To claw forward the Parish needs to acknowledge that it’s “right size” is inextricably tied to the degree to which the Lower Ninth is itself a vibrant housing market, a weak market, or emptied out. As the Lower Ninth goes, so goes much of the consumer purchasing power of residents in the retail trade area that would support commercial space along Perez and St Bernard Highway, especially west of Paris Road.

It also must acknowledge that the “right size” leaves empty no less than 20 percent of the land area customarily dedicated to neighborhoods. This emptiness can take one of two forms. It can be dispersed throughout the Parish, or it can be consolidated. In the former, the Parish will present itself as a place of 10,000 homes each on what looks like a 1/2 lot – which is to say looks empty – or in the case of the latter, 10,000 homes tightly clustered and thereby transforming the Parish into a more genuinely walkable, less empty-feeling suburban area.

In either case St. Bernard Parish is not going to become a Parish of 25,000 households earning $60,000 a year capable when combined with a full Lower Ninth of generating $760M in annual spending on goods and services, and is instead likely to be a Parish is 10,000 HHs earning $50,000 a year without the Lower Ninth nearby and thus more probably capable of supporting not much more than 700,000 sq.ft. of retail

If the Parish continues to claw back without a change in strategy, it will be look and feel empty because it is. There will be too many streets with only a few houses on them, and too many empty chain stores. It will communicate to the market more that 15,000 HHs are not there rather than the fact that 10,000 are. It will signal to the market more that 1.9M sq.ft. of retail is vacant, than that 500,000 is not and that 200,000 is yet to be filled and supportable. The signals will all point to a failed recovery because it will look empty and over time, validate the emptiness by remaining so. Households considering a return, to say nothing of those who might be new to the region, will soon discover the rationale behind the migration of former St. Bernard residents to Slidell and other locations in St. Tammany Parish.

The right direction is to get smaller physically, redirecting infill between Delambert and Jean Lafitte, shrinking Chalmette’s footprint by 30 percent, and incenting higher density mixed-use development in Arabi, and combining these intentions with a cessation of suburban strip retail along Perez and St. Bernard and instead focusing smaller retail at key intersections (Paris and Perez) (Paris and St. Bernard) so as to create consolidated, neighborhood-serving destination retail in a concentrated central location while also encouraging smaller-scale retail to flourish throughout. Perez from Packenham to Mereaux needs to be scaled down and eventually incented to become residential; otherwise the development trend, without the population, will mimic the results along Veterans in Jefferson Parish.

For the Parish to flourish, it has to rebrand. It cannot alone be a ancestral home to the St. Bernard tribe that came back against all odds. It can be partly this. But it also must be something more (and less) than a series of subdivisions and suburban strip malls mismatched to current and likely population groups. Instead it must rebrand itself as a Parish of three small working class towns with healthy retail and civic spaces, and open consolidated spaces between them.

Let’s hope St. Bernard will be renewed as a unique and wonderful place, and NOT become a cut-rate cookie-cutter suburb that’s destined to blow down like a house made of straw.