the INCREMENTAL house

Diamondhead HFH Cottage Demonstration Interior showing addition of living room Installation of prefabricated tag unit. Katrina Cottages are sold by Lowe's. New homes at Cottage Square. Enterprise Community Partners will find occupants to move into the 8 units in Cottage Square. I don’t see how the occupants are going to last. Will the people living there be temporary? Can someone last permanently in a space like that? It is not that different from a cheap studio apartment in a city, but this is Ocean Springs. Some of the larger units might be viable. If they go to the trouble of making sure the trailers can be permanent, but if the space is not livable enough to be permanent, then what is the point? Spending time in such a small unit, one realizes that it wouldn’t work for the typical American family. Maybe in other countries, but not in the US. Consequently, the first question is: “Well, what about adding on?” The main challenge is that commun...

One of the interesting components about the Katrina Cottages is the questions it raises about temporary vs. permanent housing. Of course, the original FEMA trailer and mobile homes that were provided were certainly seen only as temporary housing. I don’t need to go into detail about how poorly these were planned and built. Not only were many people forced out the trailers because of toxic formaldehyde issues, there was no plan at all with what to do with them AFTER people got back into permanent housing. In fact, they are now selling most of them for scrap. And while the Katrina Cottage didn’t actually look like a trailer, its scale was such that it was seen as something temporary. And the house was actually mounted on a trailer. The plan was for these to serve as temporary housing to be put on site while people rebuilt their houses. There was no real long term plan for it. Most of the Cottages were produced in Mississippi through their receipt of a $270 million from the...

Cottage Square in Ocean Springs, MS The original Katrina Cottage designed by Marianne Cutsano Mississippi Cottage I went to the Mississippi Gulf Coast to learn more about the Katrina Cottage. Developed out of the New Urbanist charrettes after the storm, it is one of the few decent examples of architecture/planning that I think has come out of the process. It is something that has actually gone to scale and is being put to use. Designed as an alternative to a FEMA trailer that was built and looked better, it was an option many people could be more comfortable with and something people felt a little more up to the standards that one would expect out of our country. Digging into it has been interesting and revealed much about American’s approach to housing. One interesting location where one can track the progress and development of the Katrina Cottage is at Cottage Square in Ocean Springs , MS . There, architect Bruce Tol...