[3] In 1998, Blakely ran to succeed Harris as mayor of Oakland and finished the election in a very distant second-place behind Jerry Brown.
[7] He alleged, in a speech in Sydney, that the actual population of New Orleans pre-Katrina was known to be slightly lower than the official number reported by the U.S. Census Bureau.
[11] According to the Times-Picayune, "Blakely has acknowledged that trying to shepherd a clumsy and sometimes-inept City Hall bureaucracy through the maze of federal rebuilding rules has been a challenge.
In the same interview, Blakely claimed that the people of New Orleans were lazy and virulently racist, and that "Unless the next mayor is very clever, it's going to explode and there are going to be race riots.
Simultaneous with his resignation, his agency was renamed the Office of Community Development, supervised by Blakely's deputy director Austin Penny.
[19] In a farewell presentation to the City Council's Recovery Committee, Blakely urged that New Orleans "face south" to increase trade with Latin America in view of the Panama Canal expansion project.
He also recommended focusing the city's biomedical industry on tropical diseases and working on New Orleans East to rebuild Pendleton Memorial Methodist Hospital[20] and to "let people know we're in the technology business" by making the Michoud Assembly Facility a tourist destination.
[33] He is a consultant working on Affordable and Indigenous housing in Australia and a member of the OECD panel on Economic Development and employment.