The New Republic recently posted a piece on Make It Right entitled “If You Rebuild It, They Might Not Come,” accompanied by the provocative, Google-friendly subhead: “Brad Pitt’s beautiful houses are a drag on New Orleans.” The author, Lydia DePillis, argues that the project, however well meaning, has diverted resources that could be better spent in other parts of the city.

There are a number of things about this piece that really bugged me as an editor (it’s sloppy and unsourced early on, for one, and ends with a completely unsupported conclusion, which I’ll get to later on). But first I’d like to concentrate on the central premise: that Pitt’s 90 (and counting) Make It Right houses have failed to revive the Lower Ninth, which according to DePillis, remains “a largely barren moonscape.”

The news hook for the piece—as best as I can discern (maybe DePillis cashed in miles for a trip to New Orleans)—was the not-so-recent announcement by Make It Right that it would open up eligibility for houses to people “who didn’t live in the neighborhood prior to Katrina.” DePillis says there’s a (cliché alert) “Catch-22” to the announcement, since there is no real neighborhood surrounding the “futuristic” houses. (What exactly is a “futuristic” house?) No stores, no services, not even a fast food restaurant. None of this is news, and much of it is only partially true.

I don’t know how much time DePillis spent in the Lower Ninth reporting the piece. Was it her first time? First time in a few years? If so, then I can understand how she might survey the vast, desolate sections of the neighborhood, and come to the wrong conclusion. But, if I can resort to a couple of clichés of my own, here’s the real scoop: it might not look like it to the casual observer, or to the visiting out-of-town journalist, but something is stirring in the Lower Ninth. DePillis cited the 2010 census figures for the neighborhood—“2842 (down from 14,000 in 2000)”—but she either ignored or just plain missed the most obvious development. And it’s one I see on a weekly basis: the neighborhood is re-populating.

Homes built by Make It Right. May 2, 2012. Photo: makeitright.org

It might not look like it to her, but the numbers clearly bear it out. According to Ben Horwitz, a demographer with the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center http://www.gnocdc.org/, “Our data on households actively receiving mail shows that there were 1,271 households receiving mail in July 2010 and that has increased 27.8% to 1,624 households receiving mail in July 2012. While we do not know the household size, it is reasonable to assume that the population in the Lower Ninth Ward grew at a relatively similar rate.” Read more…

One December day seven years ago, I was just about the only person driving around Gulfport, Mississippi. Hurricane Katrina had hit three months earlier, and the downtown and neighborhoods nearby still looked like Armageddon—house after house had been crushed or split open by the storm surge. Nobody was fixing anything. People were waiting on the government to draw up new flood maps so they would know what might be insured if they were to rebuild.

By now, a lot of people have rebuilt their houses in Gulfport. Many of them are quite close to the water, just like they were before Katrina. If you look at the street views on Google Maps, you see houses rebuilt, as if no 24-foot storm surge could ever happen again. There was a rule: If less than 50 percent of your house was damaged, you could rebuild at the previous elevation. If more than half was damaged, you had to build above a 17-foot elevation. People who rebuilt low to the ground in the surge zone either squirreled under the 50 percent threshold or they don’t have insurance. Many of these people can’t afford the high cost of insurance, the city’s director of economic development, David Nichols, told me recently. They may have had their house passed down through family, so they have no debt but no money either, and nowhere else to live. Redevelopment in Gulfport generally has been suppressed by unwillingness or inability to rebuild to the mandated elevations, or by a lack of insurance—there are still also plenty of empty sites in town. But for many who have rebuilt, you can see a disaster setting up all over again.

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Yesterday’s New Orleans Times Picayune carried a front page story—fittingly, I guess, on the sixth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina—about the Army Corps of Engineers’ new rating systems for the country’s levees.  The report gave a “near failing grade to New Orleans area levees,” despite the $10-billion effort to rebuild them after Katrina. The levees are designed to withstand surges from a “100-year hurricane,” or a storm with a one-percent chance of happening in any given year. For storms the Corps described as “500-year events,” all bets are apparently off. “Larger events, however, would cause flooding,” the piece stated, rather bloodlessly. “Reviewers estimated those events could kill as much of 3 percent of the area’s population, and inundate as many as 191,180 structures, resulting in $47.7 billion in damage.”

As a new transplant to the city, skittishly checking weather reports for any and all tropical depressions forming in the Gulf, my response? No kidding.

Katrina, after all, wasn’t a “500-year event.” It was a Category 3 hurricane. Bigger storms might hit the city in the future, when as the Times Picayune correctly pointed out sea levels are likely to be significantly higher. My problem with the Army Corps of Engineers’ report isn’t with its dire predictions. (Dealing with the specter of hurricanes is part of the bargain you strike living here; it’s a lot like Bay Area residents and the so-called “Big One”.) The Corps doesn’t seem to recognize—at least, not publicly—that its 100 year-plus policy of taming the Mississippi River by brute force might need a rethink. And this isn’t just a local issue. Towns and cities up and down the Mississippi face the same threat. Building higher walls, in the end, won’t solve the problem. As a number of landscape architects have been telling us for a while, we might have to let some of the water in, to keep the rest of it out.

To read the Times Picayune story, click here.

Recent Metropolis blog post about the Mississippi.

Metropolis article - “What’s Next”

Q&A with Dutch water engineer, Jan H. de Jager.

Today, at noon, there were 91,700 entries posted on New Orleans five years after Katrina. Everyone from President Obama to Sandra Bullock got mentioned. But of the thousands of articles, films, blogs, newscasts I skimmed through, not one architect or designer made the media’s list of interviewees. Yet New Orleans’ land use, planning, building and rebuilding—those physical interventions that are needed to create places for people, all of the city’s people—provide an opportunity to make the built environment part of our national discussion.

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