The SUSTAINABLE BUILDING CENTER
as the Economic Driver
for the DANNY BARKER PLACE
and its Surrounding Community
The Danny Barker Place needs a revenue-generating component that will offset expenses for the project's construction and its maintenance.
Revenue from the site's parts as envisioned so far (the Louis and Paul Barbarin Performance Hall, the Valmore Victor Music Academy, the New Orleans Trade School, and the 6 to 12 retail shops, and the 18 to 30 units of affordable housing) will not come near the $28 million total that's estimated for construction costs.
We need a center of business on the site that will produce large amounts of income and that will employ large numbers of the surrounding community in a general uplift. That is, the Danny Barker Place can really succeed only as part of revitalization of the whole, pre-Katrina 7th Ward.
The answer to this specific need for the site could be, I think, a means that helps to broadly revitalize Greater New Orleans in general.
A Sustainable Building Center on the site of the Danny Barker Place would offer
several businesses that could produce hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue
and that could employ hundreds unto thousands of New Orleaneans.
These businesses would offer for New Orleans' residential and commercial use:
•Geo-thermal air-conditioning and heating
•Solar concentrators (Sun Cubes and Sun Towers)
•Construction materials (such as Structural Concrete Integrated Panels
(S.C.I.P.s) that resist storms, floods, pests and mold
•Recycling of waste
•Water turbines
•Energy-efficient lighting, walls and windows.
There are more than 100,000 homes in Orleans and Jefferson Parishes, within
a 15-miles radius of the Danny Barker Place, that could use these cost-cutting,
renewable-energy, recycling, and energy-efficiency measures.
If each of these 100,000 homes spent only $10,000 on a combination of cost-cutting, environmentally friendly measures from our Sustainable Building Center
(S.B.C.), the total income would be $1 billion.
The total profit would be at least 40% of that $1 billion, or $400 million.
There, I think, is our answer toward making numbers for the Danny Barker Place
work, and a large part of the answer toward making 21st-century New Orleans
sustainable for its pre-Katrina, working-class natives.
You can download and vie the brochure.
Don Paul, May 6, 2007