Trump Vowed to Stand by New Orleans After Katrina, But Let Project Die

On August 25, 2005, Donald Trump announced plans to build a 70-story high-rise in downtown New Orleans, which he referred to as a “sexy city.” Four days later, Hurricane Katrina hit. Trump and his family continued to pledge their commitment to the Trump Tower complex, saying they’d help the people of New Orleans rebuild their city, but the project never came to fruition. Twenty years later, the land it was supposed to stand on is still a parking lot.

“It’s going to be absolutely the most incredible building New Orleans has ever seen,” Trump said at the announcement. The building would have been the tallest in Louisiana and would have drastically changed the New Orleans skyline, in a city with very few tall buildings. Led by a group of Florida developers who did a licensing deal with Trump, the project was supposed to house a condominium-hotel, and include a five-star restaurant and retail space. 

After Katrina, the developers lobbied Congress to include incentives that would help the tower be built more quickly, encouraging tax benefits to buyers of the condos and allowing public interest bonds to be sold to help cover material costs. A Times-Picayune article in November 2005 was headlined: “Tower could power New Orleans revival.”

“The Trump organization stands behind the people of New Orleans as they rebuild their great city,” Trump said in a statement to the newspaper. “We have no doubt that the city of New Orleans will come back stronger than ever, and the Trump Organization is proud to be a part of this redevelopment process as New Orleans gets back on its feet. Our decision to enter the New Orleans market has only been reinforced by the dynamic nature and resilient strength of the people of New Orleans.”

Years later, during a 2010 deposition about a different project, Trump said that immediately following Katrina, he actually offered the Florida developers their money back to get out of the project, but they turned him down.

In 2007, the developers announced they had leased offices for the Trump Tower building. In January 2008, Donald Trump Jr. visited New Orleans to talk about the project and said the Trump Organization was planning a national push to look for buyers. Weeks later, they started advertising in the newspaper for employees. In the fall, the developers said the project was still going forward despite a sharp increase in construction prices after Katrina, but that they wouldn’t start building until they sell half the units. Prices for the condos would start at $400,000 and go up to $2 million.

A website for the project featured an introductory video with Don Jr. and Ivanka wearing masquerade masks that dissolved off their faces as their signatures and “Live Luxury” and “Live Opulence” flashed across the screen. It ended with a photograph of Donald Trump in a mask and the words “Live It Yourself.” A landing page for the site had a rendering of the 1.6 million-square-foot tower with the words: “In a city of limitless possibilities, lavish luxury towers from the ground up. One cannot aspire any higher. Even the sky is not the limit.”

Letters from citizens about the tower flooded the Times-Picayune, with people writing in both support and against the building. “The news of the Trump Tower groundbreaking is unconscionable,” wrote one person, Jody, in the spring of 2007. “Citizens are still homeless, jobless, without sufficient police and fire protection and without adequate levees.”

Others defended the project. “As we struggle to rebuild and redefine our future, surely Mr. Trump’s project can only be considered a win-win for all concerned,” wrote a woman named Gail. 

“Revenue from this economic development can help us rebuild levees and increase citizen protection in case of another hurricane,” said a man named Andrew. “It is clear that the Trump tower could hold the key to reclaiming New Orleans’ glory.”

For years, a photograph of the proposed building was on a giant poster at the Poydras Street parking lot where it would supposedly be built. The poster faded with age and in 2011, the parking lot was sold at a foreclosure auction. 

Five years later, when Trump was running for president against Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Convention tried to use his failed attempt against him. A DNC researcher filed a public records request seeking documents about Trump and the scrapped project, but the city said none existed.

“Donald Trump has threatened to do to the economy what he’s done with his businesses, so we believe the American people have the right to see what happened in his various business ventures,” a DNC spokesperson told the Times-Picayune in 2016. “Across the country, he has outsourced instead of making American products, shortchanged small businesses and laid off workers. America deserves better.”

Over the decades of his work as a real estate mogul, Trump developed a less-than-sterling reputation for how he conducted business. He was often accused of fraud, which his political opponents have tried to use against him. Marco Rubio, now Trump’s Secretary of State, called him out in 2016 for leaving “a number of Floridians high and dry” after tapping out of a project in Fort Lauderdale. Similar to the New Orleans project, Trump had licensed his name to the deal, but the way the project was marketed left buyers believing Trump himself was developing the project. One New Orleans citizen that wrote into the Times-Picayune celebrated Trump investing “a portion of his personal fortune into building Trump tower in New Orleans,” although, in fact, Trump was paid $2 million upfront to license his name. 

A similar failed tower and licensing deal happened in Tampa Bay and buyers were left distraught after sinking hundreds of thousands of dollars into something they believed to be managed by Trump himself. “The main reason we went into this was Trump,” said Jay McLaughlin, a physical therapist from Connecticut. “We had no idea he was just putting his name on it and not backing it financially.”

A 2016 analysis by The New York Times found that a third of the business ventures hyped up by Trump from 2006-2016 never got off the ground. But Trump would sometimes describe them as successes for his company since he got paid money upfront for the licensing deals.

The White House and Donald Trump Jr. did not return Rolling Stone’s requests for comment on the failed New Orleans project. President Trump did not publicly acknowledge the 20th anniversary of Katrina making landfall on Friday.

Katrina’s anniversary has renewed scrutiny of Trump gutting the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) since retaking the White House. After Hurricane Katrina decimated Louisiana, FEMA was overhauled and given more funding for disaster preparedness. Communities of color are often the most vulnerable communities when natural disasters strike, which was the case with the communities devastated by Katrina. These communities are the same ones that stand to be most disproportionately affected by the dismantling of FEMA.

Trump’s cuts to the agency threaten to change how effective it would be in response to natural disasters, and in a letter to Congress on Monday, nearly 200 current and former FEMA employees sounded the alarm that the Trump administration had undercut FEMA’s ability to respond to disasters like Katrina.

The day after the letter was published, multiple FEMA employees were put on administrative leave.