Gretna Mayor Belinda Constant still lives on the same street she grew up on, five blocks from Gretna’s City Hall. She now works daily in that very building to revitalize the vibrant community she remembers from her childhood.
Gretna is the second-largest city in Jefferson Parish and sits just across the Mississippi River from New Orleans. When the oil busts of the late ’70s and ’80s hit the West Bank hard, businesses shuttered, and what had once been a bustling, walkable downtown went quiet. Gretna then spent decades playing the role of bedroom community to its famous neighbor.
Constant watched it happen; she was raised in the middle of it. Her grandfather owned one of the corner grocery stores that once anchored the neighborhood, and she has a distinct memory of what it felt like when the city was alive.
She said those happy memories were what later propelled her into public life — first to the city council in 2005, where she became Gretna’s first female elected official, and then to the mayor’s office in 2013.
Using The Past to Shape the Future
Constant didn’t come from a political family. In fact, her parents, she’ll tell you, would have preferred she stayed out of it entirely. But in the 1990s, she and her husband bought a historic home on Huey P. Long Avenue, and the renovation process pulled her straight into the machinery of city government.
To work on a historic property, residents must first go before the Historic District Commission and make a case to the commissioners. When Constant approached the commission, she found a city at a crossroads. A conversation about historic preservation was gaining momentum; then-Mayor Ronnie Harris had created Gretna’s first historic district, and people were starting to talk about what the city’s past could mean for its future.
But Constant said she noticed that quality of life wasn’t yet a municipal priority. Things like walkability and landscaping, for instance, weren’t a part of the conversation.
“That wasn’t a focus at the time,” Constant said, “from any of the elected officials.”
Thinking she could bring a different perspective, when the councilman in her district retired, Constant ran, and won.
After her victory, her first meeting as a councilwoman set the tone for everything that followed. Two controversial items were on her plate back-to-back.
The first: a moratorium on oil tank farm expansion along the riverfront. The tank farms had long been a fixture of Gretna’s industrial identity, but they were consuming the most valuable land in the city, right along the river, and Constant wasn’t willing to let that continue.
The second: a historic home slated for demolition to make way for condominium development on the water. She moved the house, which later became the city’s welcome center, and the development went forward as planned.
It was, in miniature, the approach she would apply to everything: Progress and preservation don’t have to be enemies, but someone has to hold the line.
That instinct now has a formal name. The Gretna Comprehensive Plan, developed with extensive community input and supported through federal and state partnerships, lays out a vision for the city’s next 20 to 30 years. Specifically, it aims to “build upon the City’s strong foundation of community, while respecting the past and embracing the future, to improve existing infrastructure, enhance commercial corridors, and promote walkable and bikeable neighborhoods.”
Gretna 2030, the current master plan, is that vision in action. Every development, from new businesses to improved canals, is a line item in an argument Constant has been making since before she held her title.
Laying The Groundwork
In South Louisiana, infrastructure is never just infrastructure — it’s a negotiation with water, knowing that every city in the region shares the same vulnerability.
Constant understood early that Gretna couldn’t build its way out of that reality.
“We’re not going to pipe and concrete our way out of flooding,” she said. “The region shares the canals, the region shares every place from the smallest collection basins to the largest canal. We’re all sharing that same space for water.”
The only viable path forward was green infrastructure projects that managed water and, by design, improved quality of life.
That philosophy is built into every major infrastructure project her administration has undertaken. The Gretna Resilience District, which centers on improvements to the 25th Street Canal and Gretna City Park, is the clearest expression of it.
With roughly $20 million assembled from federal and state partners — including FEMA, HUD, and the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development — the district addresses longstanding flood mitigation needs in the city’s Jonestown neighborhood while simultaneously expanding recreational amenities for residents.
The same logic runs through the Fifth Street Redevelopment, an $8 million investment by the LaDOTD that resurfaces and reimagines a corridor that Constant describes plainly as depressed.
“It’s been a plan of action to increase development here for commercial,” she said, “because what does that do? It increases our tax base.” The project includes new bike lanes, a center median, drainage landscaping and on-street parking.
The city didn’t wait for funding to start positioning itself; it acquired vacant properties along Fifth Street over several years as part of the 2020 and 2030 master plans, holding them until the right moment.
“Individually, the projects don’t make for a great city, but collectively they tick all the boxes for why somebody would want to either live here or do business here,” Constant explained.
Open For Business
From the beginning, Constant was set on one fiscal principle: grow the tax base without asking residents to pay more.
“We live and turn the lights on here in government from sales tax and property tax,” she said. “My commitment to the people is to never have to raise millages.”
In 13 years, she hasn’t had to. But that discipline required a clear-eyed approach to growth.
One of her first targets was Fleurty Girl, a woman-owned boutique that had outgrown its origins as a T-shirt operation run out of the trunk of a car. Constant recruited the business to downtown Gretna. Today, the owner has invested in and owns her building.
“I knew small cities need small retail to keep people local,” Constant said. It was a repeatable strategy: find businesses with roots, bring them in, give them a reason to stay. Several more such businesses have since followed.
Another transformation has happened at the table. Constant doesn’t hesitate when she describes that Gretna has become, in her words, the “culinary mecca of the West Bank.” She notes that it didn’t start that way. For years, downtown operated almost entirely on the lunch traffic generated by the Jefferson Parish government complex and the courthouse.
“After 4 o’clock, it was a ghost town,” she said. But eventually, restaurants began making the change to stay open into the evening. “That was a huge risk,” she said. “Thanh Thanh was the first restaurant, along with Common Grounds, to stay open at night.”
Commercial change, of course, must be balanced by residential change.
The city’s population of approximately 17,000 has grown by roughly 1,500 over the last decade — modest in absolute terms, but meaningful given that it’s happening in tandem with an aging population cycling out. The average resident age has dropped from the mid-60s to the mid-40s.
Young families are moving in, drawn, Constant says, by walkability, safety and the events calendar that has made Gretna a place worth showing up for.
Investment is starting to show up at a larger scale, too. A $25 million mixed-use development at the corner of Huey P. Long Avenue and 2nd Street — a public-private partnership between the city, Jefferson Parish and Jefferson Facilities Inc. — broke ground in late 2024.
It will bring a second location of Port Orleans Brewing Company, the Avo Taco restaurant, a 148-space parking garage with EV charging stations and green stormwater infrastructure. The project is projected to generate $9 million in local and state taxes over 10 years and create 55 permanent jobs.
“Growth comes from the infrastructure components we’re putting together,” Constant explained. “Getting to the place where you’ve put out a product that people want to be a part of… which creates the growth necessary to maintain the city in a way that people choose to be here.”
The Heartbeat of Downtown: Gretna’s Marketplace
If infrastructure projects are Gretna’s bones, then the Marketplace is its pulse.
Every Saturday morning, rain or shine, vendors set up along Huey P. Long Avenue between 3rd and 4th streets for the Gretna Farmers Market, a volunteer-run institution that just celebrated its 20th anniversary.
Gretna Fest, which has been running for more than 30 years, is the event that first put the city on the regional map. “If I had to point to something, that would be what really put Gretna’s name out there,” Constant said.
What sets it apart from other regional festivals isn’t just the music; it’s the setting. Gretna Fest is held in the middle of downtown, which means attendees can experience the fullness of the city while enjoying the festivities.
“It showcased the city in a fabulous way,” Constant said.
Which makes what’s happening right now a big gamble, though a necessary one. On May 1, the city began a major renovation of the Marketplace itself, transforming aging infrastructure into a modernized gathering space worthy of everything it hosts. The project is expected to take four to six months.
The timing, Constant acknowledges, wasn’t ideal.
“We were hoping it wouldn’t have interfered with Gretna Fest,” she said. But state funding doesn’t wait for convenient calendars. “The why is because of funding. We never had the money before.” When the opportunity came, the city pounced.
Gretna Fest will look different this year. In place of the traditional three-day festival, the city and the Gretna Economic Development Association have created Gretna Festin’, an expanded Friday night concert series that will bring festival-caliber entertainment to downtown over four Saturdays in October. Each weekend will feature a local opener and a nationally recognized headliner, with the full lineup set to be announced this month.
Without festival vendors taking over the streets, the city’s restaurants will become the main draw. The businesses, Constant said, are excited about the opportunity.
“We’re going to have four bites of the apple instead of just one weekend,” she said.
Gretna Fest will return in 2027 in its full three-day format, this time with the newly renovated Marketplace as its front door.
“When this project is finished, every event we host here will be better,” Constant said. The short-term inconvenience, she’s betting, will make everything that follows permanently stronger.
Making Gretna A City Built to Last
Constant has a line she returns to when people ask her what kind of city she’s trying to build. “Governments build cities,” she says, “and people build communities. That’s what Gretna is. It’s the Gretna community.”
It’s a distinction that shapes how she governs. Since taking office, Constant has held regular district meetings, public informational sessions and community outreach events — keeping residents inside the process of transformation rather than presenting them with its results after the fact.
The people who watched the city go quiet in the ’80s have watched it come back. The young families who moved in for the walkability and the safety have watched it keep going.
“Our residents have enjoyed seeing the transformation as we move through time,” she said.
The work isn’t finished. It never quite is in a city this old, with this much history to honor and this much ground still to recover. But the momentum is clear.
“Historic cities can be left behind based on no changes,” Constant said. “We want to ensure that we’ll continue to evolve as our generations continue to evolve. Our biggest goal is ensuring that this city is ready for the next generation.”
Constant has lived her entire life in a city she has spent her entire career refusing to give up on. That hasn’t changed. Neither, it turns out, has the city itself. It’s just finally becoming what she always knew it could be.
