An eyesore no more? Developers have big plans for a troubled Bay St. Louis motel

When Bay St. Louis Mayor Mike Favre was a teenager, he and his friends would sneak onto the Driftwood Motel property on U.S. 90 at night to take a dip.

“We called it the neighborhood pool then,” Favre said Thursday, remembering the property’s glory days from shortly after it was built in 1959.

But the motel — which sits on a piece of prime real estate near Main Street and the city’s growing downtown — has spiraled into an eyesore and, most recently, gained a reputation as a drug den.

Now, there’s hope for a revival.

A New Orleans development group has acquired the property and has big plans to restore it in as little as six months.

Favre hopes the renovations will resemble the Drifter in Mid-City New Orleans, which was a down-on-its-luck motel on Tulane Avenue until developers turned it into a hipster oasis. The Bay St. Louis redevelopment, Favre said, could and attract tourists visiting the Mississippi Coast, New Orleanians looking for a brief getaway from the city, or bachelorette groups planning a weekend trip.

Bay St. Louis hotel managers arrested after drug overdoses

In its most recent life, the Economy Inn was an extended-stay motel with myriad issues.

Complaints started rolling in to the city about fire hazards, and the property was unkept and outdated, Favre said.

The managers of the Economy Inn were also arrested in June on drug distribution charges after five guests overdosed while staying there, resulting in one death.

In November, Robert Galloway and Cassie MacKenzie admitted their guilt in federal court and will be sentenced for drug conspiracy in February 2024. Each faces up to 20 years in prison.

New Orleans real estate developer buys up hotel property

After the overdoses, the city began looking into building violations and considered shutting the hotel down and declaring it a public nuisance in September, Bay St. Louis Zoning Administrator Jeremy Burke said.

“Then I got a call on my cellphone from someone interested in buying it,” he said.

The buyer is SVN Urban Properties, a real estate development group that also deals with property management, brokerage and project management.

The city has been working with SVN Managing Director Eugene Schmitt as the renovation kicks off. Videos of the renovation are going viral on TikTok and Instagram.

Burke said the goal is for the motel to become a vacation destination again rather than an extended-stay motel. The plans mirror a trend happening across the U.S. where old properties built in the 1950s and 60s are being restored to their original glory with modern room updates.

“It’s better when something that needs to be gone is able to be made new again instead,” Burke said.

What will the renovation look like?

The rebrand will have a retro, roadside motel feel with nods to the Bay. The developers spent time touring the city and looking at things like typography, house style and color schemes when creating their vision for the space.

Schmitt said Wednesday that the exterior will be cleaned up but left in its familiar form, with the largest renovations coming inside the rooms.

The contractor for the project is Cain Construction out of Bay St. Louis. Schmitt said once a model unit is finished, a larger plan and renderings could be released to the public.

SVN also plans to expand and renovate the pool area in the center of the property, Schmitt said.

“It’s going to be a unique feature for the city of Bay St. Louis,” Burke said.

Favre hopes the developers will consider naming the resort with a nod to the past.

“I’d like for it to be called the Driftwood if possible,” he said.