Sep '06 - Nov '06
It takes $500 million to start a new city in South Mississippi, according to The Journal of South MS Business. It's not everyday that one hears that someone decided to start a new city. Sort of struck me as bizarre, but I guess anything is possible when you have hundreds of investors involved. It's planned to be developed in an area north of Biloxi. Investors include many of the casino owners in Biloxi and are really trying to help the area recover after Hurricane Katrina.
As far as the rest of the south coast, many of casino hotels that existed before the hurricane are now fully operational and bringing back the economy to South MS. After talking to some realtors about properties near the site of my thesis project, I found out that they're all in the process of being developed into condominium hotels and casinos. Of course, developers are having to invest more because of the new building codes and extremely high insurance rates. Hearing in on some of the city council meetings, it seems that they want the area to be like Las Vegas, but with beaches. We'll see how that turns out. In any case, it's good to hear the area is doing well to recover.
3 Comments
so new cities will be made up of condos, hotels, and casinos? is this the nail in the coffin signalling once and for all the death of public space? who runs the beaches?
the sneetches with stars upon thars of course, steven. silly question.
there was a good article in the new york times called "battle for biloxi", which deals with the gentrifying, class-based, reality of new urbanism and how it is being used to squeeze out the poor people, especially from the beaches where the rich folk now want to live.
my favorite quote is this bit...
"New Urbanism is like Whole Foods: it's meant to be good for you, but it's expensive, at least on the front end, and it comes with a set of cultural connotations that generally play best among the prosperous and the self-consciously progressive.
At Tyrone's Barber and Beauty Shop, Bernice Catchings had flipped through the plan, with its spiffy little houses and tasteful storefronts, and said: "A poor lady like me, what the hell am I going to do with that? Walk by it and admire it? We can't buy it. The white man will always have us pushed to where we have to just . . . go by and admire it and then go home somewhere and eat them old beans and bread and be thankful." "
500 million is a piss in a bucket for even financing a small town. Sounds like someone is making money on a big idea, just like after the Civil War...think they called them Carpet Baggers.
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