Affordable Housing Institute : US

Some days back, I predicted an astonishingly rapid and sophisticated mobilization to rebuild New Orleans.

 

With billions of dollars’ worth of insurance policies kicking in, and a wired America watching, we are about to see just how astonishingly quickly and effectively construction and financial markets can respond to a large-scale tragedy. 

 

As the New York Times notes, it’s already happening:

 

SLIDELL, La., Sept. 12 – One team of men is bent over drills, driving mobile home anchors deep into the moist earth. Others are lifting cinder blocks that will be used to hold up the next set of identical beige homes that trucks, one after another, are bringing here.

 

A building boom is under way in this city at the edge of Lake Pontchartrain, where one-third of the houses have been damaged or destroyed.

 

Once former residents of Lower New Orleans settle there, why will they need to return?

 

But this is just the start.

 

What are they building with?  Everyman’s affordable housing, mobile homes:

 

At four giant staging areas across the region, FEMA is assembling tens of thousands of mobile homes and trailers. In Baton Rouge alone, at a former Defense Department logistics center, thousands of them are already lined up on a field.

 

Note that Baton Rouge wins big.

 

We have come to think of Baton Rouge as a sleepy backwoods town, but it is the state capitol.  This will assume greater importance as massive resources funnel into New Orleans.  Through where?  Through Baton Rouge.

 

The homes being built are not your typical 200 square foot hotel room, they are multi-bedroom apartments:

 

The homes in Slidell – those so far are all 14 feet wide and 70 feet long [980 square feet -- Ed.] and have three bedrooms – arrive furnished with beds and box springs wrapped in plastic, a full-size refrigerator, a couch and living room chair.

 

The speed of the activity is breathtaking:

 

By the end of Wednesday, FEMA expects to have installed 3,500 homes requested by the governor in Alabama, most of them set up in long rows at state parks. By Friday, FEMA and its contractors will have installed about 1,000 homes in the New Orleans area for workers helping to rebuild the city.

 

So is its scale:

 

The government is beginning what urban planners are calling one of the biggest bursts of federal housing development in United States history. Last year in Florida, the Federal Emergency Management Agency set a record by installing 15,000 homes in the aftermath of four hurricanes there.

 

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, they hope to open 30,000 homes every two weeks, reaching 300,000 within months.

 

Those numbers make Levittown – the suburban community on Long Island where 17,447 houses were built after World War II – look modest.

 

Now multiply by 17,500 x 18 …

 

Even the rebuilding of Chicago after the great fire of 1871 or San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake do not compare, said Ruth C. Steiner, an associate professor at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Florida.

 

“This is a milestone of urban planning,” Ms. Steiner said “There is no precedent on this scale in this country.  It is just phenomenal.”

 

That there will be tens of thousands of new homes is a given:

 

The numbers might drop if the demand does not meet expectations. But more than 140,000 people are now packed into emergency shelters, while hundreds of thousands of others fill hotels, homes of friends or relatives or are temporarily relocated across the United States.

 

Will what results be a camp, or a city?

 

FEMA officials say they realize that they cannot just drop 75,000 people into rural, one-stoplight towns.  Classrooms, sewage treatment plants, stores, restaurants and medical centers will be built as well.

 

That sounds good, but remember that buildings are exoskeletal, as are street patterns:

 

[In Slidell], FEMA and its contractors are simply dropping as many new units as they can squeeze into an existing mobile home park.

 

The homes are lined up exactly 11 feet apart.

 

Minuteman Missile Mobile Home Park, Rapid City, South Dakota, 1964

 

The high streets in two score European cities (Naples, Lucca, Florence, Cheshire) track the cardo and decumano of their founding Roman forts.  Whether they admit it or not, these new planners are imprinting the New Town’s DNA.

 

Cardo and decumano of Ravenna

Does this look like the future capital of the Roman Empire to you?

 

The blitzkrieg building is predicated on the presumption that it will be temporary:

 

It is not clear how long these new FEMA-created towns will last. Temporary housing built for shipyard workers during World War II in cities like Richmond, Calif., was occupied for decades. FEMA officials say that is not their objective; they will own the units and move people out when they are ready.

 

Behind my house in Cambridge (originally called Newtowne!) is a building called Vanserg, built in haste during World War II.  In 1972, I took classes in it.  Today it is a permanent, if multiply renovated, part of the neighborhood footprint.

 

“These temporary homes will come out,” Mr. Gair of FEMA said.  

 

And go where?

 

“We want to rebuild New Orleans. [You can rebuild, you can't replicate. -- Ed.]  We do not want to create a state of travel trailers and mobile home parks.”

 

What, I ask you, is wrong with mobile homes?

 

The families moving into the first of these new trailers and mobile homes, the use of which are provided at no cost, seem almost startled to be inside a structure that is not flooded or stiflingly hot and overstuffed with people.

 

So even as we rebuild Upper New Orleans into a pleasure palace, Lower New Orleans is decaying into moldy unsalvageability, and the former denizens of Lower New Orleans are being housed, at little cost, in entirely presentable accommodations. 

 

The New Towns are going to be around.  What will they turn into?

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