Housing Divided: A Study in Failure
Editor's Column from LCV

When it comes to resolving the crisis of housing, one of the most pernicious barriers to the Recovery of New Orleans is that we collectively--citizens and our government--are proving to be our own worst enemy. If you don’t care for the problem, just wait until you see the solutions being proffered.

Even before Katrina, the City of New Orleans proved itself paralyzed in dealing with the reported 27,000 blighted houses, many of them architecturally significant, scattered throughout the neighborhoods. It is appalling that given the current crisis, the Mayor and the City are incapable of stirring themselves to serve immediate notice on the owners of these properties that have received prior citations that if they don’t begin repairing them within 30 days, the property will be seized and auctioned for repair and immediate occupancy. An enormous proportion of the entire housing shortage of the city could be resolved simply by finally addressing a problem that has been neglected by one administration after another stretching back for decades.

Disharmonious Solution

One would hope that concern for the welfare of the unfortunate, and especially our hallowed musicians, keepers of the flame of our culture, would yield a housing rescue better than the much-ballyhooed Musician’s Village. Located in one of the historically most drear and remote sections of the upper Ninth Ward, largely bereft of any infrastructure or services even in the best of times before the storm, the monotonous row of houses of the Village might architecturally be described as “shotguns,” but in truth they more resemble migrant worker cabins, the inelegant 20th century equivalent of slave-quarters. Unlike traditional New Orleans shotguns, they are thickly proportioned, bereft of the slightest ornamentation or grace, their grim functionality unalleviated by the gesture of flinging over them coats of paint in vivid primary colors. As for landscaping, the only question is will they plant cotton or sugarcane?

In the category of “watch out what you wish for” must be placed the well-intentioned, but hopelessly inappropriate designs being contemplated for the Global Green house competition. If this be the future, we will all want to make recourse to nostalgia. The six finalists are proof positive that American schools of architecture are hopelessly in the thrall of the modernism of the International style, with its sterile, one-size-fits-all, approach that fails to adapt to local conditions and culture. The low flat roofs, absence of galleries or overhangs, large glass panels, and lack of shutters (with just a couple of exceptions) all bespeak a lack of acquaintance with not only our historical antecedents but with the functionalism that embodied the lessons learned over time of how to build in the local climate. Like the Habitat for Humanity Musicians’ Village, they have the visual ambiance of barracks. The visual music of our traditional architecture is utterly tone-deaf in these modern alternatives.

Victimizing the Intrepid

The lack of a Plan promises viciously to undermine the city and victimize both its most vulnerable and most self-reliant citizens. It is criminal to allow the self-reliant—those unwilling to surrender to the torpor and inaction of government or insurance companies—to risk their assets in rebuilding their houses in the absence of a comprehensive Plan. These intrepid souls face the risk of losing everything if their neighborhood cannot be rebuilt; they likely will not be able to reinsure or even sell their house for lack of insurance or market. Similarly, encouraging people, sometimes by mere political passivity, to rebuild in neighborhoods that have always been marginalized and vulnerable and lacking in infrastructure, like the lower Ninth Ward, does them and the city a disservice. In 1970, New Orleans--on a smaller footprint before the development of New Orleans East--had a larger population, around 629,000, 150,000 more than the 479,000 people who inhabited the city when Katrina hit. With so much high-elevation under-developed land in the corridor along the river from Bywater to Riverbend, why in the world would we want to encourage people to return to perpetually vulnerable, marginalized and underserved neighborhoods, when we could incorporate them into safer, higher areas with better access to services, schools, stories and the city itself? If New Orleanians can so easily be absorbed into Atlanta’s neighborhoods where they are strangers, why not in their home city? If this logic is not persuasive, try asking yourself this question: where and in what kind of houses would a racist want to see the African American community of New Orleans live? Am I the only one who finds the solutions being proffered shockingly like the answer to this question?

My objections are not merely a matter of personal aesthetics. A hundred cities in America—from Atlanta to Tulsa--operate more effectively and efficiently than does New Orleans. If we lose the cultural character that makes us unique--and our architecture is one of its most important elements— we will undermine our identity and with it our economy, lose the urban competition, and doom ourselves to a future without much grace or hope.

—Michael Sartisky, Editor-In-Chief