Tyler Bridges, a freelance writer based in New Orleans, is a former Nieman Fellow and reporter for The Miami Herald and The Times-Picayune. He is the author of The Rise of David Duke and Bad Bet on the Bayou: The Rise of Gambling in Louisiana and the Fall of Governor Edwin Edwards.

She has butted heads with Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who once called her a “loudmouth,” but has since made amends. She won a seat on the New Orleans City Council despite an embarrassing and potentially career-ending incident involving her husband—an attorney for the city—and a marijuana joint.

And she was instrumental is saving her neighborhood from being razed and turned into parkland after Hurricane Katrina submerged it in seven feet of water.


This, in a nutshell, is LaToya Cantrell—the most interesting up-and-coming elected official in New Orleans today. Now that Landrieu is a lame duck—he’s term-limited and his tenure ends in 2018—Cantrell has attracted enough notice that she is frequently mentioned as a possible successor. But she gets a little shaken up when people refer to her as a politician.

“I will always, always be tied to the community and the grass-roots network,” Cantrell says at a recent gathering at St. John Institutional Missionary Baptist Church. She is wearing a turquoise dress and New Balance running shoes and explains that she’s just come from walking a nearby neighborhood, documenting houses that remained blighted. During that event, all of the dozen neighbors who fanned out with her were white. Cantrell mixes as easily with them as she does with the 150 or so African-Americans in the church crowd.

In a city where African-American and white groups often choose to do their own thing, Cantrell bridges the racial divide and can point to a record of getting things done.

“She has a record of success as a community organizer,” says Edward Chervenak, a political science professor at the University of New Orleans. “She’s a coalition builder.” Chervenak notes that Cantrell stands a demographic advantage in a mayoral race, given that 59 percent of voters are African-American and 56 percent are female.

In years past, African-American elected officials in New Orleans came mostly from the civil rights movement. Their focus was making sure constituents got government jobs and contracts and were not excluded from social functions. But Cantrell represents a new generation of African-American officials with broader concerns.

This is on display as she speaks to the church group. She highlights her latest political fight, a measure approved unanimously by the city council in January that bans smoking in the city’s bars, hotels and gambling halls. Cantrell typically tries to find common ground among competing interests. But in this instance, she pushed for the strictest smoking ban possible.

Her concern, she tells the group, is protecting bartenders, customers and musicians from second-hand smoke. The smoke frequently causes death and chronic illness, which, she says, “are more prevalent in the African-American community.”

Cantrell notes that political opposition to the ban continues. The casino giant Harrah’s, which operates the only casino in New Orleans, is pressing for a partial exemption. “I will continue to fight the good fight,” Cantrell promises the crowd.

Chervenak says Cantrell’s laser focus on her constituents isn’t unique—New Orleans residents expect more leadership out of their elected officials now. “Voters are more performance-oriented now,” he says. “They don’t want to see a repeat of the disaster in [Hurricane] Katrina so they are paying more attention to government.”

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Cantrell, 43, came of age politically after Katrina and the collapse of the federal levee system that protects New Orleans from surrounding waters. The August 2005 catastrophe killed more than 1,800 people and left 80 percent of the city under anywhere from six inches to 14 feet of water. Cantrell was instrumental in getting whites and African-Americans to work together to rebuild their neighborhood, called Broadmoor.

Cantrell went on to win an open seat on the seven-member city council in 2012, and she won a full four-year term in 2014. Her racially-mixed district reflects the disparate faces of New Orleans. The poorer neighborhoods inhabited by African-Americans remain downtrodden, and shootings there are common. Blight remains, although it has declined.

But in the more affluent neighborhoods, population and job growth are up. Investors are lining up to buy and retrofit historic buildings in the Central Business District and the Warehouse District, which she represents. That puts Cantrell in the middle between developers who petition the City Council for variances to zoning laws and preservationists demanding that she hold the line.

She grew up in the Los Angeles area, in a mixed neighborhood of Hispanics, Asians, whites and African-Americans and came to New Orleans to study at Xavier University. After graduating with a degree in sociology, she went to work for an education foundation in New Orleans that assisted public schools.

Her life changed after Katrina broke the unsound levees, and Broadmoor, was swamped in floodwaters seven feet deep. While Cantrell was still stuck in Houston, a retired General Motors financial analyst named Ernie O’Steen returned two weeks later, before anyone else had come back. The stench of death and decay were overpowering. “It looked like a napalm bomb had hit,” O’Steen, an Air Force veteran, told me in 2007.

A mayoral planning committee held little hope for Broadmoor. Its pro-bono land-use consultant proposed turning the neighborhood into green space that would help absorb future flooding in the city. Residents would be resettled.

O’Steen and the neighborhood’s other white leaders turned to Cantrell, who headed the Broadmoor Improvement Association, an unpaid position. She and neighborhood volunteers found a captain for each of Broadmoor’s 151 blocks, and they created a web page that served as a crucial community bulletin board. In the meantime, Cantrell rebuilt her own two-story home. “We said, ‘our community will return,’” Cantrell said in 2007. “We will make it return. We can’t wait on government. We have to do it ourselves.”

Broadmoor came back faster than any of the other 48 flooded neighborhoods in New Orleans, according to researchers at Harvard University. Property values there today are up by 93 percent since Katrina .

Broadmoor was the boyhood home of Mayor Landrieu and his sister Mary, who lost her 2014 U.S. Senate re-election bid. Their mother and father, Moon Landrieu, who was mayor of New Orleans during the 1970s, still live there. Mitch Landrieu, however, didn’t support Cantrell in 2012, during her first run for city council.

During an hour-long interview in her City Hall office, Cantrell attributes this to her getting pushy with Landrieu to unravel red tape blocking an investment project in Broadmoor. He dismissed her as a loudmouth, Cantrell says.

“If I was a loudmouth, I wouldn’t get anything done,” she recalls saying. “Loudmouths don’t get anything done.”

The investment project eventually moved forward, and she now credits the mayor with making it happen.

The mayor now also has kind words for her.

“Councilmember LaToya Cantrell has been a great partner with our Administration in building a better, stronger and healthier New Orleans,” Landrieu said in a written statement, “and I am personally grateful for her leadership on many key issues important to our city’s future.”

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Cantrell has had one embarrassing moment in the public spotlight, and it involves her husband, Jason Cantrell. Two months before the 2012 election, Jason, then an assistant city attorney, was in court and speaking with a police officer when a marijuana joint fell out of his pocket. He was cited for minor possession, a low-level charge, and resigned from his job. The incident rocked his wife’s campaign.

Her reaction: “I told him, ‘That was some bullshit. What the hell? Was it yours?’” (He said it was.)

At the time, Cantrell issued a statement saying she was “angry, embarrassed, and disappointed.” “I love my husband unconditionally and am very concerned for his health and well-being, and for that of our family,” she added. “I hope that this incident will encourage Jason to seek the professional help he needs and ask that the public respect our privacy in this very personal family matter.”

Today, Cantrell says the incident “didn’t have anything to do with me. I was running to serve, not him. Judge me on my own.”

Voters liked what they saw, and she won the race, thanks to the reputation she had forged in Broadmoor. “She’s one of the few people who ran for office who didn’t have to say what she’d do in office,” says Oliver Thomas, who formerly represented that district. “She already had a record of doing.”

Besides the smoking ban, her highest profile work recently has come with two zoning variances sought by investors. In one case, developers sought approval to build a six-story Marriott Hotel in the historic Warehouse District. The plan conformed to the district’s 65-foot zoning height limit, but the zoning code permitted only five floors, not the six sought by Marriott. Signs opposing Marriott’s request appeared in nearby townhouses. Cantrell sided with the neighbors.

In a separate dispute, another set of developers wanted to build a $120 million, 20-story budget hotel on historic Canal Street that would be three times as high as the zoning code allowed. It would occupy what is currently an empty lot and lead to the destruction of all but the facades of three pre-Civil War buildings that now house a sushi restaurant, a bar and a massage parlor. A liquor store and a souvenir shop also would have to make way for the project. “The armpit of Canal Street,” Cantrell calls the site.

Neighbors and preservationists opposed the variance and said the site—abutted by historic buildings and higher-end tourist hotels—deserved better. Cantrell convened a working group of interested parties to seek consensus. When that didn’t work, she seemed to give a green light to the project by allowing it to move through the city’s planning process. Neighbors questioned her motives and stepped up their opposition. In late March, the developers announced without explanation that they would withdraw the project.

Patricia Gay, executive director of the nonprofit Preservation Resource Center, says she was concerned that Cantrell seemed willing to support the high-rise hotel. “We’ve had our disagreements,” Gay says. “But she’s responsive to us. We look forward to working with her to get a really good project.”

But it is the basic work of strengthening neighborhoods that seems to animate Cantrell most. On a recent Saturday morning, she polishes off an Egg McMuffin and then applies eye shadow as she sits in the back of her city-issued SUV on the way to the blight walk.

Before they set out to see the houses, she accepts an offer of a cup of coffee from a neighbor named Richard and follows him across the street into his house. As they enter the kitchen, Richard mentions how she ended a brief debate with a Harrah’s official from Las Vegas with a cutting remark. “And thank you so much for visiting,” Cantrell was quoted as saying in the local media.

“I read that quote of yours and almost peed in my pants,” Richard chortles.

Cantrell laughs and asks about his dog. “And what’s the baby’s name?” she says.

During the walk, Cantrell notes with satisfaction that several previously blighted houses are now occupied and look presentable. Then she stops in front of a house badly in need of a paint job. An African-American woman sits on the concrete porch, in a blouse, shorts and white socks. “We’re seeing the houses,” Cantrell calls out, “trying to bring a little love to them.”

The woman says her name is Joanne and says she doesn’t have the money to fix it up. “That’s OK,” Cantrell replies. “Just do what you can do.”

Cantrell picks up some litter, deposits it in a garbage can and continues to the next street.

Watch Live Tuesday 9am ET as POLITICO presents a live conversation in New Orleans with Latoya Cantrell. Register here.