Things that make you say...

What!?

"On November 25, 2008, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and Louisiana State University announced the selection of the Mid-City neighborhood for the site of their new hospitals. The new hospitals would needlessly destroy the historic neighborhood around Charity Hospital, where residents have been rebuilding and restoring their community since Hurricane Katrina."

"the plans for new construction call for the demolition of some 200 homes and buildings constructed prior to 1880 in 25 blocks of an adjacent National Register Historic District, despite the existence of a largely vacant site nearby."


What were they possibly thinking?

This is not a completely devastated neighborhood. This is one trying very hard to get back on its feet.

Please check out the Save Mid-City page on the National Trust For Historic Preservation's website for more information and links to how you can help. Thank you.

Say a Little Prayer for New Orleans

this weekend, ok?

I have friends currently packing up their car for evacuation to shelter East in Mississippi. Let's hope they'll be able to come home real soon.

Hey Gustav! This isn't the way we wanted to commemorate the anniversary of Katrina, so go way out to sea and don't bother anyone this time, ok!

Blogger Loki at HumidCity will be posting a live audio blog as he and his wife evacuate. They've been through this before too during Katrina. So, as I await updates from my friends I will also be checking in with Loki for his web updates.

I wish both couples good luck. Join me please.

Letter from New Orleans

 
Casa Dietrich

Because of my recent Gulf Coast posts, I wanted to give you the perspective from someone who survived Katrina, aka "The Thing". I asked two of my New Orleanian (Orleanean?) friends, John and Linda Dietrich, to write about their thoughts, post-The Thing.

What Linda sent me was beautiful, touching, and amazing. I remember speaking to her while they were relocated in Houston. She was near tears all the time and there wasn't anything I could do to help. Reading this, I realize I don't ask enough about how's it going, and I am extremely sorry for that. I hope that this letter was somehow cathartic for her and John.

On SHELTER, I will only post the parts pertaining to my questions about the rebuilding of New Orleans' damaged areas. However, I strongly suggest you read the whole letter here, on my other blog. These are her words.

Letter from New Orleans:

I live in what local writer Chris Rose likes to call "the sliver by the river" or "the isle of denial.” I live Uptown in the Irish Channel. My neighborhood didn't flood. Wind damage only. Our house; my husband's and mine, was still standing after the storm. It had blown off it's piers on one side, but didn't break. We lost some wood siding, part of our fence, a washer and dryer, and one refrigerator.

There are still people living in FEMA trailers. People are still waiting to figure out how to rebuild and with what money. For all the billions of dollars poured into NOLA, it is definitely going to take more.

There are also plenty of abandoned houses, overgrown lots, and homeless people. Changes will be made. Rome wasn't built in a day and neither was NOLA. Brad Pitt started the "Pink House" campaign. I think it's great and it is going to make a difference. Brad's houses will be much more modern, but with a nod to traditional New Orleans homes. Those places are gone in the Ninth ward and St. Bernard. Some can be salvaged, some cannot. I don't see any problem with modernizing some of the architecture here. It has always been an amalgam of styles, as people added on to the homes they bought. My house is 165 years old in the front and 120 in the back. The inside is brand new. Times change. This city will always preserve its history, but it will also continue to look towards the future.

I want to see the neighborhoods rebuilt with the wisdom of lessons learned. We need to have the growth of the populace keep pace with the growth of the infrastructure. I WANT THE DUTCH TO BUILD OUR LEVEES!! I want a real levee system. Not one made out of tin cans. KATRINA DID NOT DESTROY NEW ORLEANS! BAD ENGINEERING DID! I want wetland restoration to take priority. I want the American government to realize how important this city is to the rest of the country. America needs our port. The Mid-west is crippled without it. I want our oil related tax revenues back. We could afford to rebuild ourselves. I don't know which political genius gave that up, or what he got for it, but I hope his house flooded.

This has turned into a rant. It's hard to talk about the way you feel without getting overly emotional. I still can't watch clips of Katrina's aftermath without feeling as if my heart will literally shatter into a million pieces. Sometimes, I can't even drive by houses with water lines still on them without feeling slightly defeated. Other days, when the sun is shining, and I see a few houses sitting repaired and pristine among the wreckage, I feel the infinite joy of watching the miracle of birth and the resilience of the human spirit and know that everything will be just fine. It's only going to take time.

The Dietrichs

More from the Gulf Coast

• Habitat for Humanity is building homes in the area according to the regional style. Good, because here in Virginia the only Habitat homes I have ever seen are 2-story townhouse types. They have built over 1,300 homes in the Gulf Coast since Hurricane Katrina and every month they start 50 more homes.

• Mississippi may not get the big press on rebuilding but I think they have the best overall plan. You can check out everything you need to know, right here through their Patternbook for Gulf Coast Neighborhoods. This patternbook also explains the four styles of Gulf Coast designs and shows examples of Acadian/Creole, Victorian, Classical, and Arts and Crafts buildings.

• Mississippi is also embracing New Urbanism, which wants to use city zoning to recreate our country’s small-town beginnings. Places where homes looked out on one another, homes were near enough to the street to seem engaging, and people used their porches to chat with neighbors. These places were also walkable with accessibility to transit; communities with real downtown at the center. In some places, this is so hard to visualize so it might be easier to use television shows as examples: Mayberry, Stars Hollow, Walnut Grove, Pleasantville, etc.
  
• Check out the specifics of New Urbanism and Smart Growth (a reaction against sprawl) at the Congress for the New Urbanism, NewUrbanism.org, Smart Growth America, and Coalition for Smarter Growth.
• Here are the other designs that were developed during the Mississippi Renewal Forum in 2005.

Gulf Coast ReBuilding

Read about the effort, volunteerism, and construction of this family's new Pass Christian, MS home in an inspiring story from Cottage Living magazine.
The local organization, Mercy Housing and Human Development partnered with Lowe's, Cottage Living, the Mennonite Disaster Service, and the Gulf Coast Community Foundation in the project. If you feel inspired to help, donate to the Cottage Living Building Fund through the Gulf Coast Community Foundation.

Ocean Springs Cottage Square in Ocean Spring, MS. The development was designed by local firm, Tolar LeBatard Denmark Architects and has won a 2007 Charter Award.

New Orleans' Projects

Here is a great New York Times article and slide show about the variety of design styles being used to rebuild New Orleans.

From the article, the sentiment I completely agree with is this statement:
"Among the ideas advanced by architects and urban planners is permitting New Orleans to come back as a smaller city, with some heavily flooded areas left undeveloped; commissioning innovative 21st-century architecture for new public and residential buildings, even as the city’s treasured historic structures are preserved; and rebuilding low-income housing on higher ground."

The uproar that the city/state would even suggest not rebuilding some of the flooded areas seemed more political than sensible. Why even take the chance of this tragedy happening again? Some low lying areas should be left alone as they will always be too dangerous. This does not mean those people should not be provided housing in New Orleans, just that it should not be there.

 
The Tulane Gravier and Tremé/Lafitte New Orleans neighborhoods are to be reconstructed with help from Providence Community Housing and Enterprise Community Partners.
UrbanBuild N.O.'s Central City area project designed and built by the Tulane School of Architecture in conjunction with Neighborhood Housing Services of New Orleans.

 

Photo courtesy of JetsonGreen.org
Global Green USA, Brad Pitt, and the Home Depot Foundation project in the Lower Ninth Ward Holy Cross** area. Each home will cost about $150,000. Applicants must have previously owned property in the ward to be eligible and will be expected to contribute whatever they can afford.

In my personal opinion, these last two groups missed an important component in developing these environmentally sustainable and modern designs for the people of the Gulf Coast. They forgot to honor and preserve the history, attitude of the area and its people. I am a strong supporter of the green building movement, but in this case, I think more emphasis should have been focused on the importance of the exterior design of these projects. I was strongly disappointed in the designs as I see no connection to the regional architecture of the homes that they will be replacing.

**As of 11.21.07, the first home in Holy Cross (which will be used as a visitors center) has not been finished. More information via this incredible site from the neighborhood, HelpHolyCross.org.

Rebuilding the Gulf Coast Stronger

I have been wanting to write about this for over a year but had no idea of how to approach it. I have friends who were evacuated during Hurricane Katrina but they were lucky to live at a higher elevation and sustained minimal damage to their home when compared to those whose homes were flooded, submerged, or completely destroyed.
In October of 2005, the Mississippi Renewal Forum was created to respond to the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina and its massive loss of residents' homes. Here is a great article from Katrinacottages.com about the effort behind the creation of emergency hurricane resistant and affordable housing solutions for those people.

One of the assignments during the Forum was to “develop designs for affordable housing, which could be immediately put into place while respecting the place upon which it would be built”, in this case the architecture of the Gulf Coast states. It was that last part of the statement that impressed me.

The first design created from that forum was the beautiful, affordable, and historically sensitive Cusato Cottage designed by Marianne Cusato. The beauty of this design is that those needing quick housing could create an affordable, well-constructed, yet quickly built home that complies with the latest hurricane safety requirements. For her efforts, Ms. Cusato won the first Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt People's Design Award in 2006 for her Katrina cottage design.

It was a downsized version of the Mississippi coastal-style house, designed as an alternative to the FEMA trailer. Unlike the FEMA trailer, this cottage and other designs offered, are meant to be permanent structures and "are designed to withstand hurricanes, since we know that they will continue to occur," Cusato said.

FEMA trailer interior
Cusato cottage interior

Ms. Cusato started small; the original design was only 308 square feet*, but it was designed so that as these residents regained their lives, the cottages could be easily expanded, having possible additions already built into the plans. An example is the KC 612, "this 2-bedroom cottage with 1-bathroom starts at 612-sq.-ft. and can expand over time to a 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom 1,080-sq.-ft. house with a family room." The materials for the house average about $55 per sq. ft., so that the KC 612 house would cost $33,660, before labor costs.

The designs of Ms. Cusato, Andres Duany, Eric Moser, and others are available to everyone through Lowe's Katrina Cottage building plans. The eleven plans available from Lowe's range from a 544 square foot 2-bedroom to 1,807 square feet for a 5-bedroom cottage.

• Katrina Cottage types available through Lowes.

• A comprehensive list and descriptions of Katrina Cottages types available through other sources.

*According to this 11/06 New York Times article, Ms. Cusato actually lived in a 11 by 28 foot, 308 square foot apartment when she was designing the first cottage.