of Biloxis, Blahniks and Broadways

I recently spent the last few days in Biloxi, on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. One of my thesis students is presently living out of a recycled Israeli Army tent on the grounds of 'Hands-On USA.' Hands-On is one of the volunteer organizations currently working in Biloxi to help with the post-Katrina disaster relief efforts along the southern U.S, along with other groups like Habitat for Humanity, the Salvation Army and Architecture for Humanity. Biloxi, along with some of the other coastal towns, was among the hardest hit cities when Katrina rolled in. It, along with other towns like Pascagoula, Pass Christian and Waveland, have really low seabed profiles, which meant the storm surge had nowhere to go but up. It hit at about 5 am, at a height of about 26 feet and washed in from the Gulf all the way to the Back Bay.

Our university has a group of graduate students working with the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio for their Spring Semester. There's a group of guys from Mississippi State, one or two from Auburn University (Alabama) and a straggler from the Boston Architectural Center. The design studio is being coordinated by a professor from Mississippi State and an Auburn/Rural Studio Alum. Our students are living in tents (and have been for the last month or so) and have been working with the East Biloxi Coordination Center to help out residents who are trying to get back to a semblance of normalcy. Most of Biloxi's residents are not wealthy. There is a large immigrant Vietnamese population (which was largely ignored by FEMA when they showed up with ridiculous re-building strategies) and a big African American population too.

I flew down to spend a couple of days to see what's going on down there for our students and for my thesis student, which, incidentally, happens to be plenty. We were driving down interstate 90, right along the Gulf Coast, and James, my Grad student observed that Americans need to leave their next generation a broader purpose other than War - and this is a good place to start.

The students are working with local residents where-ever they wind up being needed and in-between the architectural and building 9-11, they are doing policy, zoning and code reviews to figure out how to reduce the financial and bureaucratic loopholes that many residents have to jump through and have no idea how to start. Insurance companies have refused to pay up, the Federal Government has threated to reduce funding assistance to residents, FEMA keeps, I don't know, doing whatever it was (or wasn't) doing and the volunteers keep doing their own thing.

We took a day and went to New Orleans. We spent some time in the lower ninth-ward and in St. Bernard Parish, as well as visiting with some of the other volunteer organizations in the city. The lower 9th is still decimated. Half of New Orleans' population has yet to return. There are 75% fewer physicians, less than 1/2 the public schools are open. There is environmental damage because of oil refinery spills - but Mardi Gras still rolls on...and on...and on.

In Spike Lee's film, 'When the Levees Broke,' someone reflects on the unbelievable complacency of the U.S. government response to Katrina. Condoleeza Rice spent the day after Katrina shopping for Manolo Blahnik shoes in Manhattan, the evening at a Broadway show (where she was boo-ed), and the next day hitting tennis balls with Monica Seles, before realizing that something was happening along the Gulf Coast. George Bush eventually found the door to his office and came out to New Orleans to make some bizarre comments about looking forward to 'sitting on Trent Lott's porch when it gets rebuilt.' Trent Lott, for those of you out there who don't know is, the Junior Senator from Mississippi who once praised Strom Thurmond's support of segregationist political policies (which included a filibuster against the Civil Rights Act in 1957). Senator Thurmond was, up until recently, the longest serving senator in U.S. history.

The government staggered in with regulations and rezoning that required some neighborhood homes to be raised over 24 feet high - which would require ramps (for those needing wheelchair access) over 104 feet long. They neglected to engage the Vietnamese community in Biloxi, instituted bizarrely draconian building-code and permit requirements and basically threw FEMA trailers at people - and is now threatening to yank funding for the re-building initiatives.


lower ninth-ward, new orleans





The spray-paint that you can see on the above house in New Orleans is part of the code that mold-abatement and rescue teams used to communicate the state of the house and any survivors. The upper quadrant contains the date of the review, the right will indicate the team performing the assessment, the left denotes the presence of any hazardous materials, and the bottom number indicates the number of dead bodies found inside.

new house construction in Waveland, MS.


a new brick home in Waveland, jacked up 12 feet.


FEMA sweetness.


It is deeply saddening that it takes a disaster of this magnitude to wake people up (I'm sure those Manolo Blahnik shoes were really nice). The equivalent of over 260 World Trade Centers occurred in Rwanda during the genocide in the 1990's. Over 200,000 people have died in Darfur. 230,000 people are estimated to have died in the Asian Tsunami. Over 31 million people have died of HIV/AIDS in Africa - more than 50children have died since I started writing this post - about 1 child every 13 seconds. And Iraqibodycount.com says anywhere from 52-62,000 civilian deaths since the war started. George W. has asked congress for over 147 billion dollars to fund the troop escalation in Iraq (and over 400 billion in defense budget spending). I think that the Gulf Coast has seen less than 7 billion.

Manolo Blahnik sandal : $878.00

Broadway Ticket to Spamalot (orchestra section): $250.00

Monica Seles Career earnings: $14, 891.762.00

Cost per square foot of a new house in Biloxi: $85.00


Graduate student camp in Biloxi.