re: Concepts that Baton Rouge Lacks

Loop, bike/walking lanes

That not a real Jewish deli baw

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Public hangings for people who litter.

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I can't stand someone that litters. I really do think that cops should have the right to make a person stop their day and pick up trash for an hour if your caught actively littering.

I wanted to address two items

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Public hangings for people who litter.

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Out of all the problems our city has, this is the easiest thing to address. The litter and public areas makes this city as a whole an eyesore. The first thing a visitor sees driving in from the airport is litter and broken concrete on 110. It's unacceptable. Drive around surface streets and you'll see the same trash, overgrown grass, piles of cigarette butts, gravel and broken curbs. While BRAC is working on quality of place initiatives, the mayors office and DPW need to be fully on board. Unfortunately, it seems priorities are not in order yet. But this is serious low hanging fruit that could make the city look a ton better.

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bike/walking lanes

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BREC is currently building a huge network on bike lanes around the city. The Capitol Area Pathways Project will start off connecting the areas and parks around the medical corridor from Pennington to Siegen. (Currently there are trails by the mall, Siegen shopping center and from Perkins Road Park to Quail Drive) There is a master plan to have routes all over the parish. (Google it to check
out the website) With the implementations from Imagine Your Parks 1, I can definitely see this coming to fruition with Imagine Your Parks 2. That's one thing locally where you can see our tax dollars at work.

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While Baton Rouge has gotten a lot wrong over the years with policing, urban sprawl, schools, mass transit, etc, it's easy to forget that there are a couple things they've done really right: parks, recreation, libraries, and downtown development.

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As a lifelong resident, agree with all of this.

I feel like electing Weston Broome will set our city back 20 years.

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That is why downtown will continue to deteriorate
Would/do you live there?

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I live in Spanish Town and considering I work downtown, I couldn't think of anywhere better and more convenient. It's extremely safe too considering the culcha across 110.

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I live in Spanish Town

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You call that living?

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While BRAC is working on quality of place initiatives, the mayors office and DPW need to be fully on board. Unfortunately, it seems priorities are not in order yet. But this is serious low hanging fruit that could make the city look a ton better.

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Broome and her people are too busy race baiting to care about an issue like litter. In the past DPW was a train wreck, but maybe they're better now. I've heard that BRAC and BRAF were working on quality of place initiatives, but I don't see them getting much support from Broome. They will likely have to do what they can on their own.

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That is why downtown will continue to deteriorate Would/do you live there?

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I moved here in '07 and lived at Mansions in the Park on Perkins for a few years before buying a house in Springlake in '10(unfortunately leaving before Olive-or-Twist and Rum House opened up). I would have wanted to live downtown for those early years if that was an option, but it really wasn't in '07.

Most of the Baton Rouge apartments offer the worst of both worlds to young professionals (and students for that matter) - waste money on rent in "luxury" apartments, but still not be a walkable area. Cheap land for the developers seems to be the main driver to where apartments end up in Baton Rouge, not occupant demand.

2017 Downtown Development Link

According to the linked document, there's about 9000 people that live downtown now - but that's including some of the rough neighborhoods around downtown ("Downtown East"). For a BR metro area of about 830K, that's barely above 1% of the area population living in the downtown area.

I would guess easily 5-10% of the area would "prefer" to live in an urban environment vs. the suburban feel that completely dominates the area. With that in mind, you can recast Baton Rouge with about a 50k person downtown and drastically change the feel of downtown without changing much of the area that surrounds it (still sit at ~200K for the rest of the city of BR and 600K for the surrounding EBR Parish and Suburban Parishes).