CenLamar | Est. 2006

Among other things, I have been charged with researching the best practices for city-wide youth involvement programs. It’s an issue close to my heart. The average age of our workforce will reach retirement in less than a decade. The Rapides Foundation has also recognized the exigency of the situation, which is one of the reasons they created the “Bring ‘Em Home CenLa” campaign through CAP. Ever since I was a teenager, I have enjoyed participating in an open public discussion. Back then, The Town Talk featured a “Youth Council,” a group of a dozen or so high school students who…

I spent my last year in Houston living in a mixed-income, racially-diverse neighborhood in the middle of town; it was an area that anticipated gentrification, both due to its housing stock and its great location, but it hadn’t quite reached the tipping point– which was a good thing for the working class and nearby college students. It’s difficult for some of us in Alexandria to recognize that there can be negative effects of gentrification; we’ve never dealt with it. Wikipedia offers a fairly good definition of the term gentrification and its numerous implications: Gentrification, or urban gentrification, is a term…

It’s not a big secret that Alexandria has always struggled with its identity, which is one of the reasons this blog tends to obsess over Alexandria’s few remaining historic buildings and places. It’s a way of rediscovering what we’re made of– every one of those places can tell their own stories.  Since I took the job with the Mayor’s Office, I’ve had the opportunity to learn quite a bit about Alexandria’s history. Local history is a passion shared by many in my family. My great-aunts, Sue Eakin and Manie Culbertson (my paternal grandmother’s sisters), wrote the book Louisiana: The Land…