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While I also doubt that the person was being serious, I have to wonder if you actually live in NO? Practically everyone here has a basement.
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Do YOU actually live in New Orleans? You realize we're talking about the one in Louisiana. Those houses with the front entry door on the 2nd floor (
like this) don't count as having basements, BTW.
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Actually those are called basements, but they are above ground, and the main living quarters are on what would be called the second floor in most of the US and the first floor in much of Europe. But as far as practically everyone in NO having a 'basement', absolutely no way. Many of the houses are raised with a crawl space underneath, but a crawl space is not a basement. In the newer neighborhoods most of the houses are built on slabs supported by pilings--mine is.
I myself had a good laugh with that "knock three times and ask for Joe" business. New Orleans is a city where the locations of brothels, dungeons, crackhouses, and other dens of corruption and iniquity are known even to little old ladies. In spite of some overzealous law enforcement out in Acadiana. it is as legal in Louisiana for people to play poker in a bar as it is to play pool--as long as the bar doesn't take a cut. If Las Vegas is Gomorrah, New Orleans is Sodom, and no one much cares except a few bullhorn-waving evangelists annoying people in the Quarter during Carnival and Southern Decadence.
LOL