Officials with the Baton Rouge Area Chamber and Greater New Orleans Inc. on Thursday released the dates of their first joint canvass trip.

While the exact details of the trip are still being worked out, the plan is to spend three days and two nights in central Florida, with each city getting “kind of equal billing,” said Lauren Hatcher, a BRAC spokeswoman.

Officials say central Florida was selected for the trip for several reasons. Tampa and Orlando are about as far apart from each other on Interstate 4 as Baton Rouge and New Orleans are on Interstate 10. The demographics of both regions are similar to each other, even though central Florida has a larger population.

Five areas have been identified as fields where central Florida can serve as a model to south Louisiana: super-regionalism, digital media, health care, crime and international trade.

“Central Florida has a lot for us to learn from, particularly in how our two regions can collaborate to further economic development in southeast Louisiana,” Adam Knapp, BRAC president and CEO said in a news release.

Since 2003, BRAC has made eight canvass trips, visiting cities such as Austin, Texas; Nashville, Tenn.; Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; and Louisville, Ky. But this is the first time GNO Inc. has participated.

Michael Hecht, president and CEO of GNO Inc., said the joint trip is symbolically important of the relationship between metro New Orleans and the Capital Region.

“This is another step together,” he said.

“The impetus behind this super-region effort is that the business community already views New Orleans and Baton Rouge as a single community, with a single laborshed,” Hecht said.

Hatcher said she has gotten a lot of questions from business and political leaders who are interested in the super-regional aspect of the canvass trip and the chance to network with people from Baton Rouge or New Orleans.

“We’ve gotten strong feedback and now that we have announced the location, we expect a pretty strong response,” she said.

The trip will be limited to between 125 to 150 participants, with a goal of having equal representation from Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Hatcher said.

Registration for the trip will begin next month. For more information, go to the canvass website at http://www.srccanvas.com/.

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Economic development officials say it’s the payoff from years of work to improve the business climate in Louisiana from a time when the state was faltering and watching other areas excel.

“We sent our best and brightest, our sons and daughters, to other states,” Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal said. “We couldn’t offer them the best career opportunities.”

He insists that has now changed.

“By fostering an environment where businesses want to invest, we are creating a new Louisiana,” the governor proclaimed. “The payoff for all of us is that our sons and daughters, our children and grandchildren, will be able to find the best jobs and the most rewarding careers right there in Louisiana.”

New national rankings of metro areas have New Orleans in the top 12 for growth.

Michael Hecht is the President and CEO of Greater New Orleans, Inc. He is celebrating the rankings. Hecht says it’s based on population and GDP growth in the region.

Bloomberg Rankings and Nikhil Hutheesing say on the Bloomberg website that the New Orleans-Metairie-Kenner area is #2 on the list of Top American Boomtowns.

“The area is growing as it rebuilds from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Tourism is booming, and the New Orleans area gained more residents than any other in the U.S. from 2007 to 2011,” The article states. “The population rose to 1.2 million in 2012, and there’s plenty of job growth in heavy construction and even the television and motion picture industry, according to New Orleans demographer Allison Plyer. The unemployment rate, at 5.9 percent, is below the national average.”

The Top 12 American Boomtowns according to Bloomberg are:

1. Austin-Round Rock, Texas
2. Greater New Orleans, Louisiana
3. Raleigh-Cary, North Carolina
4. San Antonio, Texas
5. Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, Texas
6. Washington, D.C. Metro Area
7. Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
8. Nashville-Davidson-Murfreesboro-Franklin, Tennessee
9. Portland-Beaverton Oregon, Vancouver Washington
10. Charlotte-Gastonia-Concord, North Carolina
11. Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, Texas
12. San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, California

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The report, authored by the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, concluded that the three regions have key industries in common — and many similar challenges. The threat of coastal erosion touches on all south Louisiana communities, but in collaborating on research aimed at coastal restoration, leaders can build a body of expertise that can be marketed to other coastal communities around the world.

That’s just one opportunity for economic cooperation among these neighboring regions. The Baton Rouge Area Chamber and its Crescent City counterpart, Greater New Orleans Inc., are already seeking business development opportunities in digital media and software design.

We hope such collaboration continues, and expands. Similar teamwork among neighboring regions in other states, such as Tampa and Orlando in Florida and Austin and San Antonio in Texas, have reaped big rewards. By working together more closely, New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Houma might score a few big wins, too.

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Researchers, though, with Bloomberg rankings looked even deeper by sorting through census and gross domestic product data.

They found the New Orleans, Metairie and Kenner area make up the second biggest boomtown in the United States.

“These are numbers about population and growth and we know that we are the fastest improving city in the country,” says Michael Hecht of GNO Inc.

Researchers found that the New Orleans area gained more residents than any other in the U.S. from 2007 till 2011.

“We’re back to 94 percent of our Pre-Katrina population with about 1.2 million and they’re coming back here because simply as a family, an individual or as a company, you can do more for less here,” says Hecht.

The unemployment rate is 5.9 percent, which is below the national average.

Researchers also pointed to plenty of job growth with heavy construction throughout the city.

“Of course, you have the medical corridor. That’s thousands of jobs for people that are going to be building 3 billion dollars of new healthcare facilities. All along the corridor literally tens of billions of industrial projects are being driven by low national gas and oil prices,” says Hecht.

Tourism numbers were certainly a factor in helping to rank the New Orleans region so high on the booming list.

“In 2012, we welcomed 9 million travelers which was more than any other year since 2004 and it’s by far our highlight year since Katrina,” says Kelly Schulz of the Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Schulz says those travelers spent 6 billion dollars in New Orleans in 2012.

Schulz says when large companies are shopping around for their next convention destination, they look for some of the same things as the Bloomberg researchers.

“Imagine if you’re planning a meeting for 30 thousand medical professionals or school teachers, you need to know that New Orleans has the infrastructure, population and staffing to handle that,” says Schulz.

“It’s really important that our message is targeted broadly and that’s what we are trying to do,” says Hecht.

The only area in the U.S. booming more than New Orleans is the Austin, Texas area.

The Raliegh-Cary, North Carolina area rounds out Bloomberg’s top three boomtowns.

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But possible and persistent obstacles must be avoided for the parish to reach its potential.

The $850 million ammonia plant planned for Waggaman indicates the parish offers amenities suitable to the industrial industry: strategic vacant land and proximity to the Mississippi River and complementary businesses.

On what could be considered the opposite end of the spectrum, Smoothie King is moving its corporate headquarters from Covington to Metairie following a transition in ownership. Wan Kim, the sole franchisee for South Korea, has taken over the company from founders Steve and Cindy Kuhnau, who founded the business 40 years ago in Jefferson Parish.

Michael Hecht, CEO of the regional economic development group Greater New Orleans Inc., says Kim selected Jefferson, specifically the Lakeway property at the foot of the Pontchartrain Causeway, because of its central location.

“I think what you’ll find is that businesses see Jefferson as physically being the heart of the region,” Hecht said.

If that’s the case, then retail is the lifeblood pumping through its main arteries. Commercial real estate activity along Veterans Boulevard, Clearview Parkway and Manhattan Boulevard is fueling growth, with the Huey P. Long expansion expected to lead to further variety in the business makeup of Jefferson. For example, the complexion of Elmwood is expected to change now that the footprint of the Elmwood Shopping Center property has been filled with a host of new retail options. As such, real estate experts believe the area could see a move away from its traditional warehouse/industrial legacy.

But the decision of Starr Textile Services to build a $10 million industrial laundry facility in Elmwood shows that it won’t be a dramatic change.

Fat City could be where the overhaul is most noticeable, with new laws having already forced old-line, adult-oriented businesses out of the neighborhood. In their place, Hecht sees opportunity for startup companies and young families to take root, much in the same way the Warehouse District in New Orleans has been reimagined albeit on a much large scale.

“One thing that Jefferson Parish lacks is a true town center, and it could be that Fat City becomes this,” as it undergoes its transition, he said.
There are obstacles that Jefferson Parish must overcome to reach its economic potential, namely a subpar school system that is at the nascent stages of a charter movement. Plus, the Huey P. Long expansion is expected to exacerbate existing traffic issues on surface streets not designed for the anticipated increase in vehicle volume.

Another potential setback could take place at its publicly managed hospitals, which face looming competition from the facilities under construction in Mid-City, in addition to Ochsner’s intent to grow its market share.

Hecht notes that a dated housing stock could also present issues for Jefferson Parish, although families seeking newer accommodations have options in nearby St. Tammany Parish as well as the River Parishes.

On the upside, he notes the education reform movement is under way, and cosmetic efforts such as the art installations along the Veterans Bouelvard median provide a tactile glimpse of the “next Jefferson.” Plus, a $650 million expansion of Armstrong Airport is on the table.

Jefferson finds itself at an enviable juncture of time and location. It’s next door to a city that’s experiencing its own high-profile rejuvenation, thanks in large part to serving as its springboard for recovery after Hurricane Katrina.

With its unfortunate political history hopefully behind it, Jefferson stands poised to continue its economic growth and diversity.

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Mayor Landrieu says the new terminal will be built on the north side of the current airport property. He says it should cost more than $800 million and be finished in 2018 — the city’s 300th anniversary. The plan comes after $300 million was spent spiffing up the old terminal in time for the Super Bowl.

Greater New Orleans Incorporated President Michael Hecht says the money spent on renovations was not wasted.

“We had no choice. But now, where we are today, looking forward, the most cost efficient and revenue efficient way to go forward is to build new.”

Hecht says the aging design was expensive to operate.

“If you notice in a modern airport all of the retail is behind security when people are kind of a captive audience. In our airport, most of the retail is in front of security and so their sales are about 50 percent lower than they would be in a modern airport setting.”

He says the increased revenue will help attract more flights, because having planes at the airport will become cheaper for airlines.

Landrieu says the cost estimate includes improved access from Interstate 10, a power plant and an on-site hotel. He says the terminal will be paid for with funds generated at the airport, with state and federal funds. He says no city money will fund any part of the project.

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Local economic development leaders said they welcomed the study released Tuesday by the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center because it confirms that their efforts to strengthen regional ties are on the right track.

“This supports the direction we had begun moving in,” said Michael Hecht, president and CEO of Greater New Orleans Inc., a regional economic development alliance that serves the 10 parishes around New Orleans. “To compete with other markets, we need a critical mass that takes us to the next step.”

Several years ago, board members from GNO Inc. and the Baton Rouge Area Chamber came together to form the Southeast Super-Region Committee to foster cooperation on issues of mutual interest for both cities, such as education reform, boosting international trade, coastal restoration, inter-regional transportation, and airport and flight connectivity. Last year, the group won a gold medal from the International Economic Development Council for “Regionalism and Cross-border Collaboration.”

More projects are in the works to boost the ties between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The two cities are teaming up for a joint visit to Tampa and Orlando, Fla., this fall to further develop a super-regional economic development policy, Hecht said. And the cities will co-host a south Louisiana tour for site selectors, he said.

“Our alignment happened fairly well,” said Adam Knapp, BRAC president and CEO.

Now it’s just a matter of folding in Houma-Thibodaux to the ongoing efforts, he said.

The GNOCDC study said the three south Louisiana cities have key industries in common, such as sophisticated heavy construction, engineering and scientific consulting, higher education and water transportation.

But these mature legacy industries are projected to have sluggish growth over the next few years. The three cities are projected to see annual job growth increase by 1.4 percent a year through 2020. In contrast, the super region of Austin-San Antonio and major cities such as Houston, Atlanta and Raleigh, N.C., are all projected to see job growth of more than 2 percent a year over that same period.

GNOCDC said the southeast Louisiana region has a number of existing connections. For example, the oil and gas industry served by Houma-Thibodaux’s Port Fourchon and the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port provides the feedstocks that are used by the petrochemical and chemical plants in metro Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

“We’re very intertwined on a workforce basis,” Knapp said. “There’s a lot of migration from the workforces in the region.”

The report said this interconnection and experience in areas needs to be directed toward emerging industries, an idea that mirrors the state’s “blue ocean” initiative for economic development. In the blue ocean strategy, Louisiana stakes out economic development opportunities that haven’t been exploited by other states.

One blue ocean initiative that plays into southeast Louisiana’s strengths is the industry for rebuilding coastal marshes, which utilizes the regional expertise in heavy construction and engineering. The report said not only could this shore up key components of the south Louisiana economy, such as refineries, ports and chemical plants, but it could be used to protect other areas of the country that face increased flood risks.

Southeast Louisiana cities, along with the Louisiana Economic Development department, are pursuing similar business opportunities in an effort to diversify their economies, the report said. BRAC and GNO Inc. are looking for opportunities in digital media and software design.

The south Louisiana Economic Development Council in Thibodaux is pursuing opportunities in equipment manufacturing and metal fabrication, similar to the fabricated structural materials that BRAC has targeted and the advanced manufacturing sought by GNO Inc.

Hecht said that while all three regions have worked together on an ad hoc basis on certain issues, such as the federal moratorium on offshore drilling that came down in the wake of the BP disaster, the goal is to formalize a more efficient relationship.

“We’ve made assumptions about a lot of our strengths and now we have great data as we work forward,” Knapp said.

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For much of the last 20 years, the city was wilting in plain sight. In the 1990s, a period during which the U.S. added 21 million jobs, New Orleans didn’t just lose jobs; it also lost people. With tourism filling the void left by manufacturing, wages fell way behind the national average. It was place to bring a bachelor party, but not a bachelor’s degree, and certainly not a business.

And then, in 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit.

Days later, 80 percent of New Orleans was underwater. More than 1,200 people were dead. In a year, the city lost more than 90,000 jobs — more than the number employed by the local education, transportation, and manufacturing sectors, combined — and $3 billion in wages disappeared. A city already in decline had suffered perhaps the worst natural disaster in American history.

There are three ways things could have gone.

In the first story, New Orleans slides into its own wet grave, another urban tragedy of geography and economics. In the second story, New Orleans rebuilds itself as it was before — a sleepy southern belle of a town serving up wet weekends of intemperance. In the third story, Hurricane Katrina somehow kickstarts an age of innovation and an economic renaissance in a city written off for dead.

The Big Easy has chosen the third path — the hard path, and their struggle has revealed both the tantalizing allure, and the deep challenges, of reinventing a city.

‘To Hell With It, We’re Going Home’

Kenneth Purcell is evangelical about New Orleans. This makes him more or less like every other person you meet in New Orleans.

When Hurricane Katrina struck, the tech entrepreneur with shoulder-length hair watched from a high rise on Lafayette Square as the water overcame the streets. “Like every other good redneck, I said ‘I’m not leaving,’” he told me.

Ten days later, he left.

Purcell moved his budding start-up to New York, where he stayed for the next two years building iSeatz,com, a service that lets shoppers book multiple travel arrangements on one website. But in the undertow of national fatalism about the city’s future, Purcell found himself pulled back home. He wanted to prove a point, to make a stand.

“I got so pissed off at the headlines about the city, with company after company leaving, that I said, ‘To hell with it, we’re going home,’” he told me just blocks from Lafayette Square, at a conference on entrepreneurship (I attended and spoke at the conference last month). “And it was the best decision I ever made.”

iSeatz has grown its platform from $8 million in gross bookings in 2005 to $2 billion in 2013. It’s clearly one of the city’s biggest homegrown tech breakthroughs. Then again, it is also one of the city’s only homegrown tech breakthroughs.

Purcell is a member of New Orleans’ boomerang generation — a group of proud, young- to middle-aged reformers who came back to New Orleans in the wake of Katrina to find the city flattened. The city didn’t have the jobs they wanted. So they built their own. After 2005, the start-up rate in New Orleans doubled in just three years.

New Orleans needs more than start-up enthusiasm. It needs start-up success stories. Breakout success stories.

“How do we get from this nascent state of having a lot of bubbling petri dishes to seeing some things really culture out, and having a sustainable ecosystem to support them?” Purcell said. In other words, how does New Orleans, a great city to get away from business, become a great place to start one?

Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville was drawn to the crescent city in the crook of the Mississippi River in 1718. He mistakenly believed the land, most of which is under sea level, to be properly shielded from the stormy Gulf tides. “Paris on a swamp.” It was a good elevator pitch.

Nature’s feedback was harsh. Four years after La Nouvelle-Orleans was founded, an inauspicious hurricane destroyed every home, shop, and makeshift chapel. A reasonable person might have relocated. Instead, Bienville rebuilt. One hundred years later, New Orleans was the largest city in the south.

The history of New Orleans is that of a city always rebuilding itself. But unlike past efforts, the current makeover isn’t funded by on an economy of sugar or oil, but rather an economy of people and ideas.

When you cast your eye across the country’s leading high-tech cities — the San Francisco area, Seattle, Boston, Washington, D.C., and New York — a rough blueprint emerges. These are large, dense, mixing-pots of people and businesses.

All five regions have a long history of government investment, especially in science and technology. All five have built clusters of commercial activity, ranging from apps and airplanes to government and software. All five have national universities that provide a steady stream of talent and research that can be injected into companies. All five are home to companies and organizations–Google, McKinsey, Congress–that serve as national talent magnets for young people with degrees from prestigious universities.

New Orleans has some of this. There is Tulane University. There are the energy companies. There are the studio outposts that lend it the name “Hollywood South.” And, unlike the country’s richest cities, New Orleans has cheap living costs to attract graduates with debt. But on the high-tech radar for young graduates, New Orleans registers faintly. When the Martin Prosperity Institute, led by Atlantic senior editor Richard Florida, ranked the 20 leading high-tech metros, New Orleans didn’t place. Huntsville, Alabama — home to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the United States Army Aviation and Missile Command — finished 15th.

New Orleans is one of the great cultural brands in American cities with a rich history of art, music, and food. But it is not one of the country’s great business brands. It doesn’t have a rich history of Fortune 500 companies or national media-darling start-ups. The term “Silicon Bayou” exists, but the term is more hopeful than descriptive. Currently, the city’s economy would be better suited to mining silicon than manipulating microprocessors. When you compare New Orleans and, say, San Jose the cities could not be more different by industry specialization. San Jose has 96 percent fewer mining jobs than the average city. New Orleans has 240 percent more. San Jose’s share of information workers is three-times the national average; New Orleans is still below average.

So why are some investors so optimistic about New Orleans?

First, the price is right. “It is massively cheaper to do a start-up in New Orleans,” said Jim Coulter, the co-founder of the private equity firm TPG Capital. “The cost of living, of labor, and of office space, is much lower.” And then there are the tax incentives. One particular tax credit, which covers 25 percent of companies’ production costs and 35 percent of payroll expenses for local employees, has been credited with growing the city’s tech jobs by 19% between Katrina and 2012, six-times the national rate.

The flip-side of cheap labor is a dearth of tech talent. “There is a definitive hiring challenge here,” Purcell said. “[Hiring] quickly is hard. Looking for developers is hard all over the country, but we have a steeper climb here.”

But there’s something else New Orleans has. Katrina has been a surprising force for renewal. The storm demolished the city’s storefronts, infrastructure, and tax revenue. But it also shuffled some of the old order in New Orleans in ways that give it a unique advantage.

‘The Perfect Proving Ground for Education Start-Ups’
It would be wrong to say the hurricane destroyed New Orleans public schools, because there was so little worth saving even before the storm hit. Orleans Parish was the second-worst-performing school district in the state, plagued by an abysmal drop-out rate.

Demolishing the city’s schools, the storm inspired an start-up mindset in the parish that has created perhaps the most-watched petri dish of education reform in the country. Today, there is no major city where a majority of public school students are in charter schools — except New Orleans.

Before the hurricane, fewer than 30 percent of New Orleans students were in passing schools, according to Alison Plyer of the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. Now it’s 68 percent. “There’s been a concentrated effort by the entire community to improve the schools,” she said, “led by charters and Teach for America.”

One of the city’s new experiments is Kickboard, an analytics program that visually tracks student progress. CEO and founder Jennifer Medbery was a Columbia graduate with a degree in computer science, teaching math in public schools for years, grumbling that there was no way to crunch the data she was gathering from students. “Each week we spent hours trying to organize it all with a homegrown maze of Excel spreadsheets and Google Docs,” she said to me in an email. In February, the company raised $2 million in funding.

The recovery in New Orleans has let ed-tech start-ups partner directly with schools in a way that would be impossible if the calcified public school bureaucracies hadn’t been knocked down by the hurricane. “Because of the charter schools, you have fast adopters of new ed-tech tools in the area. This is important because [as an entrepreneur] you want to be close to a market of adopters.”

It’d be easy to assume the explosion of entrepreneurial activity was merely born of necessity. But it was about “more than just rebuilding the city,” Medbery said. “It was about re-imaging it as a place for big ideas.”

Gary Soloman had a big idea, too, he just didn’t know where to take it. Born in New Orleans, he studied lightening design at NYU in order to work on Broadway. But after Katrina, “there was a calling to come back home,” he said.

“There was no industry here [in New Orleans] for what I do,” he told me. “Our opportunity was to create it.” So he teamed up with two unlikely partners: Steve Fink, the longtime director of operations at the Superdome, and Jonathan Foucheaux, an entertainment tech wiz from Six Flags Theme Parks.

In 2009, the company, called Solomon Group, had three employees. Today, they have a staff of more than 100, with eight figures of revenue. They’ve designed complex installations for museums and marquees for theaters. The exterior lights of the Superdome? They designed that. When CBS hosted the Super Bowl here this year, the network shot from ten “broadcast environments” throughout the city. Solomon Group built eight of the ten.

“While New Orleans has an awesome foundation and history and way of doing things, this feels like the first time the old guard has been willing to listen to new ideas,” Solomon said. “Pre-Katrina there was no changing anything that had been done for 100-plus years. I don’t feel like we’re fighting anymore. There is a desire to change and do new things.”

More Than ‘Most-Improved’
Twelve years ago, a group of New Orleans-born tech guys met at Loa Bar, just off Canal Street, to share war stories and gripe about the decline of the city. They wanted New Orleans to be a place where entrepreneurs would flock. That boozy meeting led to the creation of a non-profit, the Idea Village, which has tirelessly lobbied the city to support start-ups. It has fought through bureaucracies and hurricanes and a Gulf oil spill to build Entrepreneur Season, a nine-month annual program to support new start-ups. The capstone Entrepreneur Week conference last month ended with 1,700-person vote for start-up of the year, the largest crowd-sourced investor pitch in the country. It was literally a street party. Kind of like a Start-Up Mardi Gras.

If New Orleans has a competitive advantage, this is it: A reputation for fun, along with a culture of engagement and a civic awareness sharpened by recent tragedy. Organizations like the Idea Village will be pivotal to building a city culture that celebrates and encourage entrepreneurs, who are, by their nature, ambition yet alone, independent-minded and dependent on the support of others.

In the last five years, the city has won an astounding number of city awards, but many of them are a variation on the “most improved player” theme. In 2011, the Wall Street Journal named it the most improved metro. Forbes has dubbed it the Number-1 metro for IT job growth. CareerBuilding said it had the third-fastest wage growth in the country. Just last week, the Brookings Metropolitan Policy program named it the number one recovery city in the country. But since Brookings measured growth compared with the aftermath of Katrina, this is as much recognition of how far New Orleans has come as it is recognition of how far New Orleans had fallen.

After losing up to 10 percent of its population, New Orleans is growing again. The parish ranks behind only Austin and suburban Washington, D.C., as the fastest-growing large counties in the U.S. As the people have returned, the number of blighted homes has fallen by more than half since 2008. Crime is falling, and the share of bachelor’s degrees is rising.

But there is no getting around this central fact: The city isn’t merely miles behind San Jose and Austin in attracting the nation’s top talent. It’s behind the national average. The share of New Orleans young adults with a bachelor’s degree has increased from 23 to 26 percent since 2000. That’s not just below the average city, but also it’s growing slower than the average city.

New Orleans’ most critical challenge in the next five years will be to win the mind-share of young entrepreneurs — whether by building a city-wide wifi network, hosting a major corporation’s bureau, or launching a nationally celebrated consumer-tech company. “For all their individualism, entrepreneurs tend to flock,” Jim Coulter said. “There’s a network effect. Flocking drives more entrepreneurs. The coffee shops become the discovery points. That’s what happened in San Francisco, it’s happening in Austin and it’s beginning to happen in New Orleans.”

Just beginning. Still beginning. Sometimes a start-up city is just a city getting started, again.

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However, observers cautioned that while they expect the project to transform downtown, the unique nature of the deal that landed the tech giant limits how applicable it is to other major projects in the works or on the horizon.

The $55 million development announced last week will take up the block bounded by River Road and Main, North and Lafayette streets. When it opens in 2015, IBM will employ 800 office workers in the eight-story building along North Street. An 11-story residential tower along Main Street will include 95 apartments and nine luxury townhomes.

Davis Rhorer, executive director of the Downtown Development District, said the addition of that many office workers and residents, the nature of the technology jobs and the allure of potentially working with IBM for other companies makes the development a “game changer.

“When you capture a company such as IBM, that is internationally recognized and renowned,” Rhorer said, “it is very significant. It changes the market.”

“Once the announcement was made, our office was inundated with phone calls,” he said of the current and prospective downtown businesses and developers interested in what the deal could mean to them.

Branon Pesnell, a broker with Beau Box Commercial Real Estate, said the project is significant for downtown in two ways.

First, it will spur development because the employees at IBM will probably be younger, recent college graduates who are more interested in living downtown and are more inclined to want entertainment options within walking distance in the evenings and on weekends.

“It adds a different type of employee than we’ve seen downtown in the past,” he said.

Second, technology companies that want to do business with IBM will likely begin to target downtown, Pesnell said.

“The hope for everybody is that there will be businesses that feed off of IBM and it actually becomes a hub,” he said.

Downtown’s renaissance has been marked by successful developments large and small, both public and private. They include the addition of several state office buildings and parking garages, The Main Street Market, The Shaw Center for the Arts, the II City Plaza office building, Kress at Third and Main, the new courthouse, Hotel Indigo, the Hilton Baton Rouge Capitol Center, the Hampton Inn & Suites and the North Boulevard Town Square.

But the past 15 years also have seen the announcement of several major residential and mixed-use projects that have fallen by the wayside — Richard Preis’ One River Place, the Hartley/Vey riverfront condo tower and the Brownstones, which was Commercial Properties Realty Trust’s planned apartment building . Other projects, like Pete Clements’ River Park and the redevelopment of the Commerce Building, are still in the works.

Preis, who finally sold the One River Place site to former Shaw Group chief Jim Bernhard late last year, said there is demand for residential development downtown. He said Hurricane Katrina, the financial crisis and national recession just made the last decade difficult, and that it is still tough to get ambitious projects financed.

“If it hadn’t have been for the hurricane and the credit crunch, there would have already been downtown living,” he said.

The deal that brought IBM to Baton Rouge consisted of major incentives from the state and city-parish, and the involvement of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, making comparisons with other projects difficult.

Preis said it will be interesting to see whether the IBM project will have any direct effect on other projects in the works.

“Are (banks) gonna say, ‘That’s great, we will now do a Richard Preis-type development here, here and here,’ or are they going to say, ‘Let’s see how the market absorbs these 90-plus units.’ ”

Trey Trahan, an architect who owns four pieces of downtown property, including the rest of the block Bernhard bought from Preis, said he thinks the IBM project improves the prospects for everyone downtown.

“We’re really excited about IBM coming to town and are in discussions about what the opportunities will be as a result of it,” he said. John O. Hearin, who owns a half-block along North Sixth Street between Convention and Florida streets and would like to do some kind of a mixed-use development there, agreed.

“Something like this definitely helps. People are taking a harder look at their real estate and what they can do with it,” Hearin said.

Hearin, however, said it is difficult to say whether the IBM deal improves anyone’s prospects in the short term.

Each project has its own hurdles and not every deal gets the kind of public-sector muscle that the IBM deal did.

“I don’t see this IBM deal alone changing things,” Pesnell agreed, noting the project probably wouldn’t work financially in a traditional deal.

“This deal would be very difficult to work if it was an arms-length transaction,” he said.

Preis offered a similar assessment.

“In my opinion, the days of the private sector doing that type of development are gone,” Preis said.

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Half a century ago, when Green was a first-year student at Southern University of New Orleans, he would wake up before sunrise, get dressed and be out on the streets by 6:30 a.m. to hitchhike from his west bank home to the SUNO campus.

On Tuesday, the retired U.S. Department of Treasury employee was on hand as SUNO announced the creation of its west bank satellite campus opening this fall.

“I had to hitchhike,” Green said. “It was worth it to me because I knew what was at the end of the road, but looking at this today, it would have been nice to have this.”

Starting in August, SUNO faculty will move into the unified L.B. Landry and O. Perry Walker High School building. They will teach between 12 and 15 first-year courses in English, biology, math, social work, criminal justice and others. All at no extra cost to SUNO.

The August roll-out will include space for students to register for classes and apply for financial aid. SUNO Chancellor Victor Ukpolo said the plan is to expand incrementally until a student can get a “full-service, four-year degree,” all on the west bank campus.

The plan has been in the works for nearly a decade as leaders in both secondary and postsecondary education have lamented the void of options on the west bank.

The great barrier, apparently, is the Mississippi River.

Ukpolo, a west bank resident since 2006, said he sees the surprise on the faces of his colleagues and hears the shock in their voices when he tells them he lives on “that other side of the river.”

“I’m kind of surprised of the great divide,” he said.

He points out that about 30 percent of the nation’s population holds a four-year degree or higher, while only 15 percent of people on west bank can say the same thing.

Ukpolo estimates SUNO would have to eventually shepherd 290,000 students through its west bank campus to meet the national average.

National research says bachelor’s degree holders make as much as $1 million more in salaries and wages over a lifetime than those with only a high school diploma.

Ukpolo said the goal for every community should be to increase the number of residents with a bachelor’s degree.

“We’re bridging that gap, so that people won’t have to go to the east bank to pursue a degree,” Ukpolo said. “Students who have children in day care don’t have to worry about it anymore because we’re right here now.”

The partnership between SUNO and the high school was solidified with the signing of a memorandum of understanding Tuesday. But the idea has been discussed since 2005. Most in attendance at a morning news conference gave the credit to O. Perry Walker High School Principal Mary Laurie. She will hold the same position next year when her school merges with L.B. Landry High School.

“Today is the beginning of a dream realized,” Laurie said. “The river can be a great divide for our families. This is a great moment for all of those people whose dreams were placed on hold. Who better than Southern University of New Orleans, with its long history of providing four-year degree opportunities to citizens, single moms and struggling families to help people realize their dreams.”

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