As New Orleans struggles to balance tourism and residents, the neighborhood is caught in the middle One morning a couple of years ago, a neighbor called me over from my porch to point out the guy staying in the Airbnb next door: a certain famous actor who?d just appeared in a blockbuster Middle-earth fantasy. I snuck a look, and there he was, smoking in sunglasses and a T-shirt next to our rusty old iron fence. Our neighbor had just googled how much this actor was worth, and wondered aloud why he wasn?t staying up at the W or the Ritz, adding that he?d just been tweeting from the restaurant around the corner about a bathroom art installation. As though on cue, we overheard the actor tell his hosts that he hoped the neighborhood wouldn?t ?lose its authenticity.?
Two neighborhoods downriver from the French Quarter, Bywater is close enough to its tourist vortex to be convenient but far enough away to still seem cool and ?authentic.? Pre-Katrina, it was an affordable, laid-back mix of black and white, working class and professional, with a fair number of artists. Modest 19th-century shotgun houses and Creole cottages dominated, with larger ones mixed in throughout. I bought my 1850s Creole side hall in 2003 on a New Orleans public school teacher?s salary. Now, with skyrocketing real estate prices, high-end renovations, and a steady stream of neighbors being displaced by spiking property taxes and short-term rentals, Bywater is becoming unrecognizable to many locals. As o...