Below sea level, behind a levee, and increasingly expensive to insure – here is what the suburbs of New Orleans actually demand from the people who stay.
Metairie is not a city. It is an unincorporated community inside Jefferson Parish, planted on flat, sinking land just west of New Orleans in southeast Louisiana’s coastal plain. Interstate 10 runs straight through it.
So does Veterans Memorial Boulevard, six lanes wide, cutting through the densest part of a suburb that about 145,000 people call home – 6,170 of them per square mile, with no city hall of their own.
Jefferson Parish handles roads, drainage, utilities, and public safety for Metairie alongside every other unincorporated community in the parish…