a significant impact in bringing people to Broad Street,” said Marla Nelson, associate professor and program coordinator of the Urban and Regional Planning Program at the University of New Orleans. That was Schwartz’s idea from the beginning

“We’ve always envisioned this project as being an anchor for small business development,” Schwartz said. “And we’d like to see some residential, preferably affordably or at least mixed-income development, in the rest of the corridor.”

Article courtesy NEXT CITY –> http://nextcity.org/equityfactor/entry/whole-foods-new-orleans-refresh-jeff-schwartz-project-refresh?fb_action_ids=10153791252005137&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_ref=.UvU9A1kdsjI.like&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=[625662207469569]&action_type_map=[%22og.likes%22]&action_ref_map=[%22.UvU9A1kdsjI.like%22]