Louisiana’s tallest and largest skyscraper, One Shell Square, has been sold for $102 million to a Massachusetts real estate investment trust.

The Times-Picayune reports the 51-story building’s longtime owner, Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., sold the limestone building to the CommonWealth REIT of Newton, Mass., around the sixth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina in late August.

The sale brings a new real estate company to New Orleans that is likely to expand.

Timothy Bonang, vice president of investor relations at CommonWealth, said his company tries to get into the market by purchasing a “trophy asset,” and then hopes to pick up other properties in the market. One Shell Square is CommonWealth’s only holding in Louisiana.

“We try to purchase what we think is one of the best assets in the market, and then we hope to add through additional acquisitions over time,” Bonang said. “What we really look for are high-quality assets, high credit-quality tenants, and long-term leases.”

Continue at Boston Herald

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Construction of a new $1.1 billion research and teaching hospital in New Orleans is expected to begin within weeks, to replace the hurricane-wrecked Charity Hospital, after state lawmakers Friday backed the spending plans.

Approval from the Joint Legislative Committee on the budget, which came without opposition, was the last significant hurdle stalling the hospital. The committee’s support marked the end of years of wrangling between the Legislature, the governor’s office and LSU over the size and scope of the facility.

“We’ve got contracts ready to go. We’re ready to start blowing and going,” said Jerry Jones, state construction project chief for Gov. Bobby Jindal’s administration.

Jones said construction will begin in two weeks. The hospital is estimated to open in 2015.

The facility to train new doctors and health professionals, care for the poor and provide trauma and specialty medicine has been on the drawing board for six years, since Hurricane Katrina flooded and shuttered the 1930s-era Charity Hospital.

Continue reading at HC

NEW ORLEANS – The decaying brick buildings of what was known as the Magnolia Projects are now rows of freshly painted town homes with ornate balconies and manicured lawns. Stoops where dealers once sold dope and shot at rivals have been replaced by a clubhouse featuring a flat-screen TV and a pool where neighborhood kids splash. The Magnolia Projects, once one of the city’s most notorious public housing complexes, today is Harmony Oaks Apartments, a 460-unit mix of government-subsidized and market-priced apartments. It replaces one of six public housing projects across the city recently razed to make room for new apartments and a fresh approach to housing the city’s poor.

“I never thought I’d be able to live like this,” says Harmony Oaks resident Larry Berzat, 60, who grew up in the former Magnolia Projects. “It’s a whole lot safer. And a whole lot better.”

New Orleans’ traditional model of corralling all subsidized housing into one location is being replaced by newer developments that mix subsidized and market-priced homes. More than 900 such units have opened in New Orleans already; another 3,100 are on the way. Public housing projects in Chicago, Atlanta, Salt Lake City and other cities have followed a similar trend, says Linda Couch of the Washington-based National Low-Income Housing Coalition. What makes New Orleans unusual is how the city toppled all of its major public housing projects at once, choosing a swift overhaul to its public housing over a phased redevelopment, Couch says. “People will be watching New Orleans closely,” she says.

Residents and city leaders agree that the new developments are far more livable and draw less crime than the previous structures, some of which were more than 8 decades old. But housing advocates warn that the new plans will steeply drop the number of available public housing units, leaving thousands of low-income families without affordable places to live.

Across the city, about 3,500 fewer units will be available, says James Perry, head of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center.

“You’re going to have a large number of people without housing,” Perry says.

Continue at USAToday

Yesterday, New Orleans Regional Transit Authority (RTA) officials and U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood formally launched construction on the Union Passenger Terminal/Loyola Avenue streetcar project.

“The New Orleans streetcar project will create jobs, economic opportunities and greater transit choices,” LaHood said in a prepared statement.

In addition, LaHood announced the RTA will receive a $400,000 grant from the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) to establish a program to assist in the hiring and training of skilled streetcar maintenance workers.

The streetcar extension, which received $45 million through the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) program in 2010, is expected to begin service in June 2012.

The extension will run through New Orleans’ central business district along Loyola Avenue from the Union Passenger Terminal to Canal Street. The terminal is a major southern hub for Amtrak, which operates three trains that serve the station.

From ProgressiveRailroading

The Passivhaus (now called Passive House in North America) standard is usually thought of as a response to temperate or cold conditions, given its German origin. Certainly its annual heating energy limits are not going to mean a lot in New Orleans, where ArchDaily and Design by Many ran a competition to design a Passive House. But there is still a overall energy limitation which is tough to meet if you are going to provide air conditioning. The surprising winner was a Canadian architectural firm,Sustainable TO.

The competition brief asked for

a well balanced concept of sustainability including minimal impact on the local environment, affordable to heat and cool, and affordable to build and purchase….Homes should be shotgun typology and strive to create cohesive neighborhoods.

In shotgun plans, the rooms are arranged enfilade without a corridor, which allowed for windows on both sides of a single room and good cross-ventilation. It is a French concept, seen from Versailles to apartments in Montreal to New Orleans. It doesn’t work very well with our current expectations of privacy, so the architects have modified it:

The house reinterprets a traditional shotgun-style plan by mirroring two bedroom and bathroom units on either side of the main living space. The open living plan optimizes natural air flow and daylighting. The corridor opens southward to a flexible cantilevered side gallery that wraps around the house, providing shaded outdoor living space.

The architects write:

Organized linearly along a circulation corridor, the long axis of the house runs East/West. This organization addresses strategies of natural ventilation, daylighting, shading and solar heat gain. The south facade’s deep roof overhang provides passive solar protection for the building’s interior in the summer, while allowing passive solar heat gain in the winter.

Continue and see more images at Treehugger