Disasters can spark innovation and creativity. That′s one reason why Build It Bigger is doing its third Hurricane Katrina-related episode since the tragedy five years ago—each, thankfully, more hopeful than the one before.
We first visited in December 2005, just three months after the tragedy of the hurricane and the subsequent levee break. The city was still in crisis. Houses were abandoned, over 1 million of New Orleans residents were scattered all over the country, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and their subcontractors were working brutal hours to try to shore up the levee breaches.
It was a difficult show to make, a difficult place to be. I saw houses pushed off their foundations and slammed blocks down the road. I saw upside down cars sitting atop roofs. And when the sun set, I saw residential neighborhoods disappear into pitch blackness, as power had still not returned to most areas.
The show that we made was a scrambled attempt to explain what created the flooding, from an engineering perspective, and to illustrate what they were doing to repair the situation.
For our second post-Katrina show, we went not to New Orleans but to Mississippi to try to tell the (less well-known) story of those outside Louisiana who were affected by Katrina. Mississippi lost 40,000 homes in wake of Katrina (in a state where they typically build only 10,000 new homes each year), so we wanted find out how the state was coping with its housing crisis. We met a woman named Rose who had lived in a small town called Pass Christian for forty years. Katrina took Rose′s home and most of the resources she might have used to build a new one. So, somewhat atypically for our show, we checked out a special modular homebuilder who was working to create Category 5 storm-resistant homes. Incredibly, they built Rose a new house from start to finish in just two weeks.
This third show is a very different kind of program. When we looked at the New Orleans, now five years on, one of the most powerful statistics that caught our attention was how few people have come home to the city—less than half of the residents who had fled. To come back, they have to feel safe, so we definitely wanted to investigate how the storm infrastructure was being redesigned in order to prevent another Katrina. That′s on the city-wide level, but what about people′s individual homes? Were they being rebuilt in a way that was safe—storm-resistant—but also recovered the strong sense of culture and community that was there before? Did the new homes, in other words, feel like home?
So we split our efforts between two vastly different projects whose mutual success the city depended upon. The New Orleans Surge Barrier is going to be longest and strongest barrier ever designed. It′s a two-mile-long, 280-foot-deep concrete and steel wall being constructed eight miles outside the city. What′s amazing about this design, beyond its heft, is its location. In the past, the levee system, the concrete and earthen embankments that have held back the water for centuries, was New Orleans′ only line of defense . . . located 25 feet from people′s homes. If the levee failed, as it did after Katrina, the community was lost. In the new strategy, rather than try to defend themselves in their own backyards, they were preparing to engage the water miles before it ever reached them. They created a primary defense system eight miles away, transforming the existing and repaired levees into back-up—or, as the Army Corps of Engineers like to call it, "a multilayered risk reduction model." The wall is a stunning piece of planning and engineering designed to take on a storm even larger than Katrina.
But even if the water is held back and communities remain dry, there′s still the question of what kind of city remains to be protected. The communities that existed before Katrina were historic, architecturally fascinating, and helped produce one of the most artistically vibrant cities in America. So the question for New Orleans is how do they build safe, inexpensive, homes that will survive the brutal conditions of the Gulf and help restore the unique spirit of the neighborhoods.
For us that answer came from an unlikely source: Brad Pitt. He created a foundation called Make It Right that was attempting to build 150 new homes in one of the hardest hit and most economically challenged areas of New Orleans: the Lower 9th Ward. The logic was that if they could make a small community work in the roughest conditions, then that success might act as a catalyst for further development.
But instead of taking either one of the typical paths of urban redevelopment—rebuild what was there before or create new fortified structures that resemble concrete and brick bunkers—Make It Right tried something different.
Hoping to find a new, better solution, they assembled a team of some of world′s most exciting architects, and they brought them together with people who lost their homes. The idea was look to the architectural history of New Orleans, understand how the community actually lived there, and use some of the most sophisticated sustainable technologies in the world to create a new type of home: one that was born from the history, climate, and culture of the place.
The houses I found in this new community are striking. They′re contemporary, traditional, sustainable, affordable, shocking, playful, storm-resistant, confusing, and fun. They are designed to survive the next hurricane but they are also designed to consume less energy, so that a resident can weather the monthly electrical bill as well as a possible storm. A thriving community only works if the houses stand up, and residents can afford to stand with them.
Another aspect of the foundation′s work that I found interesting is that they′re engaged in the financing. They′re not simply building new homes for new residents looking to relocate; they′re helping former residents, who already own these plots of land, tackle the often complicated issues of title and mortgage. The foundation works with them to clear their titles and then ultimately sells these new homes back to them with a mortgage they can afford. So the idea of sustainability isn′t just about the solar panels but about the viability of the loans these residents take on, which Make It Right considers to be as important as the concrete in the foundation.
It′s going slowly, but it′s certainly a start in the right direction. Maybe when we go back for our fourth post-Katrina episode, New Orleans—all of New Orleans—will be back as well.
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