Entrepreneurs Leverage New Orleans’s Charm to Lure Small Businesses

IT has been a long time since the word “optimism” was spoken in the same sentence as “New Orleans.”

But a small group of entrepreneurs has been using that word lately to describe their efforts to attract small businesses to New Orleans. For now, their enthusiasm may be greater than their results. But they say the city’s low rents and business tax incentives along with its music and culture have proved to be powerful lures, despite the still-halting efforts to get past the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

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