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...

Lower 9th Ward Lower 9th Ward from the industrial canal levee Waiting Gym in the lower 9th Unfinished house in the lower 9th Public housing in upper 9th ward On my stop back in the US , I headed to the Gulf Coast to see how things were progressing after Hurricane Katrina. My first stop was New Orleans . One of the more telling things about New Orleans is that now, there are some areas of the city where you can’t really tell if it had been flooded or not. Some parts that had been flooded are back and in good shape, and there are neighborhoods that had never been flooded that look worse than those that have been flooded. The word decay was constantly popping up in my mind. Yet, while decay is very present, growth is very present, with the building industry booming, one of the few places in the country. New projects are popping up all over the place. Part of what makes this time and rebuilding interesting is ...