after the storm

Credit: David Sharpe

When residential architect set out to cover the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast two years after Hurricane Katrina's devastation, we assumed we'd end up with a story of hope. We did—sort of. Many of the local architects we talked to expressed optimism about the future of the region. They spoke with energy and passion about plans to renew neighborhoods, to remake cities and towns, and to fortify against the next hurricane. But the very same people, sometimes within the same conversation, also revealed serious doubts about the pace and direction of the recovery effort. Like the family of a critical care patient, they scrutinize every little change, veering back and forth between delight and despair. Especially in New Orleans, they anxiously await each new development in the rebuilding process, unsure whether it will help or harm.

In this report, we've endeavored to illuminate the good and the bad, the true signs of hope and the harsh realities of its absence. Over and over, Gulf Coast architects emphasize that people around the country need to know what's really going on in this still-devastated but still-compelling area. They're right. Its redevelopment incorporates the most crucial issues facing architects today: land use, affordable housing, sustainable design, historic preservation, and social responsibility. How this process succeeds or fails will influence architecture and planning for decades to come.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, it propelled architect Kurt Hagstette, AIA, into a nomadic existence. He and his wife and children rode out the storm at his sister's house in Covington, La., then took shelter with his in-laws in Missouri. One son's private high school temporarily transferred its students to a similar school in Houston, so the family moved there and rented an apartment. “We didn't know whether they were going to board up New Orleans,” Hagstette says. As an associate at the New Orleans firm Eskew+Dumez+Ripple, which relocated to Baton Rouge, La., for three months after the storm, he spent each workweek in Baton Rouge and drove four hours back to Houston on the weekends.

Just before Katrina, Hagstette and wife Kelli Wright had remodeled a 1930s Cape Cod-style house in the Broadmoor neighborhood of New Orleans. They couldn't wait to get back to it, even though standing water had caused substantial damage. As soon as schools reopened and residents were permitted to return, they did, staying in another house they still owned in a part of the city spared by the storm. The Broadmoor home's first floor already sat three feet off the ground, as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) recommends, so Hagstette didn't go to the expensive, time-consuming trouble of raising it higher. “I figured I can always raise it later,” he says. “It was more important for me to get back into my house.” The family reoccupied their re-remodeled residence in July 2006, almost a year after the storm.

They count as the lucky ones, compared to some of their fellow Gulf Coast residents. As the world witnessed in August 2005, Hurricane Katrina took nearly 2,000 lives in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. Hurricane Rita struck Louisiana and Texas 26 days later, hampering recovery efforts. The total cost of the damage from Katrina, estimated by the National Hurricane Center, is $81.2 billion.

According to figures released in mid-June, about 70,000 families along the Gulf Coast still are living in temporary housing units provided by FEMA. Studies by the Sierra Club and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have shown dangerously high formaldehyde levels inside the FEMA trailers—just one of the many reported problems with these emergency shelters. “People are living in inhumane conditions,” says 6-foot-7-inch architect Bruce Tolar, whose family stayed in a non-FEMA trailer for seven months while their house in Ocean Springs, Miss., underwent repairs. “I could hardly stand up in ours, and ours was a little above a FEMA standard. After two months, the cabinet doors started falling off. For those who have never had the ability to get out of the trailers, it's awful.”

Often, the trailers' inhabitants just don't have the money to live anywhere else. Many had no insurance, and their homes represented their only assets. Although Louisiana's troubled reimbursement program, The Road Home, has picked up speed recently, it still had paid only 36,655 out of 158,489 applicants as of July 16. All along the Gulf Coast, property insurance costs two to four times its pre-storm price, further hindering attempts to find or build permanent housing. Construction costs have risen 40 percent, due mostly to a shortage of qualified labor.

A visit to the hardest-hit parts of New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward reveals a weed-filled wasteland where streets of shotgun houses used to sit. Storm surges swept most of the buildings there off their concrete slabs. Neighborhoods with less severe flooding still contain some boarded-up or caved-in houses on every block, mixed in with fully repaired residences.

But the damage extended beyond the physical. The displacement of many hotel and restaurant workers, who already were living on the financial edge, sent the city's all-important tourism industry reeling. In sleepy Mississippi beach towns such as Pass Christian and Waveland, which also rely on travelers' dollars for income, the storm destroyed most of the extensive historic housing stock—a key tourist attraction. Residents of Waveland and Bay St. Louis, Miss., now must drive 20 miles to the nearest surviving grocery store.

Bright spots do exist. Some New Orleans neighborhoods—especially those in the “Sliver by the River,” as the high-ground portion of the city is known—weathered the storm with minimal damage. In the Garden District, manicured antebellum mansions, chic boutiques, and fragrant magnolia trees contrast with TV-news images of a devastated city. The floodwaters also spared the wrought-iron balconies and color-drenched Creole cottages of the raucous French Quarter, and the sounds of live music once again stream out of jazz clubs there. This spring, the city's famous Jazz Fest attracted 375,000 people over six days—comparable to 400,000 over seven days in the pre-Katrina spring of 2005. Nonprofits like Habitat for Humanity, ACORN Housing Corp., and Architecture for Humanity [see full story] are rebuilding working-class neighborhoods in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, house by house. “In this area, a lot of people with very modest means are finding resources to help them rebuild,” says Allison Anderson, AIA, LEED AP, of Unabridged Architecture in Bay St. Louis.

The June version of The Katrina Index, a report updated monthly by the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center and The Brookings Institution, holds positive news. “April delivery statistics from the U.S. Postal Service suggest that New Orleans and the metro area continue to repopulate,” the report says. “Active residential deliveries in Orleans Parish [i.e., within city limits] grew to 63.8 percent of pre-Katrina levels in April 2007.” The Mississippi Governor's Office of Recovery and Renewal reported in May that 98 percent of the state's coastal counties population had returned.

Architects from all over the country deserve much credit for the region's progress—starting with the locals who lost their homes, offices, and clients but still managed to assist their communities in the storm's aftermath. “Almost every residential architect here on the coast is involved in some kind of Katrina recovery effort,” says Dennis Cowart, whose Ocean Springs-based firm designed a memorial to the hurricane's victims in Biloxi, Miss. Hagstette ended up leading the rebuilding of Broadmoor's public library [see full story]. Another New Orleanian, Angela O'Byrne, AIA, nearly had to shut down her firm, yet she persevered by helping plan the Louisiana Recovery and Rebuilding Conference and co-founding a nonprofit [see full story]. Non-Gulf Coast designers pitched in, too, in a variety of ways. Almost 200 architects, urban planners, and landscape architects traveled to Biloxi on short notice to attend the Mississippi Renewal Forum in October 2005 [see full story]. Hundreds of firms around the world entered post-Katrina design competitions [see full story]. And architecture schools continue to send teams of students and professors to help nonprofits build houses.

Yet the way in which designers may wield the most substantial influence over the Gulf Coast's resurgence is through the Unified New Orleans Plan (UNOP), the official road map for the city's rebuilding. Managed by New Orleans-based architecture and planning firm Concordia, the UNOP process involved a set of individual neighborhood plans, larger district plans, and one overall citywide plan. Local planner Villavaso & Associates developed the citywide portion, while Concordia and a national advisory team selected four firms to lead district and neighborhood planning: Goody Clancy of Boston, Frederic Schwartz Architects of New York City, H3 Studio of St. Louis, and EDSA's Baltimore office. “I felt very strongly that there was no more important issue facing this country, in terms of urban issues, than the recovery of New Orleans,” says Goody Clancy's David Dixon, FAIA. Many more firms, including Miami-based DPZ, the Atlanta office of EDAW, Wayne Troyer Architects [see profile: wayne troyer, aia], and Eskew+Dumez+Ripple, helped with the neighborhood plans. And UNOP also incorporated feedback from the city's powerful neighborhood associations. The process “really was a cross section of the community,” says Nathan Chapman, president of Vieux Carré Property Owners, Residents, and Associates.

The resulting 10-year, $14.4 billion plan, released last spring, reimagines New Orleans as a pedestrian-friendly metropolis with nodes of high density. UNOP pinpoints specific redevelopment projects in each of the city's 13 planning districts, emphasizing mixed-use communities, public transportation, mixed-income housing, and long-term economic stability. By calling for every neighborhood to be rebuilt, it sidesteps the public outcry triggered by the earlier, discarded Bring New Orleans Back plan, which suggested turning some low-lying areas into parklands.

However, a number of local architects, even ones who endorse UNOP, think rebuilding every neighborhood is both unsafe and unrealistic. They believe the city should be consolidated to use resources and services more efficiently. “UNOP has some very good points, but everyone dances around the real problem,” says Marcel Wisznia, AIA [see profile: marcel wisznia, aia]. “The city needs to shrink.” Given the strong ties between New Orleanians and their neighborhoods, though, such a plan may never have gathered enough popular support to survive the way this one has so far. At the end of June, the Louisiana Recovery Authority approved a wide-ranging city renewal plan that incorporates UNOP, opening the door for New Orleans to access $117 million in state-held Community Development Block Grant funds.

In the meantime, New Orleans' rebuilding is occurring on a case-by-case basis, rather than citywide. “There still are no cranes in the sky,” says Melissa Urcan, executive director of AIA New Orleans. But with Road Home payments coming in, many homeowners feel ready to hire architects for remodeling projects or new houses. “People are finally getting money for small residential projects,” Urcan asserts. “The architecture field is going to get overwhelmed. We're right at the beginning of the overload.” The Katrina Index reports that Orleans Parish authorized 73 new single-family homes in April—the highest number since before the storm. “It's a pretty good time to be a young architect here,” says Byron Mouton, AIA, whose studio has several custom homes in progress [see profile: byron mouton, aia].

Farther to the east, the ripest opportunities for residential architects seem to lie in community planning and multifamily work. “In the Biloxi area, there's going to be a much stronger market for multifamily and attached housing,” says market research consultant Laurie Volk of Clinton, N.J.-based Zimmerman/Volk Associates, noting the extra cost of building single-family houses according to new codes. High-end custom work in coastal Mississippi, though not completely absent, has proven scarcer so far. “I haven't seen a lot of beach houses come back,” says Unabridged Architecture's Anderson. “For people who want to build big houses, it's hard to get insurance and financing.”

New Orleans, too, could use more multifamily housing, according to real estate appraiser Craig Davenport of Cook, Moore & Associates in Baton Rouge. “The sheer demographic numbers of what was destroyed indicate that [New Orleanians] need more housing,” he says. But many multifamily developers who saw the city as a golden opportunity post-Katrina have thought again. “Some projects are not moving forward because of construction costs and insurance,” says Henry Charlot, director of economic development for the Downtown Development District, a nonprofit charged with creating and sustaining New Orleans' downtown area. To cover these increased costs, developers are also turning planned condominiums into apartments or retail so they can capture tax credits designated for rental properties. Local developer Sean Cummings, for example, has reluctantly converted an on-the-boards condo building into apartments, citing historic rehabilitation tax credits as his only financial option. “The situation is very directly shaping the behavior of the developers and will yield an outcome that's not good for New Orleans: an abundance of rental housing,” he says. “You don't have to be [visionary developer] James Rouse to know that a community is far better off with a high percentage of homeownership.”

Another popular Big Easy financing option is the state low-income housing tax credit. “I'm working with quite a few developers who are thinking of doing low-income housing in New Orleans,” Davenport says. No one can deny the need for affordable housing in this poverty-ridden city. Insurance costs have sent rents skyrocketing: the fair market rent for a one-bedroom apartment, defined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), is $836 (compared with $578 pre-Katrina). In a controversial move, the HUD-run Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) shuttered four of the city's 10 public housing projects after Katrina, declaring them too damaged to be inhabited. This action surprised many local architects, who believe the low-rise, circa 1940s brick structures should be renovated. “They're very sound buildings,” Urcan reports. HANO plans to replace them with mixed-income housing, but first it must defend itself against a lawsuit filed by Advancement Project, a nonprofit group that says HUD and HANO are violating public housing residents' rights. (A court date is set for November.)

Prefab provides another potential solution to the Gulf Coast's emergency and permanent housing needs. “It's a resource-efficient way to build, especially in a market where there's very little labor available,” Anderson says. The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) concurs. Using a grant from FEMA's Alternative Housing Pilot Program, the agency this summer made two modular residences—the Park Model and the Mississippi Cottage—available to thousands of randomly selected FEMA trailer residents. The units are meant to serve as emergency housing, but occupants eventually will have the option to buy them and turn them into permanent homes. The MEMA program will also include GreenMobile, a third modular model whose adaptation to MEMA's requirements is still in progress [see full story].

As time passes, a sense of nervous expectancy builds along the Gulf Coast. Current residents and hopeful returnees wait to see what the next hurricane will bring, which way the real estate market will go, whether local businesses will rebound. They fear that irresponsible land use will lead to sprawl and a loss of the region's distinct cultural identity. They feel frustrated by what they see as misrepresentation by the national media. In New Orleans, a pronounced distrust in the government prevails, along with a faith in the power of grass-roots initiatives. “New Orleans is going to come back from the bottom up, not top down,” says Goody Clancy's Dixon.

Right now, all residents of this battered region can do is put their heads down and work on rebuilding their homes, commu nities, and livelihoods. Every returning neighbor, every visiting tourist, and every reopening business represents a small victory for those counting on a Gulf Coast renaissance. Mouton, talking about New Orleans, echoes the same sentiment expressed on every front porch from there to Mobile, Ala. “It's not back to normal here,” he says. “But it's still a beautiful city.”