People are leaving New Orleans. Can a new mayor help bring them back? | New Orleans CityBusiness

New Orleans is a city where someone like Nelson Williams should thrive. An upright bass player with a degree in music from Louisiana State University, Williams moved to New Orleans in 2020 at the age of 25 from his hometown of Baton Rouge with the hope of furthering his music career. New Orleans seemed the obvious place to go, he said.

Despite moving to town in the middle of COVID-19 lockdowns, he started connecting with other musicians almost immediately – playing American string band music, like bluegrass, old-time and Cajun and Creole music, on porches and in parks. By the time pandemic restrictions were lifted, he was in a position to regularly book gigs across town, sometimes playing four or more in a week, more than he ever had in Baton Rouge. His career blossomed. He began touring with Jake Blount, a fiddle and banjo player with a national following, and got to play at venues as storied and distinct as the Grand Ole Opry and NPR’s Tiny Desk.

It’s as promising a career as a working musician could hope for – and the kind of career that has supported countless New Orleans musicians over the decades. But in recent months, Williams, a lifelong Louisianian, has been questioning whether staying in New Orleans makes sense for him anymore.

Williams, who recently got engaged, rents a two-bedroom apartment in Mid-City and makes about the same as an early-career schoolteacher. He and his fiancée will look at homes on Zillow, but despite the fact that the local housing market has slowed in recent years, homeownership feels out of reach and risky, largely due to the cost of insurance, which skyrocketed in southeast Louisiana after a series of hurricanes in 2020 and 2021.

“I keep thinking, if I stay in New Orleans, can I even afford a home?” Williams told Verite News. He’s watched insurance premiums climb, pricing some of his friends out of their own homes, and, at the same time, he has grown frustrated with the fact that musicians like him are not being paid enough to afford the rising cost of living.

“It just feels really hard and disappointing that homeownership, which is part of the quote-unquote ‘American dream,’ can be so out of reach,” he said.

If Williams does choose to leave, he will join the tens of thousands of others over the last five years – making the New Orleans metropolitan area one of the fastest shrinking in the country. Since 2020, the greater New Orleans area has seen its population shrink by about 40,000 residents, a net loss of almost 4% of the metropolitan area’s population. Much of that loss was driven by the city proper, which lost an estimated 20,000 residents during the same period.

Population decline carries real consequences: Fewer residents mean lower tax revenues for schools, libraries, trash pick-up and other basic services. Long-planned and necessary infrastructure upgrades can go underfunded. And population decline can slow the economy. As skilled and working-age adults depart, the city loses its lifeblood — from workers and small business owners to renters and homeowners.

Still, for many like Williams, the calculus is simple: It is simply too expensive to live in a city where there aren’t enough jobs – especially jobs that pay well enough to keep pace with the cost of living.

As the city heads into the 2025 election, this demographic exodus is part of what’s shaping the race to succeed LaToya Cantrell as mayor. Population loss is now an urgent political issue. But can whoever is elected mayor meaningfully reverse this trend and bring people back to New Orleans?

For its 2025 election guide, Verite News asked all four leading mayoral candidates about what they would do to stymie this population loss. They discussed the need for more housing, stronger infrastructure and public services, and more and better jobs.

Royce Duplessis: “I have committed to working with public and private sector stakeholders to build 40,000 affordable housing units. We should also leverage public and private dollars to provide better access to capital for our small businesses. … For too long, we have put all our economic eggs in one basket. … We need to make the Port of New Orleans the leading Port of America. … Revitalizing our port will help us create and sustain new jobs and grow our economy while we diversify it.”

Arthur Hunter: “We’re going to put serious investment into neighborhood infrastructure, public safety, and housing. We’ll clean up our streets, fix broken services, and make sure the resources go where they’re needed most.”

Helena Moreno: “I would create the conditions for businesses and citizens to thrive. That means streamlining permitting, prioritizing business retention, bringing retail to neighborhoods, and reinvigorating our Office of Economic Development. I want community and business leaders at the table, along with stakeholders like GNO Inc., to help my administration support the growth of key industries, such as healthcare and bioscience, green energy, logistics and trade, film and hospitality, clean energy, and tech.”

Oliver Thomas: “As mayor, I’ll focus on the basics that make people stay: affordable housing, good-paying local jobs, safer neighborhoods, and stronger infrastructure that protects communities from flooding and storms.”

But hanging over the entire race is an uncomfortable truth: there is only so much that a mayor can do to solve the core problems driving people to leave. The ongoing threat of hurricanes, flooding and extreme heat, all exacerbated by climate change, are leading to higher insurance premiums.

But the mayor has no regulatory control over homeowners’ insurance companies. That is a state matter. And while the city government can exercise control over some locally generated greenhouse gas emissions and work to mitigate the effects of a warming planet for its residents, those measures won’t do much to stem the worst impacts of climate change.

The mayor and the New Orleans City Council are not even empowered to demand that local employers pay more so that residents can better afford to live in an increasingly expensive city. A so-called state “preemption law” prohibits city and parish governments from raising the local minimum wage that private employers must pay above the federally guaranteed minimum, which is currently $7.25 per hour.

It’s not just New Orleans that is at a crossroads; it’s all of Louisiana.

“The entire state is losing population with very few exceptions,” Allison Plyer, chief demographer at The Data Center, told Verite News. “Every time people talk about population loss in New Orleans, they should be talking about population loss across Louisiana.”

Plyer said that the data available cannot tell us specifically why people are leaving Louisiana, but a lack of economic opportunity is the number one reason nationwide why Americans move long distances. And the fact that Louisiana is failing to grow its economy is corroborated by the data.

According to a report by The Data Center, since 2000, Louisiana has experienced one of the lowest rates of job growth in the country at just 2%. By way of comparison, in that same period, Florida has grown jobs by 41%, Georgia by 25% and Alabama by 13%. The national average job growth was 20%. Louisiana, meanwhile, has struggled to keep college graduates in the state, with many young professionals leaving for Texas and other nearby states for better opportunities.

“Clearly, there needs to be a different way of thinking about how to grow an economy,” Plyer said, noting that the kinds of industries supported by state leaders, such as oil and gas, job growth in the industry has been on the decline. “We continue to be dominated by industries that are shedding jobs, and those continue to be part of our economic development plan.”

New Orleans’ economy remains heavily tied to tourism, hospitality and lowwage service jobs, a market that can highly vulnerable to economic downturns and volatile even in a relatively good economy. Nearly two dozen restaurants and bars have already closed in 2025, many citing increasing costs paired with decreasing revenues.

Even when the city hosts major events — a stretch from fall 2024 to early this year included three nights of Taylor Swift concerts, the Sugar Bowl, the Super Bowl and Mardi Gras — some business owners don’t feel like they benefit.

Skyrocketing premiums

Sandra Green Thomas, who is chief of staff for New Orleans City Councilmember Eugene Green, said that although she has chosen to stay in New Orleans, she has encouraged her adult children to leave for better opportunities, and they have.

“Their educational, work, and social experiences have exceeded their experiences here,” she told Verite News.

But talk to anyone who has left – or is considering leaving – and it is clear that it is not just a lack of jobs that is causing people to leave the city or the state. Many cite the impact of climate change, both existentially and financially, as driving their decision to leave.

“I am a lifelong New Orleanian, but my wife and I have had serious conversations about moving to the Northshore or maybe another city, due to the outrageous cost of homeowners’ insurance,” resident Charlie Hurst told Verite News. “My wife and I love New Orleans and its culture. We grew up knowing the dangers that hurricanes present to this part of the country. However, it is becoming difficult to justify the expense of living here.”

Hurricanes in 2020 and 2021 bankrupted several property insurers, causing insurance prices to skyrocket.

High property and flood insurance premiums, combined with climbing interest rates nationwide, have rendered the local real estate market softer over the past few years, according to Ginger Wiggins, president of the New Orleans Metropolitan Association of Realtors. Even with lower sale prices, however, the cost of insurance has made “affordability impossible” for property owners, she said.

And according to Wiggins, if fewer homes sell, there could be economic ramifications for the state.

“The average sale of one house in Louisiana brings in like $85,000 on average into the local economy,” Wiggins said, pointing to money spent on commissions, moving expenses, home repairs and furniture and appliance purchases.

The insurance crisis has also had downstream impacts on the rental market. As premiums climb, some landlords have to increase the rent for long-term tenants in order to cover their increasing monthly payments, helping to push up rental prices.

‘It got harder and harder to defend living here’

Hurricanes have also revealed the extent to which local infrastructure, from the sewerage system to the electric grid, might not be prepared to meet the new reality of quickly intensifying hurricanes defined by both high winds and more rain. Even without storms, New Orleans’ infrastructure is often in disrepair. Potholes, water main breaks, sinkholes and unstable roads feed a sense of neglect.

“If you poll people, the biggest issues for them are always going to be housing and infrastructure,” said Monique Blossom, policy director at the Louisiana Fair Housing Action Center. “Yet we’re not investing at a level to even do damage control, much less in the crisis we’re facing.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by current and former residents. Courtney Fricke, who was born and raised on the Northshore, moved to New Orleans three years ago. Now, she and her husband have decided to leave the state.

“It truly has been death by a thousand cuts,” Fricke said.“It got harder and harder to defend living here, so we decided to move.”

The city’s next mayor will be contending with a difficult political environment. It is a Democratic city in one of the most conservative states in the country. Gov. Jeff Landry, a conservative Republican, has often made a point of using the city as a political punching bag, at one point even holding up funding for a critical New Orleans infrastructure project after local leaders said in 2022 that they would not prioritize enforcement of the state’s abortion ban. The reelection of Donald Trump, bringing with it the prospect of massive cuts in federal funding for city priorities, as well as the loss of federal employees who work in the region, only further complicates things for the local government.

“Leaders across the state really need to be working together to look at why the state is losing population and what they’re going to do about it, because the mayor could pull every lever in his or her power, but if the state is continuing to lose population, they’re not going to be able to turn it around,” Plyer said.

Plyer said local and state leaders should also be wary about Trump’s immigration crackdown. One of the few mitigating factors to population loss is international immigration, which drove a modest growth in population last year.

But city leadership does not have any say over federal immigration policy. And the state legislature has sought to erode what little power it had — enacting local policies that prevent police from working with federal immigration authorities — by passing laws that ban such “sanctuary” policies and even making it a crime for local law enforcement agents to refuse to assist in immigration investigations.

“Louisiana’s population would be declining even faster if it weren’t for international immigration,” Plyer said.

Williams, the musician who moved here in 2020, recognizes that a mayor alone cannot solve all the problems facing the city. But he still thinks tackling bread-and-butter issues, from building better bike infrastructure to continuing to regulate short-term rentals,  would help him feel more committed to staying in town.

“So much of how I think about myself and what I do musically is tied to New Orleans,” Williams said, noting that the city has a long history of being a home to Black musicians like him. It’s a lineage he would like to continue to be a part of – if he can afford to.

“It’s like, man, could I ever afford to live in this city I love so much and that has given me so much?” Williams mused. “If I want to have that type of thing, then I have to leave the city to find it.”

This article first appeared on Verite News New Orleans and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.