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But New Orleans' poor homeowners will lose even more if they rashly invest in fixing up homes that will later be deemed uninsurable or are in neighborhoods so sparsely populated they can't get police, water or electricity service. If these residents hold out only a few months more, they can make better decisions about what to do.
Local and federal government, on the other hand, must move fast to make sure the city is inhabitable for low-income citizens. The federal government urgently needs to craft a measure like the one proposed by Rep. Richard H. Baker, R-La. Baker's proposal would allow homeowners to sell their ruined homes to a state development corporation and help them move to safer areas.
President Bush, in a speech from New Orleans' then-deserted Jackson Square, promised the nation that New Orleans would be rebuilt, but the White House has inexplicably withheld its support for Baker's proposal. Does the president intend for the federal government to finance the replacement of every destroyed house where it stood? If not, how will the rebuilding of New Orleans be accomplished?
New Orleans, meanwhile, needs to gather information. How many displaced people wish to come home? How many would live elsewhere if their old neighborhoods are unlivable or dangerously situated? How might they rebuild social networks? Gathering answers to these questions will jump-start the city's ability to offer utilities where needed and make crucial decisions about rebuilding plans.
Every day the line snakes down a spartan corridor on the eighth floor of City Hall here, as hundreds of people clutch a piece of paper inscribed with a fateful percentage that could force them to abandon their home.
The number is always over 50, and it means a house was so damaged in the flooding after Hurricane Katrina — more than half-ruined — that it faces demolition, unless the owner can come up with tens of thousands of dollars to raise it several feet above the ground and any future floodwaters.
But there is a way out, and that is why so many people stand in line every day, collectively transforming this half-ruined city. "What you need to do is talk to a building inspector and get that lowered below 50 percent," a city worker calls out to the crowd. And at the end of the line, in a large open room down the hall, that is exactly what happens, nearly 90 percent of the time, New Orleans officials say.
By agreeing so often to these appeals — more than 6,000 over the last few months — city officials are in essence allowing random redevelopment to occur throughout the city, undermining a plan by Mayor C. Ray Nagin's rebuilding commission to hold off on building permits in damaged areas for several months until more careful planning can take place. That plan, greeted by widespread opposition, including from the mayor himself, is now essentially dead.
House by house, in devastated neighborhoods across the city, homeowners are bringing back their new-minted building permits and rebuilding New Orleans. As many as 500 such permits are issued every day, said Greg Meffert, the city official in charge of the rebuilding process.
And there is no particular rhyme or reason to who gets a permit, or consideration of whether their neighborhoods can really support its previous residents. One city building inspector, Devra Goldstein, called the proceedings on the eighth floor "really fly-by-night, chaotic, Wild West, get-what-you-want."
The floor, she said, represents "a plan by default."
It is also testament to the fierce desire of many displaced New Orleanians to re-establish themselves, no matter the odds.
hey joe!
Mr. Liddy's complaint about police tactics, while hardly novel from a big-city protester, stands out because of his job: He is a New York City police officer. The rallies he attended were organized in the summer of 2004 by his union, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, to protest the pace of contract talks with the city.
Now the officers, through their union, are suing the city, charging that the police procedures at their demonstrations — many of them routinely used at war protests, antipoverty marches and mass bike rides — were so heavy-handed and intimidating that their First Amendment rights were violated.
"The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then you have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was."
Milan Kundera, The Book Of Laughter and Forgetting.
This quote opens the second chapter of Robert Bevan's timely and original book The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War. As Bevan says, the destruction of symbolic buildings and the physical fabric of cities and civilisations is not merely collateral damage, but a deliberate intention by the attacker, to "dominate, divide, terrorise, and eliminate" the memory, history and identity of the opposing side. Cultural cleansing is inextricably linked to ethnic cleansing, genocide and holocausts.
Arranged thematically more than chronologically, the book shows the political forces at work that led to targeted destruction beyond military requirements, from the Roman erasure of Carthage in 146 BC, the elimination of the Aztecs, Mayas, Incas and their cities, to the "murdering" of aristocrats' houses during the French Revolution. But it is the 20th century leading into the 21st that is examined with forensic insight. From Guernica to Dresden, China's continuing "Sinification" of Tibet, Cambodia and the Yugoslav war, few countries escape the culpability of physical and cultural genocide.
They've been heralded as the future of building and the solution to housing shortages, yet prefabs have failed to take off. Elaine Knutt asks whether they still have a future
The Prefabulous London exhibition running at New London Architecture is based on an ABC of prefab and modular construction. Considering that prefab has been on the architectural agenda for the best part of a decade, most architects with an interest in housing could probably recite this alphabet unaided: A is for affordable, B is for bricklayers (or lack thereof), C is for container, D is for demountable, E is for engineered, F is for factory….
But there is another prefab alphabet, one the exhibition organisers might not be so keen on: C is for Challenge Fund, the Housing Corporation's funding programme that was undersubcribed after not enough prefab projects came forward; M is for Piercy Connor's Microflat, never built because land costs in central London put the product out of price range for young professionals; and P is for Peabody Trust, a prefab pioneer that found the promised cost savings never materialised.
Some Assembly Required: Contemporary Prefabricated Houses
December 8 - March 26, 2006
Medtronic Gallery / Walker Arts Center
Today’s prefab movement has captured the spirit and imagination of a new generation of architects and home buyers, who together have championed a variety of modern modular dwellings that challenge preconceptions about “prefab” homes as cheap, cookie-cutter structures of last resort. This exhibition presents a variety of approaches to prefab—from houses owners can build from a kit of parts, such as Rocio Romero’s LVL House, to those that arrive fully assembled like the diminutive one-room version of weeHouse by St. Paul-based Alchemy Architects. Among the featured projects are the glimmering sculptural metallic Turbulence House by Steven Holl; Black Barn, a pitched-roof, modern adaptation of a Viking longhouse designed and produced by Pinc House of Sweden; and the playful system of Lazor FlatPak by Lazor Office of Minneapolis. Whether Michelle Kaufmann’s Sunset Breezehouse, which adopts a variety of ecological approaches to living and building, or the precision and craft of Marmol Radziner’s Desert House or the customizable configurations of Resolution: 4 Architecture, such houses better parallel the lifestyles of their owners, who desire more flexible living spaces and want to speed the pace of the building process without sacrificing the quality of materials or construction. For more and more people, prefab meets the conditions that make the dream of owning a modern home a reality.
la concha project / vegas
the c word and 9/11
[Republican] Christie Whitman, when she led the Environmental Protection Agency, made "misleading statements of safety" about the air quality near the World Trade Center in the days after the Sept. 11 attack and may have put the public in danger, a federal judge found yesterday.
The pointed criticism of Mrs. Whitman came in a ruling by the judge, Deborah A. Batts of Federal District Court in Manhattan, in a 2004 class action lawsuit on behalf of residents and schoolchildren from downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn who say they were exposed to air contamination inside buildings near the trade center.
The suit, against Mrs. Whitman, other former and current E.P.A. officials and the agency itself, charges that they failed to warn people of dangerous materials in the air and then failed to carry out an adequate cleanup. The plaintiffs are seeking monetary damages and want the judge to order a thorough cleaning.
In her ruling, Judge Batts decided not to dismiss the case against Mrs. Whitman, who is being sued both as former administrator of the E.P.A. and as an individual.
As a legal matter, the ruling established that the suit's charges were well-documented and troubling enough to meet a legal standard to go forward. But Judge Batts also criticized Mrs. Whitman's performance in the days after the collapse of the towers unleashed, by the E.P.A.'s estimates, one million tons of dust on lower Manhattan and beyond.
"The allegations in this case of Whitman's reassuring and misleading statements of safety after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks are without question conscience-shocking,"Judge Batts said.
Calls to the Whitman Strategy Group, Mrs. Whitman's current business, and to Glenn S. Greene, the Justice Department lawyer who is representing her and the E.P.A. in the case, were not immediately returned. Mrs. Whitman, a former New Jersey governor, was administrator of the E.P.A. from 2001 to 2003.
Mrs. Whitman knew that the towers' destruction had released huge amounts of hazardous emissions, Judge Batts found. But as early as Sept. 13, Mrs. Whitman and the agency put out press releases saying that the air near ground zero was relatively safe and that there were "no significant levels" of asbestos dust in the air. They gave a green light for residents to return to their homes near the trade center site.
"By these actions," Judge Batts wrote, Mrs. Whitman "increased, and may have in fact created, the danger"to people living and working near the trade center. Judge Batts said that Mrs. Whitman was not entitled to immunity because she was a public official. Judge Batts allowed the suit to proceed on some counts against the E.P.A. She dismissed claims against Marianne L. Horinko, an assistant administrator of the E.P.A. at the time.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs were "very gratified that the court has recognized that the E.P.A. failed in its obligation to protect the residents of downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn," said Justin Blitz, a lead lawyer on the case.
In a statement yesterday, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton called the E.P.A.'s conduct "outrageous."
"New Yorkers were depending on the federal government to provide them with accurate information about the air they were breathing," she said. "I continue to believe that the White House owes New Yorkers an explanation."
About 2,000 tons of asbestos and 424,000 tons of concrete were used to build the towers, and when they came crashing down they released dust laden with toxins. After an expert panel failed last year to settle on a method for organizing an E.P.A. cleanup, the agency said it would proceed anyway with limited testing and cleaning of apartments in downtown Manhattan below Canal Street.