Discussion: Should we rebuild Nawlins ?

[QueEx]

BUMPING SELECTED THREADS - Katrina, 4th Anniversary. August 29, 2009

 

[Top_Bunk]

Re: A washingtonpost.com article

A Sad Truth: Cities Aren't Forever

By Joel Garreau

The city of New Orleans is not going to be rebuilt.

The tourist neighborhoods? The ancient parts from the French Quarter to the Garden District on that slim crescent of relatively high ground near the river? Yes, they will be restored. The airport and the convention center? Yes, those, too.

But the far larger swath -- the real New Orleans where the tourists don't go, the part that Katrina turned into a toxic soup bowl, its population of 400,000 scattered to the waves? Not so much.

When Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert said that it makes no sense to spend billions of federal dollars to rebuild a city that's below sea level, he added, "It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed." In the face of criticism, he hurried to "clarify" his remarks. But according to Washington lore, such a flap occurs when someone inadvertently tells the truth. New Orleans has had a good run for 287 years, but even before Katrina hit, the city was on the wane, as its steadily dropping population figures for decades have shown.

All the brave rhetoric about the indomitable human spirit notwithstanding, we may want to consider some realities. As much as it causes heartache to those of us who love New Orleans -- the whole place, not just the one of myth and memory -- cities are not forever. Look at Babylon, Carthage, Pompeii..

Certainly, as long as the Mississippi River stays within its manmade banks, there will be a need for the almost 200 miles of ports near its mouth. But ports no longer require legions of workers. In the 21st century, a thriving port is not the same thing as a thriving city, as demonstrated from Oakland to Norfolk. The city of New Orleans has for years resembled Venice -- a beloved tourist attraction but not a driver of global trade.

Does the end of New Orleans as one of America's top 50 cities represent a dilemma of race and class in America? Of course. There are a lot of black and poor people who are not going to return to New Orleans any more than Okies did to the Dust Bowl.

What the city of New Orleans is really up against, however, is the set of economic, historic, social, technological and geological forces that have shaped fixed settlements for 8,000 years. Its necessity is no longer obvious to many stakeholders with the money to rebuild it, from the oil industry, to the grain industry, to the commercial real estate industry, to the global insurance industry, to the politicians.

If the impetus does not come from them, where will it come from?

New Orleans, politically defined, is the 180.6 square miles making up Orleans Parish. (In Louisiana a "parish" is comparable to a county.) This place is roughly three times the size of the District of Columbia, though in 2004 it was less populated and its head count was dropping precipitously.

The original reason for founding La Nouvelle-Orléans in 1718 was the thin crescent of ground French trappers found there. Hence the name "Crescent City." Elevated several feet above the Mississippi mud, it was the last semi-dry natural landing place before the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico. That crescent today is where you find all the stuff that attracts tourists, from the French Quarter, to the Central Business District (the "American Quarter") with the convention center and the Superdome, to the Garden District and Uptown. This area is roughly comparable to Washington from Adams Morgan through K Street to Georgetown and Foxhall Road.

That tourist crescent is relatively intact. (Only two of the 1,500 animals at the Audubon Zoo died.) But it is only perhaps 10 percent of the city.

The rest to the north of the river -- as distinct from the Algiers district on the south bank, which has always been something of an afterthought -- is under as much as 25 feet of water. For the last 90 years, this vast bulk of the city has required mammoth pumps to clear the streets every time it rains. This is where you'd find working folk -- cops, teachers and nurses -- with bathtub madonnas and colored Christmas tree lights. It's also where you would find areas of soul-destroying poverty, part of the shredding fabric of a city that had a poverty rate of 23 percent. Planners have warned for years that this area would be destroyed if the levees were ever breached.

Yet, as novelist Anne Rice wrote of her native city a week ago: "The living was good there. The clock ticked more slowly; people laughed more easily; people kissed; people loved; there was joy. Which is why so many New Orleanians, black and white, never went north. They didn't want to leave a place where they felt at home in neighborhoods that dated back centuries . . . . They didn't want to leave a place that was theirs."

Sentiment, however, won't guide the insurance industry. When it looks at the devastation here, it will evaluate the risk from toxicity that has leached into the soil, and has penetrated the frames of the buildings, before it decides to write new insurance -- without which nothing can be rebuilt.

Distinct from Orleans Parish is the rest of metropolitan New Orleans, with a population of 850,000 -- twice that of the "city." These parishes, including Jefferson, St. Tammany, St. Bernard, St. Charles, St. John, Plaquemines and St. James, were hard hit. There was four feet of water in some expensive living rooms in Metairie. But they were not scenes of comparable devastation.

Also distinct from the city are the region's ports, lining 172 miles of both banks of the Mississippi, as well as points on the Gulf. For example, the largest in the Western Hemisphere is the 54-mile stretch of the Port of South Louisiana. It is centered on La Place, 20 miles upriver from New Orleans. It moved 199 million tons of cargo in 2003, including the vast bulk of the river's grain. That is more than twice as much as the Port of New Orleans, according to the American Association of Port Authorities. The Port of Baton Rouge, almost as big as the Port of New Orleans, was not damaged. Also, downstream, there is the LOOP -- the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port out in the Gulf that handles supertankers requiring water depths of 85 feet. These ports are just a few of the biggest.

Illustrating how different the Port of New Orleans is from the city, its landline phones were back in business a week ago, says Gary LaGrange, the port's president and CEO. "The river is working beautifully," he reports, and "the terminal's not that bad."

Throughout the world, you see an increasing distinction between "port" and "city." As long as a port needed stevedores and recreational areas for sailors, cities like New Orleans -- or Baltimore or Rotterdam -- thrived. Today, however, the measure of a port is how quickly it can load or unload a ship and return it to sea. That process is measured in hours. It is the product of extremely sophisticated automation, which requires some very skilled people but does not create remotely enough jobs to support a city of half a million or so.

The dazzling Offshore Oil Port, for example, employs only about 100 people. Even the specialized Port of New Orleans, which handles things like coffee, steel and cruise boats, only needs 2,500 people on an average day, LaGrange says. The Warehouse District was being turned into trendy condos.

Compare that to the tourism industry, which employs about 25,000 people in the arts, entertainment, recreation, accommodation and food sectors -- some 5 percent of the city's former population, according to the census.

New Orleans's economy is vividly illustrated by its supply of white-collar jobs. Its Central Business District has not added a new office building since 1989, according to Southeast Real Estate Business. It has 13.5 million square feet of leasable office space -- not much bigger than Bethesda/Chevy Chase, where rents are twice as high. The office vacancy rate in New Orleans is an unhealthy 16 percent and the only reason it isn't worse is that 3 million square feet have been remade as hotels, apartments and condominiums..

There are no national corporations with their headquarters in New Orleans. There are regional headquarters of oil companies such as Chevron and ConocoPhillips, but their primary needs are an airport, a heliport and air conditioning. Not much tying them down. In the Central Business District you will also find the offices of the utilities you'd expect, such as the electricity company Entergy. But if you look for major employers in New Orleans, you quickly get down to the local operations of the casino Harrah's, and Popeye's Fried Chicken.

Hardly a crying demand for a commercial entrepot.

This is not the first time that harsh realities have reshaped cities along the Gulf of Mexico.

The historic analogy for New Orleans is Galveston. For 60 years in the 1800s, that coastal city was the most advanced in Texas. It had the state's first post office, first naval base, first bakery, first gaslights, first opera house, first telephones, first electric lights and first medical school.

Then came the hurricane of Sept. 8, 1900. As yet unsurpassed as the deadliest natural disaster in American history, it washed away at least 6,000 souls. Civic leaders responded with heroic determination, building a seawall seven miles long and 17 feet high. Homes were jacked up. Dredges poured four to six feet of sand under them.

Galveston today is a charming tourist and entertainment destination, but it never returned to its old commercial glory. In part, that's because the leaders of Houston took one look at what the hurricane had wrought and concluded a barrier island might not be the best place to build the major metropolis that a growing east central Texas was going to need.

They responded with an equally Lone-Star-scale project, the 50-mile-long Ship Channel. It made inland Houston a world port. In the wake of the Spindletop gusher that launched the Texas oil industry, Houston became the capital of the world petroleum industry. As the leaders of the "awl bidness" were fond of saying, "Don't matter if the oil is in Siberia or the South China Sea -- you buy your rig in Houston or dig for it with a silver spoon." Houston went on to become a finance, medical, university, biotech and now nanotech center. The first word from the surface of the moon was not "Galveston." It was "Houston?"

What will New Orleans be known for in 100 years?

How a city responds to disaster is shaped both by large outside forces and internal social cohesion. Chicago rebuilt to greater glory after the fire of 1871 destroyed its heart. San Franciscans so transformed their city after the earthquake and fire of 1906 that nine years later they proudly hosted the Panama-Pacific International Exposition to toast the Panama Canal and their own resurrection.

Not long ago, I co-taught a team of George Mason University students in a semester-long scenario-planning course aimed at analyzing which global cities would be the winners and losers 100 years from now. The students were keenly aware of the impact that climate change might have on their calculations, among hundreds of other factors. Yet in the end they could not bring themselves to write off such water cities as New York and Tokyo. They simply wouldn't bet against the determination and imagination of New Yorkers and the Japanese. As someone put it at the time, "If it turned out New York needed dikes 200 feet high, you can just hear somebody saying, 'I know this guy in Jersey.' "

Will such fortitude be found in New Orleans? In his 2000 book, "Bowling Alone," political scientist Robert Putnam measured social capital around the country -- the group cohesion that allows people to come together in times of great need to perform seemingly impossible feats together. He found some of the lowest levels in Louisiana. (More Louisianans agree with the statement "I do better than average in a fistfight" than people from almost anywhere else.) His data do not seem to be contradicted by New Orleans's murder rate, which is 10 times the national average. Not to mention the political candidates through the ages who, to little effect, have run on promises of cleaning up the corruption endemic to the government and police force. New Orleans is not called the Big Easy for nothing. This is the place whose most famous slogan is " Laissez les bons temps rouler" -- "Let the good times roll."

I hope I'm wrong about the future of the city. But if the determination and resources to rebuild New Orleans to greater glory does not come from within, from where else will it come?

Joel Garreau, a Post reporter and editor, is the author of "Edge City: Life on the New Frontier" (Doubleday).

N.O. aint built yet?

 

[hussla's paradice]

bump

 

[thoughtone]

Who is we?

 

[Duece]

5 years after the Storm and a new Mayor...shit is slow but moving along.

 

[QueEx]

A legacy of Katrina: Green homes

USA Today
By Rick Jervis
Apr 07, 2010



NEW ORLEANS -- In this city on the mend, hundreds of state-of-the-art sustainable, energy-efficient homes are being built in lower-income neighborhoods, a trend that's outpacing most of the rest of the country.

More than 500 homes are being built with features such as solar panels, rain-catching cisterns and eco-friendly materials in neighborhoods that received the brunt of the damage from the 2005 floods following Hurricane Katrina. Hundreds of other homes are being given green upgrades.


"New Orleans is certainly a leader in that regard," says Suzanne Watson of the Washington-based American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. "The scale at which they're doing it is remarkable."

Green building has traditionally been left to higher-end homes, whose owners can afford the costlier solar panels and other elements, says Forest Bradley-Wright of the New Orleans-based Alliance for Affordable Energy. But as New Orleans began to rebuild, non-profits stepped in with innovative development techniques and eco-friendly plans to rebuild lower-income neighborhoods such as the Lower 9th Ward and Pontchartrain Park, he says.

"The destruction caused by Katrina necessitated almost every one to rethink how to rebuild their home," Bradley-Wright says.

Other American cities are building sustainable, energy-efficient housing for lower-income families. The Boston Housing Authority will receive $63 million in federal money for energy-efficiency improvements, the largest public-housing project of that kind in U.S. history. And the Seattle Housing Authority is revamping one of its public housing complexes into 1,700 green, energy-efficient units.

But it's rare for a city to develop so many sustainable and affordable single-family homes, such as New Orleans is doing, as opposed to apartment complexes, which is more the national trend, Watson says.

"What's happening in New Orleans is incredibly impressive. It shows the tenacity of those working there," says Dana Bourland, a vice president of Enterprise Community Partners, a Maryland-based non-profit that supports affordable housing efforts nationwide.

New Orleans projects include:

• Five sustainable homes, an 18-unit apartment complex and a community center in the Holy Cross section of the Lower 9th Ward developed by California-based Global Green USA.

• 150 eco-friendly homes planned for the Lower 9th Ward by Make It Right, the initiative started by actor Brad Pitt. So far, 34 of the homes have been built.

• Plans to build more than 100 green homes in the city's Gentilly neighborhood on a $20 million pledge from the New York-based Riggio Foundation.

• More than 150 elevated, energy-efficient homes are being planned for the Pontchartrain Park area, an initiative led by actor Wendell Pierce, a New Orleans native best known for his role in HBO series The Wire.

The completed Lower 9th Ward homes range in price from $120,000 to $160,000 and energy bills are 75% lower than comparable homes, says Jon Sader, Make It Right's construction director.

One of them went to Neal Dupar, 48, whose previous home was destroyed in August 2005 by more than 10 feet of water. He lives with his wife and five children in a new four-bedroom home with solar paneling and improved insulation on the same lot as his previous home. He pays $300 a month less on energy and water bills than in the old house, he says.

"It's helped a great deal," Dupar says. "I'd never be able to afford this on my own."


http://content.usatoday.com/communities/greenhouse/post/2010/04/a-legacy-of-katrina-green-homes/1

 

[hussla's paradice]

<font size="5"><center>
A legacy of Katrina: Green homes</font size></center>

USA Today
By Rick Jervis
Apr 07, 2010



NEW ORLEANS -- In this city on the mend, hundreds of state-of-the-art sustainable, energy-efficient homes are being built in lower-income neighborhoods, a trend that's outpacing most of the rest of the country.

More than 500 homes are being built with features such as solar panels, rain-catching cisterns and eco-friendly materials in neighborhoods that received the brunt of the damage from the 2005 floods following Hurricane Katrina. Hundreds of other homes are being given green upgrades.


"New Orleans is certainly a leader in that regard," says Suzanne Watson of the Washington-based American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. "The scale at which they're doing it is remarkable."

Green building has traditionally been left to higher-end homes, whose owners can afford the costlier solar panels and other elements, says Forest Bradley-Wright of the New Orleans-based Alliance for Affordable Energy. But as New Orleans began to rebuild, non-profits stepped in with innovative development techniques and eco-friendly plans to rebuild lower-income neighborhoods such as the Lower 9th Ward and Pontchartrain Park, he says.

"The destruction caused by Katrina necessitated almost every one to rethink how to rebuild their home," Bradley-Wright says.

Other American cities are building sustainable, energy-efficient housing for lower-income families. The Boston Housing Authority will receive $63 million in federal money for energy-efficiency improvements, the largest public-housing project of that kind in U.S. history. And the Seattle Housing Authority is revamping one of its public housing complexes into 1,700 green, energy-efficient units.

But it's rare for a city to develop so many sustainable and affordable single-family homes, such as New Orleans is doing, as opposed to apartment complexes, which is more the national trend, Watson says.

"What's happening in New Orleans is incredibly impressive. It shows the tenacity of those working there," says Dana Bourland, a vice president of Enterprise Community Partners, a Maryland-based non-profit that supports affordable housing efforts nationwide.

New Orleans projects include:

• Five sustainable homes, an 18-unit apartment complex and a community center in the Holy Cross section of the Lower 9th Ward developed by California-based Global Green USA.

• 150 eco-friendly homes planned for the Lower 9th Ward by Make It Right, the initiative started by actor Brad Pitt. So far, 34 of the homes have been built.

• Plans to build more than 100 green homes in the city's Gentilly neighborhood on a $20 million pledge from the New York-based Riggio Foundation.

• More than 150 elevated, energy-efficient homes are being planned for the Pontchartrain Park area, an initiative led by actor Wendell Pierce, a New Orleans native best known for his role in HBO series The Wire.

The completed Lower 9th Ward homes range in price from $120,000 to $160,000 and energy bills are 75% lower than comparable homes, says Jon Sader, Make It Right's construction director.

One of them went to Neal Dupar, 48, whose previous home was destroyed in August 2005 by more than 10 feet of water. He lives with his wife and five children in a new four-bedroom home with solar paneling and improved insulation on the same lot as his previous home. He pays $300 a month less on energy and water bills than in the old house, he says.

"It's helped a great deal," Dupar says. "I'd never be able to afford this on my own."


http://content.usatoday.com/communities/greenhouse/post/2010/04/a-legacy-of-katrina-green-homes/1

bump

 

[QueEx]

New Orleans, Five Years Later

Part 1 of 5 (The Introduction)

<font size="5"><Center>
New Orleans, Five Years Later</font size></center>

By: Jonathan Cohn
August 15, 2010


A few blocks north of one of the neighborhood's main thoroughfares is a single-story house with a fresh coat of grayish-blue paint. The lawn is bursting with green grass, recently cut. The small garden near the entrance has blooming violet flowers. It is not a large house. The narrow “shotgun” footprint can’t have space for more than five rooms, including a kitchen. But it has all the tell-tale signs of recent construction and would seem utterly unremarkable in plenty of middle-class neighborhoods.

Just a block further to the north is a lot full of overgrown vegetation. It's one of dozens in the immediate area, but this one caught my attention because of four concrete stairs rising out of the ground, presumably where a front porch or stoop once stood. As you get closer, you can see some more concrete, laid flat on the ground, with weeds sprouting up through what used to be the sections of a driveway. But otherwise the lot is empty.

You could think about the new house, the one with the fresh blue paint, and say it’s proof that life and prosperity are returning to the Lower Ninth, which Katrina had so utterly and famously devastated. You would have a point. Thanks in part to construction by Habitat for Humanity, Brad Pitt’s “Make It Right” project, and other non-profits, clusters of new houses are forming near the levees that separate the community from downtown New Orleans. Some of the older homes remain, too--and some of their owners have done impressive work restoring them. The Lower Ninth may have been a poor neighborhood, certainly by national standards, but it was also a stable community with deep roots. Before the storm, more than 60 percent of residents owned their homes, well above the citywide average. Many of these people have since returned.

But you could also look at that empty lot, or the many more like it, and say it’s proof that the Lower Ninth is in deep trouble. Again, you would have a point. Overall, just 25 percent of the residents have returned--the lowest percentage in all of New Orleans. Retail is virtually non-existent; the closest grocery store is at least a fifteen minute drive away. The neighborhood also lacks key services. If you have a heart attack in the Lower Ninth Ward, the closest hospital is in downtown--across a draw bridge. “I feel like my neighborhood has been forgotten,” says Vera McFadden, president of the neighborhood council.

And such ambiguities aren't confined to the Lower Ninth Ward. Earlier this month, the Brookings Institution published The New Orleans Index at Five, arguably the most comprehensive survey you’ll find on the state of the city. And if you assume (as I certainly had) that the situation in New Orleans is bleak, bordering on hopeless, you’ll be surprised by its findings. City population is back to 80 percent of what it was before the storm. The unemployment level is actually lower than the national average. But for every piece of good news there is bad news, or at least a footnote. The city has grown more affluent, for example, largely because poor people were more likely to leave and never return. New levees are up but replenishment of the wetlands, essential both for the environment and hurricane protection, has stalled..

My visit last week was the result of good fortune: an invitation to speak at a conference. It was also a chance to re-establish a connection I made twenty years ago, while covering news as a summer intern for the Times-Picayune. Many writers call, or have called, New Orleans home and, to be very clear, I'm not really one of them. I spent most of my ten weeks there adjusting to professional journalism and life outside the I-95 corridor, both of which were novel experiences at the time. But I was there long enough to care about the the city and the people in it.

Not that a special connection should be necessary to care about New Orleans. Katrina had a huge political impact, changing popular perceptions of the Bush presidency. But it didn't impress the American psyche with nearly the force that 9/11 did, despite loss of life that was of the same magnitude and devastation that was arguably larger, depending on how you calculate it. I don't mean to draw a moral comparison between two such different events. But I often wonder whether America has forgotten not just McFadden's Lower Ninth Ward but the city as a whole.

I hope not. It's important to understand what happened there, before and after the storm, in order to hold public officials accountable and to avoid similar tragedies in the future. As I toured the city last week, I tried to focus on three questions in particular:

Has the city rebuilt itself? Katrina was the most devastating natural disaster in American history, wiping out not just homes and business but all kinds of public infrastructure. To what extent has New Orleans been able to rebuild that?

Has the city reinvented itself? New Orleans had serious economic, social, and political dysfunction before the storm. Given a chance to start over, could the community build a better city?

What lessons can New Orleans teach the rest of us? The city has become a petri dish for experiments in urban renewal, education reform, health care, and environmental restoration. How are those experiments going?

I don’t have anything close to definitive answers to those questions. The subject is too big and complex. But I have impressions, observations, and a few insights. Over the next few days, I'll tell you what I learned--and introduce you to some of the people I met along the way.

 

[QueEx]

<font size="5"><center>
Film, TV specials mark storm's anniversary</font size><font size="4">

Spike Lee, news networks turn attention to the Gulf Coast</font size></center>

HBO will air Spike Lee's two-part, four-hour
documentary, If God Is Willing and Da Creek
Don't Rise


By DAVID BARRON
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Aug. 21, 2010, 12:02AM


From vistas as wide as Spike Lee's four-hour documentary for HBO to as specific as Frontline's examination of police misconduct in New Orleans, television networks and viewers will turn their attention over the next week to the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

Lee's two-part film If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don't Rise, a follow-up to his 2006 Emmy-winning film When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, was intended to focus on efforts to rebuild New Orleans and finish with the Saints' victory in Super Bowl XLIV. It was expanded in the past month to include an hour on the BP oil spill.

Lee's film, which airs at 8 p.m. Monday and Tuesday, also includes segments on some of the more than 100,000 Katrina evacuees who remain in Houston, including a woman who was able to find help for her autistic son in Houston that was unavailable to her in New Orleans.

• NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, who reported from New Orleans during the storm, hosts Hurricane Katrina: The First Five Days, for NBC Dateline at 6 p.m. Sunday. Williams also will host NBC Nightly News from New Orleans Thursday-Aug. 30 and will anchor Brian Williams Reports: A Return to New Orleans, Sept. 10 on MSNBC.

• MSNBC hosts Rachel Maddow, Tamron Hall and Ed Schultz also will report from New Orleans, and Matt Lauer and Al Roker will host Today from the city on Friday.

• PBS' coverage of the anniversary includes a Frontline episode titled Law & Disorder at 8 p.m. Wednesday. The program, produced in cooperation with ProPublica and the New Orleans Times-Picayune, examines several instances in which police shot civilians in the days after the storm, including one case that resulted in the indictment of five officers by a federal grand jury.

Other programs will include:

• ABC Bob Woodruff reports Katrina: Where Things Stand, beginning Thursday on World News With Diane Sawyer. Other reports will air on Good Morning America, Nightline and This Week With Christiane Amanpour. Also, GMA anchor Robin Roberts will report from her hometown of Pass Christian, Miss., on efforts to rebuild the city.

• CNN: The network's coverage of the anniversary continues with a website at www.cnn.com/katrina, viewer contributions at its iReport site and two upcoming specials.
  
  
  • Soledad O'Brien hosts New Orleans Rising, at 7 p.m. Saturday, on actor Wendell Pierce's efforts to restore his childhood neighborhood, Pontchartrain Park. Pierce, whose parents lived in the area before Katrina, formed a nonprofit community development corporation to help homeowners in the middle-class neighborhood. Music for the show was composed and performed by trumpeter Terence Blanchard.
  
  
  • On Aug. 28-29, Sanjay Gupta, M.D., hosted by CNN chef medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, returns to Charity Hospital, where Gupta reported in the aftermath of Katrina on doctors and nurses who stayed with their patients at the flooded hospital. He also interviews the last doctor on duty at Charity Hospital, which never reopened after Katrina.

• Fox News Channel: Jonathan Hunt, Trace Gallagher and New Orleans native Arthel Neville will report from the Gulf Coast beginning Thursday, with live reports and features on Studio B and The Fox Report with Shepard Smith. Smith, a native of Mississippi who reported from the area during Katrina, will participate in a panel discussion on the storm and its aftermath at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.

david.barron@chron.com


http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ent/7162136.html

 

[QueEx]

A legacy of Katrina: Green homes

150 eco-friendly homes planned for the Lower 9th Ward by Make It Right, the initiative started by actor Brad Pitt. So far, 34 of the homes have been built.

Judge: Brad Pitt, others can be sued over New Orleans homes

https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle...30-shocking-photos/ss-AAI3zkK?ocid=spartanntp

© Getty LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - SEPTEMBER 24: Brad Pitt attends the squad dinner the Breitling Summit on September 24, 2019 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Charley Gallay/Getty Images for Breitling)



NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A judge has denied actor Brad Pitt's request to be taken off a lawsuit that says his Make it Right Foundation built shoddy homes in the New Orleans area that was hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina.

The Times-Picayune/ The New Orleans Advocate reports Pitt and other foundation directors asked the court to remove them from the lawsuit, saying they weren't personally responsible for the construction.

Judge Rachael Johnson denied the request last week.

Two homeowners filed the suit. Their attorney, Ron Austin, says the homes built by the foundation in the Lower Ninth Ward have infrastructural issues and residents have reported being sick.

More than 100 green Make It Right houses were built in 2008. The foundation sued the principal architect last year saying his designs were defective.
___
Information from: The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate, http://www.nola.com

Judge: Brad Pitt, others can be sued over New Orleans homes