Global Green News
Brad the builder in New Orleans
THE GUARDIAN UK. MARCH 14, 2010. By Rowan Moore
Debra Dupar, pregnant with her fifth child, is sitting outside her new house. She is washed by the noon sun of an early spring day, nursing a pinkish-red drink and chatting to her friends. A short way off a camera crew is setting up, assessing shots, squinting at the light, chatting to potential interviewees. They are working for Spike Lee, who is making a documentary about the place where Debra lives.
A guided tour of about a dozen people tramps along the vestigial street, marked out by some sinewy evergreen oaks, or "live oaks" as they are called here. Two men, self-consciously dressed – architects, probably – get out of a maroon taxi, scan the scene, sweep it with camcorders, say to each other: "OK, I'm good", get back in the taxi and go, all in about 60 seconds. And then the man from the London Observer wants to look inside Debra's house.
Brad Pitt had warned residents of New Orleans's Lower Ninth ward that "we would be turning their neighbourhood into a circus". He was referring to the Pink Project, an "art installation/political messaging device/fundraising tool" in 2007, when hundreds of pink fabric house-shapes were scattered about the site, ghosts of houses that had been and which would return. Now, with 23 houses newly built, it remains a circus, a vortex of disaster and celebrity from which media and sightseers can't stay away. For this spot is the location of Make It Right, the project launched by Pitt in the wake of Hurricane Katrina to which he has pledged $5m. Its aim is not only to rebuild at least 150 homes in the spot worst hit by the storm and its floods but to "turn tragedy into victory", as the actor put it, and to "offer a more humane building standard… We would create homes that were sustainable and build with clean building materials for a just quality of life… We would build for safety and storm resiliency. We'd create new jobs in the process and we wouldn't stop until we could achieve all of this affordably." To show he was serious he moved his family home to New Orleans, and joined in long and gritty community meetings about the best way forward.
"We'd call upon some of our great architectural minds to innovate these solutions," he said, and create "a template that could be replicated at the macro level. We would engage and rely on the community to define the function of their neighbourhood and adhere to their guidance, protecting New Orleans's rich culture." If the people of the Lower Ninth had been betrayed by professionals, by the engineers whose levees had failed in over 50 places, if "the most sickening thought is that this all could have been avoided", Pitt's mission was to "take what was wrong and make it right".
These were stirring words, born of a celebrity's stricken social conscience but also of the love of architecture Pitt had displayed before Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005. He befriended the likes of Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid. He had spent time in their studios, especially Gehry's, trying his hand at designing buildings himself.
It was a heroic project, and one that raised questions. How much would it really be about helping victims of Katrina, and how much would it be about making Pitt feel and look good? What would the star of The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button truly know about urban regeneration?
What would "our great architectural minds", whose work is usually to design luxury items such as iconic museums and private villas, know about the hard practicalities of sustainable
low-income housing? Narcissism and charity are often close companions, perhaps inevitably, but would Make It Right be more a case of the former or the latter? And, in the aftermath of the Haiti and Chile earthquakes, are there any lessons from New Orleans for rebuilding there?
On 29 August 2005, the spot where Debra is now sitting was one of the worst places to be on earth. The horizon behind her is formed by the pale band of the infamous levee, essentially a long concrete wall, now rebuilt twice as thick and twice as high as its predecessor, and with basic precautions against undermining that weren't there before. The original levee was built by the US Army Corps of Engineers following Hurricane Betsy in 1965, and was supposed to keep out the waters of the adjoining Industrial Canal, which links the Mississippi to Lake Pontchartrain. When Katrina forced volumes of water up the canal, the levee suffered multiple breaches.
The streets nearest the levee were the worst hit. I meet Gloria, a woman in late middle age who had to get from the roof of her house on to another, and then into an oak, where she waited for nine and a half hours until her rescue. "Without that tree I'd have been dead," she says.
A few doors further along stands the rebuilt house of Robert Green. Its flagpole rises out of a granite tablet, beside it some damaged statuettes of saints, commemorating Joyce Green, 1931 to 2005, and Shanat Green, 2002 to 2005. The latter was lifted on to the roof by her grandfather, who then turned to help his other grandchild up. When he turned back to Shanat, she had vanished. Outside a nearby trailer, a tableau of wreathes and writing proclaims rage and hope: "We want our country to love us as much as we love our country. The strength of our country belongs to us all. Mr Bush, rebuild – New Orleans, the Lower 9th Ward, Cross the Canal, Tennessee Street. NOT IRAQ." Then a later text: "Obama: A New Era of Responsibility".
The floods spread throughout the Lower Ninth, an almost all-black district with a population of 14,000. Over 1,000 of the more than 1,800 deaths caused by Katrina were in this district, and since then spiking rates of suicide and heart failure indicate further victims. This area is still the most visibly devastated. The picturesque parts of New Orleans, such as the French Quarter and the Garden District, were built on higher ground and were least affected, and now bear little or no trace of damage. The prettily porched and painted houses of Bywater, a former working-class area on the other side of the canal from the Lower Ninth, are now colonised by artists and designers. Young creative types have been moving into New Orleans since the flood, drawn by low property prices, sympathy, and the poignant glamour of disaster.
Much of the Lower Ninth, by contrast, is wilderness. Big vacant oblongs that were once city blocks sprout weeds between the concrete slabs which are all that are left of the wooden houses that stood here. Some poignant short flights of brick steps remain. Files of telegraph poles still stand, marking out the blocks but serving nothing. Occasionally a bright new house stands out.
Some houses still exist as ruins, boarded up or with doors swinging open. Some carry spray-painted X's, put there by rescuers in the days following Katrina. In the quadrants of each X are indicated, according to a code in use at the time, the number of people found in each house, alive and dead, and the number of pets, alive and dead. Other homes are being laboriously restored by their inhabitants. They have been partly helped by the Road Home programme, a federal compensation plan, which has often proved inadequate and slow moving. Two men, one lean and grey-whiskery, the other in a many-holed black T-shirt, tell me their repair work proceeds "paycheck by paycheck". Straight after the flood, many wondered aloud if it wouldn't be better just to give up on New Orleans. Its population was already in decline, from 625,000 in 1960 to 450,000 in 2005. All but a few thousand were temporarily evacuated across the United States, to safer places. The luckier ones would get insurance cheques. Why would they want to come back? "It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed," said Dennis Hastert (Republican, Illinois), the then Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Yet New Orleans didn't die, proof, perhaps, that cities are more than functional conveniences. They inspire affection, emotional ties and loyalty. It is now the fastest growing city in the United States, at 7-8% per year, even if, at about 340,000, it is still below pre-Katrina levels. If people persist in living in earthquake-prone Los Angeles and San Francisco, why would they not return to New Orleans?
This renewal is despite, more than thanks to, the efforts of the city's government. New Orleans has suffered from what the New York Times called the "dysfunctional stalemate that has bogged down the city's recovery". The dysfunction is both between black and white populations and between city and federal government, and the consequence is that swathes of the place are still visibly ruined, and homeless rates remain high. Recently a tide of frustration swept a new mayor, Mitch Landrieu, to power with 66% of the vote, but he has yet to take office.
In the nearly five years since the storm, a "recovery plan" was drawn up, often reviewed, and barely implemented. The city, according to one involved in reconstruction, "has hundreds of millions of dollars committed but not spent". The recovery plan was created "without a drop of sense as to what was implementable".
One of the most visible government interventions into housing has been to demolish hundreds of decent, solid, brick homes, built for the poor under the New Deal. The stated aim was to create a more "mixed income" neighbourhood – that is, a higher income neighbourhood – but destroying serviceable houses is not what New Orleans needs.
Into the vacuum of action created by government, individuals and independent agencies have piled in. Self-organised groups that have grown up since 2005 have become significant forces of renewal. For example, one band of survivors in the Lower Ninth got together, commandeered their local Martin Luther King school, and got it reopened. The authorities had been planning on keeping it closed.
Habitat for Humanity, an international charity, has built more than 1,300 "simple, decent, and affordable homes" in the four states affected by Hurricane Katrina and her nasty little sister Rita, which followed shortly after. Another not-for-profit organisation, Global Green, is building a development of exemplary levels of sustainability in Holy Cross, the area of the Lower Ninth that was least badly affected (which was still quite bad enough) by the flooding. Global Green is also advising individual home owners on sustainable ways to rebuild their homes, and is campaigning for high environmental standards in new schools. Bob Tannen, a New Orleans-based urban planner, engineer and artist, has worked with Frank Gehry to devise the "Modgun" house, an updated version of the area's traditional "shotgun house", with a long, narrow timber-framed structure which could be extended as their owners acquired the means to do so.
