Long term housing a staggering process

Building ‘mini-cities’
Beyond the immediate emergency shelter needs, Katrina’s victims could be housed in tent cities or trailers constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers, as has been done in the past.  After Hurricane Andrew, the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history, which left 250,000 homeless, several tent cities were set up, in particular on land of deactivated Air Force bases.

But such facilities aren’t meant to house people beyond a few months and longer term shelter is in dire need.

Even under the best of conditions the logistics to deal with 500,000 homeless are mind-boggling.  “I know [FEMA has] a lot of mobile [housing] units and they’ve been buying them since 2002,” said Rick Brady, a city planner with San Diego based P&D Consultants.  “They have lots of mobile homes, basically boxes,” said Brady, who has provided group site planning and consulting services to FEMA.  “But do they have 178,000 units, which would roughly be the number needed to house 500,000 people?  I don’t know.”

A sustainable long term solution would be to build a series of “mini-cities” with temporary housing units, Brady said.  These could be attached to reclaimed or established communities in the same region hit by Katrina, Brady said, “so that the people don’t feel isolated.  They would have access to services and would better be able to integrate with their neighbors, so they don’t feel like they are refugees in their own country.” 

Brady said he can see communities of 8,000 homes being set up in multiple areas within 60-to-90 days.  “A lot of decisions will have to be made on the fly, but that’s the nature of the beast,” he said.  “If we can overcome the human capital and materials shortages that any such effort is likely to encounter, then the rest will fall in place.”

Simply finding the right amount of land is a challenge, experts said.  Building the equivalent of several mid-size cities to house Katrina’s refugees would require nearly 40,000 acres of land, according to Brady’s calculations.

And such efforts will quickly eat away at that most precious commodity, time. 

“A typical response to the Florida storms, from the time they identified a piece of land, was about six to seven weeks before people were moving in,” said Wilson.  “But I really believe the response to Katrina is going to be totally different because of the shear magnitude.”

Another, less tangible obstacle is staying committed, said Williams of Architects without Borders.  “When the main event unfolds a lot of attention is paid and within about four to six weeks something else is on the horizon and the money is all dried up, even that which was originally committed has gone elsewhere and people are still left sitting amongst big piles of debris,” said Williams, whose group has helped out with natural disasters around the globe.

There’s a need to be accountable for how the relief money is spent, Williams said, so that large organizations don’t walk away when they “feel the job is done; when the immediacy of the triage has been dealt with but the permanent community recovery has yet to be started.”

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