Demolition scheduled to begin next week

A massive downtown demolition project planned by the state to begin next week that will require removal of the burgeoning homeless encampment from nearby Duncan Plaza must be delayed to allow more time to find shelter for the roughly 150 people encamped in the public square, a New Orleans official said Tuesday.

A spokeswoman for City Councilwoman Stacy Head, whose district includes Duncan Plaza, said the city needs at least another month to complete its strategy to relocate the homeless population that has been growing steadily in the shadow of City Hall for months.


"This is a monumental task. Right now, there is just nowhere for these people to go," said Ruth Idakula, Head's executive assistant, who has been working with Mayor Ray Nagin's administration and homeless advocates to find a solution to the problem.

"We're trying to put the pieces together, but it's not something we can do overnight. If they go forward with this, it's just going to be a big mess."

State officials were unavailable late Tuesday to respond to the request for additional time.

Nagin administration officials could not be reached for comment, but in the past mayoral staffers have emphasized that they don't support emptying Duncan Plaza until housing is found for residents of the small tent city.

Design work continues

The state is preparing to tear down the shuttered nine-story state office building that borders Duncan Plaza, along with an adjacent building that once housed the state Supreme Court, which has relocated to the French Quarter. Plans call for the two structures to be replaced with a 336,000-square-foot building estimated to cost $75 million to $80 million.

While the state intends to design the new building to accommodate state offices now located in other parts of the city, that plan remains a work in progress.

The top official with the agency that oversees state-financed construction projects said a contractor is scheduled to begin erecting a fence Tuesday around the perimeter of Duncan Plaza, which will be transformed into a construction site over the next several months.

The barrier around the park, which will stretch along Loyola Avenue and Perdido and Gravier streets, was supposed to go up a week ago, but state officials agreed to delay the start date to give the city more time, said Jerry Jones, director of the Office of Facilities Planning.

"We're trying to make this transition as smooth as possible," Jones said. "We're hoping that social service agencies and the city will step forward.

"We build stuff, so we're probably not the best folks" to find shelter for the homeless.

Jones said members of his staff have visited Duncan Plaza in recent weeks to begin alerting the occupants about the impending work.

"We've tried to communicate to them that this is for their own safety," he said. "And I've been told that they are a good group of people who understand what's happening. They are not a rowdy group of folks."

Seeking shelter

The idea of emptying Duncan Plaza in less than a week clearly shocked the people most affected: figures in hooded sweatshirts who sat stiffly just off Perdido Street on Tuesday evening, bracing for another cold night.

Longtime park residents Robert Wells and Wilbur Buchanan said state surveyors recently told them that only the cement plaza in front of the State Office Building would be fenced off, within the next month or so.

But plans encompass the entire park and are set for next week. Wells, when told that Tuesday, spoke slowly and in disbelief. "I guess I will have to sleep somewhere else," he said, suggesting some grim options: underneath the overpass at Canal Street and Claiborne Avenue or in an abandoned house.

Wells had hoped to get a motel spot just before Thanksgiving, when homeless service consortium UNITY of Greater New Orleans came to the park with a list of 88 people who had been approved for housing assistance. Instead, he said, the motel spots filled up quickly, and he ended up with a voucher for the Salvation Army emergency shelter in Uptown.

Most nights, he said, that voucher is useless to him, because the Salvation Army closes its doors around 5 p.m. and he works as a waiter at a French Quarter restaurant until 2 a.m.

Last week, Wells acted as if sleeping in the plaza was no big deal. He's now changed his mind. "What I honestly and truthfully am hoping for right now is housing," he said, rubbing his hands together against the chilly air.

151 people per night

Tuesday night, Wells' tent was one of nearly 100 that covered nearly every inch of green space. Two recently created subdivisions -- rows of bedrolls, Federal Emergency Management Agency blue tarp and more tents -- extended along the Gravier Street edge of the Supreme Court building and into the main public library's side lawn.

Homeless outreach workers conducted a census two nights in a row last week and found an average of 151 people sleeping in Duncan Plaza. Outreach worker Shamus Rohn said he and other staff members had already been screening all park residents to see what services they needed. To close down the park hurriedly would waste that work, he said.

"For us, clearing Duncan Plaza means 151 scattered people that we won't be able to find next week," he said.

Last week, UNITY got the go-ahead to spend $3.9 million of Road Home money earmarked for the homeless, a population the agency estimates has grown to 12,000 in Orleans and Jefferson parishes.

The state's approval came on the day before Thanksgiving, but only after UNITY's staff spent that day finding 88 homeless people who were to be housed using the agency's own operating budget. Some of those 88 are still living in motels while they await apartments; UNITY staff had hoped to house them all by the end of this week and then begin work with a new group.

UNITY Executive Director Martha Kegel questioned the state's pressing need to either displace or jail the "very disabled population" from Duncan Plaza.

"It doesn't seem like it is so urgent to rope the place off," she said. "At a time when we are actively, intensely planning to house these people in the very near future, it seems precipitous," Kegel said.

Next week, after the fence is built, Jones said, the state will prepare the site for the first phase of demolition: the removal of lead, asbestos and other hazardous materials. That contract, which has not yet been awarded, will cost an estimated $1.5 million, Jones said, and the work should begin in February.

Work under the $2.8 demolition contract, which also has yet to be awarded, is slated to commence in March and take about six months to complete, Jones said. A multiple-story parking lot at the rear of the site will not be torn down.

Jones said construction on the new structure, which will be twice the size of the 176,000-square-foot State Office Building, will last about two years. The building is still under design, he said.

The State Office Building and the old Supreme Court sustained heavy damage from Hurricane Katrina.

Pitt unveils program to rebuild swath of Lower 9

After taping an interview Monday afternoon with the TV magazine Entertainment Tonight, Lloyd and Rosemary Griffin headed back across the empty concrete foundations and weed-choked lawns of their Lower 9th Ward neighborhood to a giant party hosted by Hollywood star Brad Pitt.

More than two years ago, during Hurricane Katrina, the couple had clung to a neighbor's roof just blocks from this spot as the wind and rain whipped in the darkness. Rosemary huddled over their toy poodle while Lloyd shielded them both with his body.

"While we were on top of the other house, our house passed us up in the street," said Rosemary Griffin, 66, a retired hotel employee.

Now, brass band music echoed and cameras flashed as hundreds converged on one of the worst-wrecked neighborhoods of flood-ravaged New Orleans for the official birth of Pitt's Make It Right initiative to build at least 150 affordable, environmentally friendly, storm-safe houses on the same lots where residents' old homes once stood.

National media attention

The event drew national attention, with "The Today Show's" Ann Curry and CNN's Larry King milling around near a makeshift stage. Also on hand was world-renowned architect Thom Mayne, who had donated his efforts to the project. And local politicians, including Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu and recovery czar Ed Blakely, showed up.

Amid the frenzy, the Griffins, married 37 years, were becoming minor celebrities as one of eight families whose new homes will be built first, all on Tennessee Street, near the place a barge landed after floating through the levee.

The scene seemed almost unreal, said the Griffins, who after their harrowing survival spent two years in Tahlequah, Okla., about 60 mile east of Tulsa. Lloyd Griffin, 67, said that since they moved back to his niece's house in eastern New Orleans in August, he has driven daily to his old neighborhood to check on his vacant property.

"I drive down here everyday, and sometimes at night, and sit at my lot. I look at my lot, sit there with the parking lights on," he said. "It looked like no one wanted to help us until Brad Pitt came along."

Thanks to Pitt

The sentiment was repeated again and again as Lower 9th Ward residents took to the stage to laud the actor's commitment at a time when it appeared that some government leaders intended to let their neighborhood deteriorate.

Patricia Jones, the no-nonsense director of the Lower 9th Ward Neighborhood Empowerment Network Association, praised Pitt's sincerity in inviting residents to participate in planning efforts -- then actually integrating their opinions into the plans. Charles Allen, president of the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association, called the actor "a dear friend and brother to us in this community."

When he took the stage, Pitt shifted the focus from himself and issued a plea for donations to augment the $12 million already pledged to Make It Right, including $5 million each from Pitt and philanthropist Steve Bing.

At the heart of the fund-raising effort is a call to corporations, foundations and church groups to "adopt" 300 giant pink blocks that are part of an art installation that spreads a half-mile from the center of the project site at Deslonde and North Roman streets.

While the blocks cost $150,000 each, the average cost of a Make It Right home, Pitt also solicited smaller donations -- from $5 to $45,500 -- to support the cost of the individual elements of the houses' eco-friendly designs, such as fluorescent bulbs, low-flush toilets and solar-panel installations. Contributions can be made the project's Web site, www.makeitrightnola.org

"My hope is that we can get next door to Jefferson Parish, then we can get into Central City," Pitt said. "There is no reason that we can't do 1,000 homes, that we can't do 10,000 homes, that we can't do 100,000 homes."

Aid has started rolling in

By noon Monday, the aid already was rolling in. Pitt told reporters that just hours into the fund-raising effort, enough money had been raised to support the construction of six houses.

"Whether you can give a dollar or $10 million, all of that, I guarantee you, will go straight into these houses," he said.

With the average house price pegged at between $100,000 and $174,000, planners expect participants to cover a portion of the cost with insurance and Road Home proceeds. But they expect that most homeowners will fall about $70,000 short of paying off their new homes. To fill the gap, Make It Right plans to offer forgivable loans of as much as $100,000. Applicants must have owned a home or lot in the Lower 9th Ward before Hurricane Katrina.

Though the project's most significant impact surely will be felt by the families who end up in new homes, other local residents said that Make It Right's effects already are spreading through a neighborhood that but for the crash of bulldozers has remained mostly silent -- and vacant -- since the flood.

Tennessee Street resident Gertrude LeBlanc, 72, said Monday's party -- and the giant pink blocks scattered across the landscape -- already had introduced a hopeful new spirit.

"This is like letting them know that we're still here," said LeBlanc, who said a church group will help her rebuild her house using Road Home money. "Yes, indeed, honey, I have been praying for this. I have been praying for somebody to give us a break. I think this might be it."

Sitting at a table inside the party tent, the Griffins, who grew up as next-door neighbors in the Lower 9th Ward, recalled the house they lost to the flood: three bedrooms, a den, a living room, a huge backyard. Inside were photographs of the couple as babies, snapshots of their 13 godchildren and a set of dishes that belonged to Lloyd's mother.

"My house wasn't lavish, but it was comfortable," said Lloyd Griffin, a retired aluminum plant worker. "It was my home."

Though angry about the senseless waste of the house they bought in 1965, Rosemary Griffin's eyes filled with tears at the notion that, thanks to Make It Right, she and her husband will be back in a new home on their own lot next year.

"I'll take a house if I have to sleep on the floor, just to say it's mine," she said, then added, like a wishful child: "I want a house so bad. I want a house, a house, a house, a house, a house."

New Orleans Hurt by Acute Rental Shortage

Inside trailer No. 27 here at the A. L. Davis Playground, where the government set up a camp last year for displaced residents of Hurricane Katrina, Tracy Bernard’s meager possessions are all packed up, even though she has nowhere to go.
About a month ago, workers for the Federal Emergency Management Agency swept through her trailer park, a bleak tableau of housing of the last resort, taping eviction notices on the flimsy aluminum doors. Thousands of other trailer residents across Louisiana were informed by FEMA last week that they too would be evicted in the next six months.

But few of them will be able to return to the city from which they were flooded out 27 months ago.

More than two years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is suffering from an acute shortage of housing that has nearly doubled the cost of rental units in the city, threatening the recovery of the region and the well-being of many residents who decided to return against the odds. Before the storm, more than half of the city’s population rented housing. Yet official attention to help revive the shattered rental home and apartment market has been scant.

In some core middle- and lower-income areas, blighted dwellings stretch for blocks on end, and the city has been slow to come up with ideas for what to do with those that have been abandoned. Last week, the city housing authority approved the demolition of 4,000 public housing units at five projects damaged by the storm. In their place, the authority plans to build mixed-income projects, large parts of which will not be affordable to previous residents.

Although repairs are being made and more housing is available now than a year ago, demand is still outpacing supply.

Ms. Bernard, a veteran worker for the local public transportation agency who has to move by Monday, has been scouring the city for a place to rent. Properties in her price range, if they exist at all, routinely come without finished walls or stoves. In New Orleans, decent affordable housing remains a casualty of the storm.

“A lot of the city is still boarded up,” said Ms. Bernard, who rented a one-bedroom house in eastern New Orleans for $300 a month before Hurricane Katrina. “Where are we supposed to go?”

One of the more striking changes to appear lately in New Orleans is the highly visible number of homeless men and women living under bridges and in parks. Social service groups say about 12,000 homeless people are living in the city, about double the number before the storm.

The sense of an impending housing crisis grew stronger last week with FEMA’s announcement on Wednesday that it would close all the trailer camps it runs for victims of the 2005 hurricanes on varying schedules by the end of May. More than 900 families are living in FEMA trailer parks around the city.

The agency said its action was intended to hasten the move of residents to permanent housing from trailers. It said counselors would assist every resident in the transition. “We’re with them every step of the way,” Diane L. W. Perry, a FEMA spokeswoman, said Wednesday.

But in interviews at trailer parks last week, a reporter found that some residents had not spoken with a caseworker in weeks, even though they were scheduled to be evicted within days.

“The caseworker is very hard to get in touch with,” said Martin Blossom, a pizza cook who lives in a trailer and who is not sure where he will move in the next few days. “I haven’t talked with the caseworker for two weeks.”

Others said the information they got from caseworkers was useless. Ramona Jones said her counselor gave her several listings, but some of the apartments were not ready for habitation by her eviction date — or they were, in her words, “rat holes.” Landlords are asking $1,100 a month or more. Though Ms. Jones and others are eligible for financial assistance to help pay the high rents, many are reluctant, knowing that, like the trailers, the assistance could disappear, leaving them stranded with huge bills.

“We done been through so much with FEMA till where it’s easy for the federal government to back out on their word,” Ms. Jones, a factory worker, said. “They did it before. Everybody’s looking at, ‘What if?’ ”

Time has already run out for some. Ms. Bernard, 40, and her two daughters got the final word on Friday that they were evicted, cast out of the only home they have had since the storm to whereabouts unknown. And they were not alone.

“I don’t know what’s going to become of us,” said Tiffany Farbe, who lives in a trailer park near the Mississippi River in the Uptown part of New Orleans with her son and mother. “They said get out. I’ve explained to them over and over again our situation. FEMA just makes you feel like dirt.”

The agency objects to that characterization, and says it is only trying to help.

“It’s the next step in the recovery,” said Ronnie Simpson, a FEMA spokesman. “It’s the individual’s responsibility to go out and find what’s suitable for them.”

While the agency provides listings, Mr. Simpson said it did not necessarily endorse the properties or know much about them beyond their locations and the basics, such as the number of bedrooms.

“We know it’s a tough decision, and that’s not lost on us,” he said, but “more and more housing becomes available every day, that’s a fact. The sooner you begin the process, the better. You want to start early and pick what’s right for your family.” He added: “We’re very sensitive to the fact that this isn’t an easy move. But it’s a necessary move.”

Before the hurricane, housing advocates estimated there were about 6,300 homeless people in New Orleans and neighboring Jefferson Parish. Today, the count is 12,000 and growing. Experts said it was hard to ignore the link between the housing situation and homelessness.

“FEMA and the federal bureaucracy seem oblivious to the fact that virtually no new affordable rental housing has yet appeared in New Orleans to replace what was lost,” said Martha J. Kegel, executive director of Unity of Greater New Orleans, a group of 60 agencies that house and feed the homeless. “It will take a long time for enough replacement affordable housing to be built. To withdraw housing assistance to the neediest people is a shirking of federal responsibility for the design failure of the federal levees in New Orleans, which was the cause of most of the destruction of affordable housing here.”

In the past several months, a homeless encampment has sprung up on the steps of City Hall — partly because it is a safe open space and partly because it is a political statement. Tents and sleeping bags are aligned in rows. The crowd of hundreds is a mix of young and old, white and black.

Michael Reeves, 45, sleeps on the grass outside City Hall. He used to rent a one-bedroom in the Ninth Ward for $350 before the storm. “Ain’t nothing left but the ground,” he said. “We didn’t have nowhere to go so we came here.”

Not everyone in the park is a native of New Orleans. Some people came here after the storm to do construction work without realizing they would not be able to find a place to live. Some sleep on-site in unfinished buildings; others have taken up residence in abandoned buildings or in parks.

Ken Cimino, 48, sleeps outside of City Hall, too. He does odd jobs at the Superdome, mostly picking up trash after Saints football games. Mr. Cimino drove to New Orleans recently from New Haven, Conn.

“I came here for construction work, and found the situation wasn’t quite what I expected,” he said. “I thought I’d live out of my car for a few weeks until I found a place. Used up my savings. I just got caught off balance.”

Now, Mr. Cimino says he cannot afford to drive back to Connecticut. He is just one of many laborers who find themselves without options.

Ms. Bernard said she might end up on a friend’s mother’s couch until she wears out her welcome. Then what?

“I know I’m going to find something,” she said. “I have faith. I know God’s going to work something out for us.”

Brad Pitt Unveils Massive Art Display in Lower Ninth Ward

Actor Brad Pitt embraces Robert Green, who lost his mother and granddaughter when flood waters from Katrina destroyed their home in the lower Ninth Ward. The two were on hand for the unveiling of the next phase of Pitt's $12 million "Make It Right" project: a vast public art display that serves as a fundraiser to expand the project beyond its initial goal to build 150 homes, and possibly into other neighborhoods and parishes

Huge pink blocks are signs of hope in Lower 9th Ward

As she drove across the Claiborne Avenue bridge over the Industrial Canal, she noticed something peculiar.

A few blocks in the Lower 9th Ward, along the levee from North Derbigny to North Galvez streets, were studded with odd, very large pink blocks, as big as houses, 100 or more of them, with pink roof shapes lying beside them on empty lots.

The empty lots had been a neighborhood until they were scoured by surging floodwaters after the levees broke during Hurricane Katrina, then were scoured again months later by bulldozers after the houses that had stood there were deemed unsalvageable. Now big pink blocks stood everywhere.

The pink blocks look stark and strange in the otherwise brown and olive landscape, like enormous, blank Monopoly houses. They could be mistaken for art, as if Christo, the master environmental artist who wraps whole buildings, bridges and even islands in garish fabric, had been at work.

But the pink blocks may be more than artistic. They may be symbolic stand-ins for real houses to come.

On Monday at 11 a.m., actor Brad Pitt is scheduled to stand in the surrealistic scene and announce details of his "Make It Right" project, a plan to create more than 100 affordable, ecologically sound homes where the pink shapes now stand.

On Nov. 9, at the Clinton Global Initiative in Manhattan, Pitt pledged $5 million to the project, challenging others to match his largess. Producer and environmental philanthropist Steve Bing contributed $5 million. A team of architects led by John Williams of New Orleans began designing the homes.

"Oh my God, all these pink roofs," Webb recalled saying as she crossed the bridge. "What are they?" she asked herself. "Let me see."

She stopped to investigate, parking at the strange construction site, where scores of workers were assembling metal scaffolding to form the house shapes, then attaching heavy pink tarpaulin skins with cable ties.

Forklifts rumbled here and there. A few spectators wandered between the tent-like structures. A pair of children played peek-a-boo from inside one pink house as their mother watched from nearby.

The mother looked familiar to Webb. Slender, dark-haired, with high cheekbones and full lips, wearing an elegant black shift -- it was actress Angelina Jolie.

Webb took a chance and approached the star and the handful of people around her, including a large, attentive man who hovered a few yards away. Webb told Jolie again and again how appreciative she was for her and Pitt's continued interest in New Orleans.

In 2006, Pitt joined with the environmental organization Global Green to announce plans to build affordable housing in another Lower 9th Ward neighborhood, Holy Cross, where work on the first model home continues.

In January, Pitt and Jolie bought a house in New Orleans, where the family stayed during the filming of Pitt's film "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," which is due out in 2008.

Now Pitt and Jolie are back, lending their considerable cachet to another Crescent City project.

As Webb said later: "It is really nice. They're showing us they ain't forgot about us."

As their conversation ended, Webb apologized to Jolie for having intruded. "I don't want you think I'm a lunatic," she said.

But Jolie invited her to a party Monday night, Webb said as she walked to her car, excitedly recounting her celebrity encounter.

Jolie caught up with Pitt a half-block closer to the river as he was bicycling around the surrealistic site in a gray sweatshirt and cap. He posed for a photograph with an admirer and watched the children splash their feet in a puddle. Then he pedaled off.

As the sun set, a group of workers gathered in an empty part of the strange development. With a collective groan they lifted one of the enormous pink blocks. It settled smoothly and silently on a barren lot.