Public and private partnerships are taking shape in New Orleans, turning the city into an incubator for new home building featuring natural resources and materials that require less cost to maintain. Entrepreneurial financiers and environmental non-profits consider devastated neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward and Holy Cross blank slates for designing and constructing new homes and tweaking sustainable technologies that are their hallmarks. Global Green President Matt Peterson says New Orleans became the perfect city for testing utopian endeavors because “the failure of government” to rebuild in the wake of Katrina left entire swatches of empty land. It provided non-profits and social entrepreneurs the opportunity to put in place social innovations, he says, creating a renaissance in green building that will not only serve as a template for New Orleans but for other cities struggling to address affordable housing issues. The most visible endeavor is the Make It Right Foundation, headed by film actor Brad Pitt. An avowed fan of architecture and of the city itself, Mr. Pitt began his involvement by hosting a design competition for sustainable homebuilding. This turned into a long-term relief organization, providing low-income residents who were displaced but returned to find their previous home swept off its foundation the chance to purchase affordable and storm resistant homes... After Katrina, New Orleans housing goes green - CSMonitor.com
interesting article. after going to new orleans and meeting the people... i'm surprised to see Green Buildings go up. most of the people there don't really know or care what a green building is... it's simply new. .... and i thought the green thing to do was to not rebuild that area at all.. shrug... it will all float into the ocean once again...
In the five years since Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has worked to rebuild itself better than it was before, and one part of that process has been implementing environmentally friendly measures in homes, schools and businesses. The Times-Picayune asked environmental advocates and building experts to share what they think has been the city's greatest green achievement since Katrina and what they hope to see accomplished over the next five years. The consensus? It's that New Orleans-area residents have become better-informed about environmental and green-building issues. They're asking the right questions and demanding more of their elected officials. And the focus for the next five years? Put simply: wetlands, wetlands, wetlands. http://www.nola.com/homegarden/index.ssf/2010/08/experts_say_new_orleanians_nee.html
But if the ROI is less than 20-80 years then it's worth it, no? Besides, what are those timeline assumptions based on?
Could be underwater. Anyway, 80 years is a long time. People have always built in strange, weird and dangerous places. Ask anyone living by a volcano.
Eh, true enough about ROI. Bad luck for those with 30 year mortgages if the drowning occurs in 20 years. The timescale comes from my estimate of the net effect of erosion, sea level rise, and repeated seasonal flooding.
From what I've read, the re-engineering of the N.O. flood protection systems are built to withstand a 100-year event, and even 500-year event in some cases. Of course, that's still nothing compared to what was done to buttress Amsterdam (then again, the Dutch are not as "pragmatic" as Americans when it comes to cost-benefit analysis). Another thing to note is that there's now a general understanding of the need to replenish the wetlands as a defense mechanism. Whether that understanding can be translated into real action remains to be seen, however.
Let's say that 80 years from now, extreme ice melting has raised the sea level 5 feet. That's trivially handled with levies 5 feet higher build at a rate of about an inch per year. Now examine that to a 15 foot storm surge of a Cat 2-3 hurricane that you only get a couple of days of warning....... It's not going to be rising sea levels that would do in New Orleans, it's going to be one or more hurricanes that exceed the measures established.
