Louisiana

The city council unanimously approved the real estate tycoon's plans for a 70-story hotel and condo tower.

Many mixed-use projects have been popping up recently in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Many say this trend is fueled mainly by a population influx of New Orleans evacuees and new development incentives.

Responding to recent criticism, Robert B. Olshansky and Lewis D. Hopkins, professors of urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, argue that the United New Orleans Plan gets a lot more things right than wrong.

To help local governments enforce a new statewide building code, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is contributing $14 million to the state of Louisiana. State and federal officials expect the new stringent code to reduce insurance costs.

The independent Bureau of Governmental Research finds the Unified New Orleans Plan "fails to deliver a cohesive, workable road map for recovery."

As the deadline to file claims came to a close, the city of New Orleans was among thousands to submit a claim indicating they would sue the Army Corps of Engineers for damage caused by levee breaches. The city's claim totals more than $77 billion.

The Nation magazine investigates whether 100,000 FEMA-purchased trailers are releasing toxic fumes from materials used in their construction, and made worse by low quality standards as the trailers were constructed at breakneck speeds.

The largest redevelopment project to date in New Orleans -- a city known worldwide for its music -- is aimed at bringing musicians back to town by giving them a place to live.

In this article from Metropolis Magazine, architect and planner Andrés Duany looks at New Orleans through a new lens to find the city's true character -- and to redefine how the city can restore itself.

The Unified New Orleans Plan was supposed to unite seven separate, and often competing, official Hurricane Katrina rebuilding plans. But it has not been able to sidestep the controversial need to align the physical city to its shrunken population.

A historic New Orleans Catholic church lauded for its engineering ingenuity is now at the crossroads of recovery and respect.

While planners and architects are giddy with the possibilities for sustainable development in New Orleans, the actual needs of the city's residents -- namely housing and jobs -- appear to have been forgotten.

This report from NPR looks at the many factors that are delaying the disbursement of recovery and housing funds to hurricane victims in the Gulf Coast region.

As the community has roundly approved the Unified New Orleans Plan, coordinators of the recovery planning effort have announced that its costs could rise above $14 billion over the next decade. Exact funding sources have yet to be fully identified.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the state of Louisiana recently a ribbon-cutting ceremony to announce the successful end of their cooperative efforts to restore devastated New Orleans back to its pre-hurricane squalor.

New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin testified to a Senate committee recently that a lack of local control over federal funding is severely limiting the Gulf Coast recovery. He says he doesn't see the federal government's will to rebuild New Orleans.

Ed Blakely, New Orleans' recently named recovery czar, will have his hands full as a research fellow studying climate change as he manages the city's planning and reconstruction.

Plans to demolish New Orleans' largest public housing complexes face strong opposition from residents.

Preservationists are working to save the city's historic homes, under threat from Katrina victims who are interested in building modern housing.

Recovery czar Ed Blakely lays out his five-point plan for the city's comeback as residents endorsed a plan for rebuilding the city's neighborhoods.