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District C Candidate Kristin Gisleson Palmer.
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Although the competition is tough, District C could well be the most gerrymandered City Council district in town. It’s my district, even though most of my neighborhood, Bayou St. John, is part of District A, the Jay Batt district. Instead of sharing representation with my neighbors east of Esplanade Ave., I fall in with the folks in St. Roch, Bywater, Marigny, the Quarter, and, for some reason, Algiers. If New Orleans was a coloring book, a child would need one sharp crayon to fill in District C. After coloring in all of Algiers, the child would have to pay close attention to C’s western boundary, which extends to Canal Street in the French Quarter but then narrows to Orleans Avenue up through Treme, and then narrows in even further to the east side of St. Philip Street. At that point, District C is basically a three-block-wide peninsula into District A, whose representative serves the folks on the opposite side of St. Philip.
With such screwed-up cartography, no wonder we all needed a monster storm and mass devastation to get us interested in politics. But it’s a new day, right? We’re still a democracy—we can vote in leaders who might be able to change things, who might even redraw the maps with straight lines. For this reason, I went to Schiro’s the day after Jazzfest to hear what District C City Council candidate Kristin Gisleson Palmer had to say. A nice white housewife prone to home repairs and volunteerism, KGP is running against James Carter, a black attorney with crime-fighting experience. (Carter headed the NOLA Weed ‘n’ Seed program, a project aimed at reducing crime and drug use, despite its botanically-suggestive name.) Their runoff is just one of the many vanilla versus chocolate showdowns on the May 20 ticket.
When I arrived, KGP was standing on Schiro’s balcony talking about blight. The audience, primarily Marigny types as well as supporters from KGP’s home base of Algiers, seemed very concerned with crime. Talk revolved around squatters and looters, and KGP proposed bringing the National Guard back in to patrol abandoned areas. As residents fussed about one of the usual symptoms of apocalypse, electrical fires near abandoned buildings, I focused on KGP’s shoes. They looked horribly uncomfortable, with wicked pointy toes and spiked heels. Yet, she didn’t seem miserable—no shifting or wincing. I resolved to keep an eye on her, see how she’d hold out.
The issue of repopulation—more precisely, of filling empty houses —was discussed for quite some time. KGP spoke of establishing a “concrete nucleus” of about 50-100 houses to go on the market immediately as a way to re-sod people back into communities. She discussed the idea of auctioning off blighted and abandoned properties at low cost to people willing to make a covenant with the city. Based on a similar plan in Baltimore, new-homebuyer covenants would address issues such as owner-occupation, prompt renovation, and possibly rent control. When I asked KGP what she could do for low-income renters in an increasingly-expensive city, she pointed to this concept of the covenant as a way to keep some rents affordable. As the state controls tenant/landlord relations and rent caps, she couldn’t promise me more than that, but did sound hopeful that covenants could turn low-income residents into homeowners and also force these new homebuyers into keeping their tenants’ rents reasonable.
I had to ask KGP what she had to offer that her opponent James Carter was lacking. Swiftly, and without any negatives about her opponent, she emphasized her experience organizing, fundraising, and working at both the neighborhood and the citywide level. If KGP had a tag phrase, it would be “I’ve done it.” She made mention of her own home-renovation work, taking the opportunity to share that her neighbors used to call her and her husband “the coal miners.” As well, she ran through a long list of organizations and commissions that she’d started or chaired, highlighting her work doing home-renovations for the elderly and building playgrounds for the children. No politician worth her salt would forget to mention either of those groups, and she still looked comfy in her hellish shoes.
Speaking of opponents, it’s worth mentioning that Julian Doerr, one of KGP’s rivals in the primary, came up to Schiro’s balcony to support her campaign. (For those of you who haven’t been following politics, Doerr is a Marigny denizen who dresses a little too emphatically like a southern gentleman, complete with Colonel Sanders glasses and goatee.) Together they spoke about the riverfront corridor and the looming possibility of high-rise condos filling in the space along the river. KGP is definitely against this “Floridization” effect. (A Marigny resident used this phrase, which I sure wish I’d coined) She’s on the record as supporting a 50’ height cap for riverfront development in the Marigny and Bywater. She also spoke emphatically about revitalizing city-owned properties such as the firehouses and the St. Roch Market so that small businesses could take root in those spaces. And possibly because she was in the Marigny, KGP brought up how important “nontraditional workers” (here known as artists, elsewhere known as slackers or bums) were to the cultural fabric of New Orleans.
Her main thrust was to remind us residents that even though we’re going to have to work toward many of our goals ourselves, she’s more than willing to serve as a resource. She plans to establish a District C Neighborhood Council to keep abreast of what we, her constituents, want. So when Marigny folk brought up the usual liberal concerns such as recycling and organic grocery stores, she nodded and promised her energy towards their desires. I know promises come cheap just before an election, but she did last the full two hours in those godforsaken shoes. Perhaps she is coal miner enough to dig us out of this hole.
A nontraditional worker, Miss Amanda wears sneakers or sandals on hot days.
