NEW ORLEANS – According to the New Orleans City Planning Commission’s newly released Canal Street Progress Report & Analysis of Current Conditions 2025, Canal Street stands at a critical juncture, with clear gains since the 2018 study was done but also with challenges that persist. The 2025 update identifies several areas where Canal Street continues to face significant challenges and outlines the actions needed to address them.
“Canal Street’s history is long and, like any significant corridor, has experienced an evolution in its appearance and function, but its stature as the main street of New Orleans has remained,” the report states. Overall, the study concludes that revitalization will depend on coordinated public-realm improvements, stronger business activity, and a clearer identity for the corridor.
Uneven Development
More than $436 million in development is currently underway across the broader Canal Street area, including new hotel projects, retail investment, and cultural facilities that contribute to renewed interest along the corridor. The scale and mix of these projects, particularly the addition of several new hotels and hundreds of rooms now open or under development, signal continued confidence from private investors that Canal remains a viable destination for lodging, tourism, and mixed-use growth.
Still, the report shows that underlying business trends remain uneven. Retail Goods Establishments have dropped by more than half over the last 12 years—from 64 to 31—representing, as the report puts it, “a significant finding” in the study area’s dataset. Other uses have proven more resilient: the number of hotels and restaurants each increased by three establishments, and personal service businesses rose earlier in the decade before returning to pre-2012 levels after pandemic disruptions.
The study recommends renewed efforts to attract and retain businesses, with strategies aimed at creating a more diverse mix of retail, hospitality, entertainment, and cultural uses. Filling persistent vacancies in the inland blocks is identified as critical to reestablishing continuity and economic coherence across the entire corridor.
In addition to ground-floor vacancies, the report also highlights long-standing challenges above the street level. The report examines the long-standing vacancy of upper floors in historic buildings between the 400 and 1000 blocks, many of which have remained unused since the economic downturns of the 1980s and 1990s. While some spaces have recently been converted into short-term rentals, the report notes that large portions of upper floors remain out of commerce.
Visitors, Infrastructure, and the Public-Realm
Visitor activity remains strong with an estimated 1.5 million people passing through Canal Street in the first quarter of 2024—a level of foot traffic that demonstrates the corridor’s continued draw even as national retail trends show mixed results. The DDD estimates that visitors to the Canal St. corridor include out-of-state visitors from “all 50 states” with “over 60 percent of those traveling over 250 miles.”
The report acknowledges citywide efforts to modernize streets, sidewalks, and public rights-of-way but states that persistent public-realm deterioration, especially uneven and damaged sidewalks, aging streetscapes, gaps in lighting, and longstanding ADA issues, continue to undermine walkability and discourage pedestrian activity. The report notes that these are foundational to making Canal Street safer, more accessible, and more appealing for residents, workers, and visitors alike.
The scale of these issues is evident in the city’s 311 data. The report notes that the Department of Public Works has received 950 service requests related to the corridor since 2018, with “nearly 45%” involving streetlight outages or damaged poles.
Corridor Identity
The report describes placemaking as “efforts to reconceive and reinvent public spaces in a way that capitalizes on the place’s assets and identity to create a space that is valuable and accessible to the community at large.” It adds that past planning efforts for Canal Street have “consistently emphasized the importance of the physical character of the public and private spaces along the street.”
The study says the 2018 Canal Street analysis examined internationally recognized corridors such as the Champs-Élysées and Times Square. Those examples, the report states, emphasized common principles—walkability, multimodal transit access, consistent landscaping and lighting, and preservation of historic character—that continue to be relevant for Canal Street today and illustrate the value of a cohesive, multi-use urban environment.
Coordination and Implementation
The study stresses that meaningful progress will require coordinated action among city agencies, property owners, businesses, and civic groups. It highlights the need for sustained interagency collaboration and active private-sector participation to implement improvements at scale and ensure that revitalization efforts are consistent across all segments of the corridor.
The report also points to the momentum generated by Celebrate Canal!, a nonprofit organization led by the New Orleans Entertainment Coalition that has emerged as an active partner in corridor revitalization efforts. Since launching in 2024, Celebrate Canal! has created a Vision and Action Plan focused on leveraging local, state, and federal resources to spur new development, attract family-oriented and high-end retail, and strengthen corridor management. According to the report, the organization has hosted nine events in its first year—including the Champagne Stroll, the Windows on Canal art installation, children’s scavenger hunts, and stakeholder meetings—to build community engagement and encourage investment.
Many of the priorities identified by Celebrate Canal!, such as enhanced landscaping, coordinated streetscape maintenance, and redevelopment of key opportunity sites, mirror the CPC’s own recommendations. The report notes that the organization has “played a critically important role in outreach to business operators, property owners, retailers, and the development community” and that its work fulfills, in part, a long-standing recommendation for a dedicated entity focused on the corridor’s revitalization.
