re: The demise of Baton Rouge

Baton Rouge issues:

Extremely poor road beginning with the I-10/12/110 debacle which divided the city and was extremely poorly planned and engineered.

Failure of Woody Dumas’ phase II road package. Phase I passed the vote leading to the widening of most of the major roads north of Florida Blvd. Phase II was South of Florida Blvd. and it wasn’t approved. Included in Phase II were significant road projects lije widening Lee, Dalrymple, and others.

The integration of schools and the destruction of neighborhood schools. The School Board left it up to the Federal judge and he destroyed what was good and it led to white flight and destruction of entire neighborhoods.

Our governing system which cut out city government for the most part, the advent of BREC, the Library System, etc. which led to an imbalanced and unwieldy tax structure. We have entities needing funds and entities running large surpluses.

Democrat mayors that shift money to NGOs, consultants and planners who are thrir friends. Social programs flourish and the cops are crushed.

A press that cheerleads instead of informs.

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Interesting. I wonder what effect on the overall town, if any, if LSU had stricter academic standards and tighter admission qualifications. Maybe it's beyond repair.

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My friend the issues with Baton Rouge have nothing to do with admissions standards.

It’s a locals issue.

It's 100% cuthca that keeps electing idiots and has no respect for human life. None.

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This is the single biggest reason why Baton Rouge will only get worse - the people just don't care. They're content to live in filth and crime.

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The ones who can afford to often do. This city has a way of trapping folks.

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It’s a locals issue.

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It's an issue with most decent sized markets in the South, including most of the larger cities in Alabama.

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It's not a "locals" issue. It's a demographics issue, in every Southern city.

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Well they are in fact locals, but outside of that we’re saying the same thing.

You cannot thrive in a city where the demographics exceed a certain threshold of low income people.

Once it hits a critical mass it’s a question of when, not if the breakdown will occur.

But that demographic isn’t there because of LSU.

Baton Rouge would be Jackson, MS or Montgomery, AL if LSU wasn’t there.

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It's more da plants

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Yeah Baton Rouge actually has some decent paying jobs outside of state government and LSU. It's just only in certain industries. I've never had a problem making a pretty good living here.

Population, Total GDP in millions, GDP per capita

Baton Rouge MSA 871,905 , $56,199, $64,455
Huntsville MSA 502,728, $34,086, $67,802
Mobile MSA 428,220, $23,876, $55,793

So, Baton Rouge's GDP is almost as much as those 2 metros combined. Huntsville has a little better GDP per capita, and I would agree that it's a much nicer city than BR. All of Alabama's other larger metros (Birmingham, Mobile, Montgomery, even Tuscaloosa) have a lot of the same problems that most larger Louisiana markets have.

This data is a couple of years old, but the best I could find.

Katrina really hurt BR and although under Kip Holden, things were kept in check possibly as best as possible, it really didn't take long for all of the problems to surface once he was out of office.. Maybe even todays the end of his last term signs were starting to show.

Alton Sterling happened under Kip right? I think that was the last thing he wanted to deal with and it happened with him only having months left to his term. Then SWB won and her and Kip didn't get along at all. It was almost as if her approach was "I don't want anything good to happen under anything tied to Kip Holden because people will say its because of Kip. I want them to say that happened because of SWB". And because of that, Baton Rouge, as a city, got worse. That and then years earlier the decisions made by the school board really hurt things.

spoiler alert, all the white people moved out