If you’ve spent much time in, or regularly passed through, Lake Charles over the past several decades, you’re surely familiar with the lone skyscraper poking its way upward near the shore of the lake. That building was most recently known as the Hertz Tower, though it’s more popularly recognized as the Capital One building. And originally it was the CM Tower.

But over the weekend, this happened, and that skyscraper is no more…

The Hertz Tower had been an eyesore since getting hit with a double whammy of Hurricanes Laura and Delta just six weeks apart in 2020, a pair of storms which did $22 billion in damage. The estimates were that it would cost some $167 million to bring the building back up to code given what the wind and rain had done to it.

On the other hand, it only cost $7 million for the city to put on that demolition show on Saturday.

An abandoned, 22-story building in Lake Charles, Louisiana — once an icon in the city that became a symbol of destruction from hurricanes Laura and Delta — was imploded Saturday after sitting vacant for nearly four years.

The Hertz Tower crashed down in a matter of seconds after a demolition crew set off a series of explosions inside. The tower fell in a large cloud of dust into a pile about five stories high.

The building, formerly known as the Capital One Tower, had been a dominant feature of the city’s skyline for more than four decades. However, after a series of hurricanes ripped through southwest Louisiana in 2020, the building became an eyesore, its windows shattered and covered in shredded tarps.

For years the owners of the building, the Los Angeles-based real estate firm Hertz Investment Group, promised to repair the structure once they settled with their insurance provider Zurich in court, The Advocate reported. The estimated cost of bringing the building back up to code was $167 million. Eventually, the two parties settled for an undisclosed amount.

We’re not saying that under different circumstances it would have been economic to restore the Hertz Tower with any real certainty. Skyscraper office buildings are not the investment they used to be in an age of remote work.

But for the last decade in particular, it seems like we’ve had more demolitions and teardowns – or at least vacating storefronts – than we’ve had commercial construction here in Louisiana.

They tore down Hertz Tower because there wasn’t enough commercial occupancy to make it economic to rent it once refurbished. And that was the most recognizable commercial building – and the tallest – in Lake Charles.

You can make whatever excuses you want about hurricanes, and you won’t be completely wrong. Lake Charles has gotten absolutely brutalized by the monsters of the sky coming out of the Gulf of Mexico – not just with Laura and Delta but with Hurricane Rita back in 2005.

But here’s the thing to remember: a decade ago, even after Rita, that was the fastest-growing mid-sized city in America. For several years in the last decade Lake Charles was leading the state in economic growth and people were talking about how it was about to take off into a major commercial center.

Industry drove that growth, of course. There has been a ton of construction of industrial facilities, and especially LNG export terminals, in and around Lake Charles over the past 15-20 years. That construction has largely petered out though the plants are operating.

And so Lake Charles’ economy has settled back down. Add hurricanes to set the place back, and it’s once again a sleepy little city which can’t support a $167 construction or renovation cost for a commercial office tower. This despite the presence of Hunter, who might just be the best mayor in Louisiana. It’s not for a lack of effort on his part that Lake Charles isn’t growing anymore or that nobody wanted the largest building in the city.

You’re probably expecting us to blame this on John Bel Edwards, and of course we’re going to. You get this kind of economic stagnation when you tax and regulate a private-sector economy to death. The people who would fill office space in a place like Hertz Tower are dealmakers and financiers, and when you’re next door to Texas and you’ve got business inventory taxes, taxes on business utilities, state income taxes and the highest state and local combined sales taxes in the country, Lake Charles’ growth will very soon become Beaumont/Port Arthur/Orange’s growth.

Anybody could have told Edwards he would kill Lake Charles with his colossal tax increases, and he did. That building demolition on Saturday was probably more of a metaphor than anything else for the damage he inflicted, even if hurricanes were the proximate cause of the Hertz Tower being removed from commerce.

Commercial office towers in downtown Houston with that kind of damage get fixed up without any question. In Louisiana, they get the dynamite. That’s the difference between a healthy, growing economy and one which has been stunted and deformed by awful governmental policy.

It was Edwards, and those Republican legislators who went along with his disastrous tax hikes, who blew up that building in a very real sense. Let’s hope that over the next year we see a substantial repudiation of his destructive idiocy and a large, aggressive set of pro-growth tax reforms passed and signed into law.

We need to be building things. Not tearing them down.