Not long after I moved here in 1988—by way of Washington, D.C., and Austin—I experienced this city’s limits.
On a summer evening, my wife and I headed out on a date. We saw Bull Durham and came out of the theater ready to discuss the movie (and baseball) over a nice meal. The movie was everything we hoped for—smart, funny and with plenty of baseball.
Dinner was not. We walked into the nice restaurant just before 9 only to discover that the place closed at 9, as did every other desirable eatery in town.
We ended up at a 24-hour breakfast joint. The meal was forgettable, but the experience was memorable. I’d found myself living in an overgrown small town with little in the way of nightlife.
This computer rendering is a specific example within FuturEBR on how to reinvent the corner of Highland Road and State Street by encouraging properly scaled buildings that combine retail, office and residential space.
In the 23 years since, I’ve seen our city grow and even progress. Today, I wonder where we’re heading.
Much of the growth in and around Baton Rouge has been obvious: new state office buildings rising around the Capitol; hotels and condos, bars and restaurants reviving downtown; the new Mall of Louisiana and the new-style, retail-residential development at Perkins Rowe; the blossoming of suburbs out along I-10 and I-12.
Despite the growth (and sometimes because of it), a spectrum of problems hobbles this community: the traffic-choked interstates, surface streets and rural roads across the area; splintering of the parish as new school systems—and even a new city—formed at the northern end; a largely substandard public school system; limited public transportation; and a murder rate that continues to soar.
Despite those shortcomings, Baton Rouge is a vastly more livable, attractive city than it was a generation ago. To draw and keep young professionals, any successful city must offer amenities: good eats, a bar scene, arts, nightlife.
Those men and women—educated, energetic, affluent—are the heart of every vibrant metropolitan area in America. The central goal of almost every progressive group is to develop, retain and cultivate a young professional class.
A decent nightlife. A jumping downtown. Sometimes that seems like all we can show for years of progress, but that’s not enough to make Baton Rouge the next great city. We need to create more significant change.
We need to move beyond a long-running squabble over the downtown library or the recent spat over the canopy for the stage at the new North Boulevard Town Square. Downtown has been a skirmish line between the forces pushing progress and those clinging to the status quo. That inherent resistance to change is strong here in Baton Rouge.
John Fregonese is an urban planner who spent five years helping to create FuturEBR, a blueprint for future development. He guided FuturEBR to passage by the Metro Council in September, and he has worked with many other cities large and small. Fregonese says he’s never seen this kind of resistance to downtown progress. “Why are they so pissed off?” he asks. “Everybody loves their downtown. They may be ambivalent about subsidies, but they don’t hate downtown. I have never seen this.”
At 324 pages, FuturEBR replaces the old Horizon Plan. It gives direction across a range of topics like infrastructure, urban design, transportation, neighborhoods and mass transit.
It’s time to move beyond downtown, Fregonese says. Our downtown revival is amazing—Fregonese calls it “a national story.” But Baton Rouge needs to create successes in other areas, such as Mid City, Old South Baton Rouge and areas outside LSU.
“Tremendously engaged” civic groups, leaders with the Downtown Development District and the Mid City Merchants Alliance are well positioned and effective enough to achieve such successes, Fregonese says.
But the forces of entropy and the opponents of change are here, and they have to be reckoned with. “They don’t control the future,” Fregonese says. “They do need to be listened to.”
Opponents can help proponents refine and improve an argument. Some can be won over with the right reasoning.
Bryan Jones knows opponents can be won over with the right case when it is persistently argued. “You can beat the status quo,” he says.
Jones, 28, is a founder and chairman of the board of the Mentorship Academy, a downtown charter school in its second year. He’s also on the Capital Area Transit System’s board and a sales manager for HNTB, a national engineering and architecture firm.
The parish’s public school system resisted charter schools, but Jones and his group persisted for a couple of years before earning their place at the local educational table. “You have to continually press your case, and positive change will happen,” Jones says.
“It’s going to take the people of Baton Rouge to tell elected officials that we want this, that we want change,” Jones says. “It’s beginning to work in certain facets of Baton Rouge. It takes time. We need bold steps to catch up to other cities.”
Bold steps, bold plans, bold action. That’s what Baton Rouge needs if we’re going to live up to the mayor’s often-repeated brag that we’re “America’s next great city.”
We’ll need Metro Council members who don’t simply pander to suburban or rural constituencies or rail about downtown getting too much attention and too much money. We’ll need our mayor to make better use of the significant political capital and good will he took office with but squandered somewhere along the way.
We’ll need men and women with a vision for the future, but at the same time, a practical side capable of pushing good ideas against significant resistance. Those are the kinds of people who will drive Baton Rouge toward the future.
We have significant, deep divisions across the various parts of our city: urban, suburban, rural; black and white; north and south; professional class, working class; newcomers, natives.
We have a deficit of trust and a surplus of suspicions.
A thriving downtown scares people who don’t come downtown. New cities and new school systems popping up at the northern end of the parish are threatening to people inside the city limits. A younger, edgier creative class worries or even disturbs the older, more staid population.
There are solutions brewing out there.
Solutions that could move us beyond the politics of division, suspicion and distrust.
I have faith. I see the signs all around.
Something beyond a vibrant restaurant scene. An improving school system. People and organizations trying to build a bus system that—instead of inadequately serving the working class—more effectively serves and is used by everyone.
The future of mass transit is a good example of where vision meets reality. I love the talk about light rail moving people between parts of Baton Rouge. I love the idea of high-speed rail connecting Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Those are wonderful visions, but right now, the practical reality is that Baton Rouge needs basics first: a good network of bus routes to carry riders who would use those dreamed-of rail lines.
That’s where the work needs to be done, at the foundation level. We need a regular and reliable bus system and a wide enough route structure that anyone in Baton Rouge would be willing and able to ride.
That’s a practical, even achievable vision. It’s a much tougher task, though, than improving the nightlife.
Baton Rouge has grown and progressed significantly in the past two decades.
Recent, vivid proof was at White Light Night, the art hop put on seasonally by the Mid City Merchants. This year’s event stretched along Government Street all the way from Park Boulevard out to Jefferson Highway. Thousands thronged into the area’s businesses to view art, listen to live music and nosh on a variety of great food. The event is so wildly popular and so spread out that the organizers hire buses to shuttle folks from one end of the event to the other.
Nightlife and public transportation coming together in a small way, on one night. Hard to imagine such a thing back in 1988. Just imagine what could be possible in another 20 years—if we all keep imagining, but also put those dreams into practice.
A regular 225 contributor, Chris Frink has been reporting and writing about the Baton Rouge area for 23 years. He now works at the Louisiana Legislature.
To get the details and varying views on FuturEBR, click here.
