Pensacola Mayor D.C. Reeves last week sought to reset the public debate over the future of the former Baptist Hospital campus, two weeks after the City Council paused an early-stage advisory contract amid public backlash. In a lengthy press conference on Dec. 30, Reeves addressed fears of displacement, confusion over the city’s selection of a New Orleans–based consultant, and what he said were widespread misunderstandings about the limited scope of work the city was proposing at this stage.
The council’s decision to table the proposed contract with Bayou District Consulting followed hours of public testimony from residents and organized activists who warned that redevelopment of the roughly 50-acre site could accelerate displacement in nearby Westside neighborhoods. In the days before the meeting, organizers with the Party for Socialism and Liberation distributed flyers in neighborhoods surrounding the campus, encouraging people to attend and speak out.
At the press conference, Reeves said he understood why communities near the site were sensitive to large redevelopment efforts but argued that much of the opposition to Bayou District was rooted in claims that did not match what the advisory contract actually authorized.
“The biggest misnomer of this entire issue is the confusion around what Bayou District is being hired to do,” Reeves said. “Bayou District is not being hired to be the developer. They’re not being hired to even design anything. All they are … being hired to do is to start the community engagement process.”
Displacement concerns and the New Orleans comparison
At the council meeting and in subsequent public comments, opponents frequently cited Columbia Parc, a mixed-income redevelopment built on the former St. Bernard public housing site in New Orleans, as a warning about how large-scale redevelopment can reduce affordable housing and limit residents’ ability to return. Bayou District’s name is associated with that project through the Bayou District Foundation, a New Orleans nonprofit that partnered with the Housing Authority of New Orleans and private developer Columbia Residential in the post-Hurricane Katrina rebuild.
Bayou District Consulting, the firm selected by the city for the Baptist advisory contract, is a separate and newer entity. In materials submitted to Pensacola, the company describes itself as providing advisory services informed by the foundation’s work in New Orleans and elsewhere.
Columbia Parc has long been a flashpoint in New Orleans housing debates because of the scope of change at the St. Bernard site. Before Katrina, St. Bernard contained roughly 1,300 to 1,400 apartments, nearly all of them deeply subsidized public housing. The redevelopment ultimately produced about 685 units in total, divided roughly evenly among public housing replacement units, tax-credit affordable or workforce housing, and market-rate apartments.
Return outcomes have also been contentious. The Outline reported said that by 2013, about 125 of roughly 920 pre-Katrina St. Bernard households had returned to the redeveloped site. Reporting and policy analyses of New Orleans’ post-Katrina housing rebuild have documented screening requirements that could create barriers to return, even when subsidized units existed, including criminal background checks, credit screening, minimum income or employment standards, and reviews of prior lease compliance.
Reeves’ rebuttal and questions of responsibility
Reeves rejected claims that Bayou District itself was responsible for those outcomes, arguing that critics were misattributing decisions made years earlier by federal and local housing authorities.
“One hundred percent of that is not factual,” Reeves said. “They weren’t even involved in that process until 18 months after the decision … by the federal government.”
Reeves was referring to post-Katrina decisions by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Housing Authority of New Orleans to pursue mixed-income redevelopment of large public housing sites, including St. Bernard. In his account, those policy choices preceded Bayou District Foundation’s role as a local nonprofit partner and were not controlled by the organization now at the center of Pensacola’s debate.
Local history and how it shapes the debate
While disputing the New Orleans comparison, Reeves acknowledged that displacement concerns in Pensacola are rooted in the city’s own history of large public works and urban renewal projects that removed housing and permanently reshaped nearby neighborhoods.
“Nobody lives in the hospital right now,” Reeves said. “But from about 1967 to 1972, blocks of this area were taken out, and people were displaced.”
Reeves raised that history while referencing other city projects, including the Hollice T. Williams Greenway, where community engagement and sensitivity to displacement have featured prominently in public discussions. His point, he said, was not that the Baptist site involved removing residents, but that past experience informed how the city structured the current process.
In Reeves’ telling, the Baptist timeline was designed to begin community engagement earlier in the sequence than in prior projects — even those widely praised for outreach — by separating engagement from design and development entirely. The advisory contract, he said, was intended to start conversations about future uses of the site before any developer was selected, design work began, or visible changes occurred beyond demolition.
Why city officials say Baptist is different
City officials emphasize that the Baptist Hospital campus is vacant and that redevelopment would not involve demolishing occupied housing or relocating current residents. They also point to two affordable housing developments already moving forward on or near the campus using federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, projects they say would add affordable units rather than replace them.
Reeves reiterated that the Bayou District contract was limited to advisory work — helping structure community engagement, analyze redevelopment options, and prepare for future solicitations — not selecting developers or locking in a redevelopment model.
“They’re not being hired to just do another mixed-income development,” Reeves said. “They’re hired to engage the community on what the community wants.”
Critics counter that even if redevelopment increases on-site affordability, indirect displacement pressures — such as rising land values, rents, and property taxes — could still affect surrounding neighborhoods over time unless anti-displacement measures are embedded in binding agreements.
Organized opposition and campaign messaging
The dispute has also taken on a clear political dimension. Many speakers at the council meeting were aligned with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, whose mayoral candidate, Jasmine Brown, has made opposition to Bayou District and the redevelopment of the Baptist site a central theme of her early campaign.
In campaign materials and a video posted the same day as Reeves’ press conference, Brown accused city leaders of advancing redevelopment plans behind closed doors and dismissing community resistance as misinformed.
“We’re demanding real authority over how public land in our neighborhoods is used,” Brown said in the video. “Public land does not belong to consultants, developers, or political insiders. It belongs to the people who live here.”
Brown and her supporters argue that city officials began shaping plans for the Baptist site long before residents were consulted, citing meetings with Bayou District representatives and visits by local leaders to New Orleans as evidence that key decisions were made outside public view.
Reeves rejected that characterization, saying the administration had publicly discussed its intended timeline for more than a year and that the advisory contract was meant to start community engagement before any visible changes occurred on the site.
“What honestly probably partially is my fault,” Reeves said, “is that I come in and react to baseless speculation … which creates some type of news story when really, in reality, it was baseless to begin with.”
Demolition first, planning later
With the advisory contract paused, Reeves said the administration is now focused on demolishing the former hospital, a roughly $30 million project funded largely through federal sources.
“We’ve got a monstrosity of a project ahead of us for the next 18 months, which is to demolish the building,” Reeves said. “One thing I feel real positive about from community feedback is that no one wants to keep an abandoned hospital in the neighborhood.”
Reeves also noted that Bayou District Consulting was the only responsive bidder to the city’s request for proposals, framing the council’s decision as a choice between hiring the firm or pausing the process to reassess.
He said he remains open to restarting engagement work if the council provides clearer direction.
“If council members have any specifics or anything that they want to bring forward, I’m open to those conversations,” Reeves said. “We’ll take a step back and reassess how we want to handle that moving forward.”
