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05 August 29
BIRMINGHAM, AL - I've been traveling a lot in recent years, and had been on the road for about a week when Katrina hit. I've long loved New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, having traveled there often over the years. Like all Americans with any ties to the Coast, the prospect of the monstrous storm was shocking... I remember setting my clock to get up at 4:45 AM on the 29th to check for news. The early reports weren't so bad; New Orleans just might dodge the bullet, although there was no news at all from the western Mississippi coast at that hour.

05 August 30
MONTGOMERY, AL - I had meetings all day in Birmingham, then drove to Montgomery late for meetings the next day; I was still up at about 2 AM when the first reports of the levees breaking came in. Like millions of Americans, I followed the story in horror during my travels that week, returning to Miami at midnight Thursday.

05 September 02
MIAMI, FL - Friday was a typical day in the office after having been gone for a couple weeks, which means that it was chaotic. Adding to the chaos was a call from a developer in Baton Rouge. At the time, I was both the principal of the New Urban Guild, and also a principal (with several others) in a planning firm called PlaceMakers. The developer wanted to know if PlaceMakers could plan a large expansion to the city; he said he was lining up a billion dollars for the emergency project in response to the flood of people and businesses coming up the river from New Orleans.

I knew the project was more than we could do, so I dropped the other stuff I was working on around 2 PM and drove across the causeway from our Miami Beach office to the Miami offices of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company. DPZ, as many would know, is the most prominent New Urbanist planning firm today, with hundreds of new towns and neighborhoods to their credit. The two principals, partners in business and in life Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, were two of the founders of the movement that began with their design for Seaside, Florida in 1980.

Andrés was in, and we met for the rest of the afternoon on strategy for doing the project. Exhausted, I returned to the Beach about dark. My wife and business partner Wanda met me at the office door. She said "I've been on the phone with Michael Barranco; it's urgent. You need to call him tonight." Michael is a colleague and dear friend of mine in Jackson, Mississippi, but I was exhausted and wanted to call him on Monday. Surely he'd be out of the office by this hour.

But Wanda persisted, and so I called. Michael was still there. He said "Steve, we're assembling a Governor's Commission, and we'd like to have you come and speak to them very soon about the New Urbanism..." We talked for a good while longer about the particulars, and about the storm. Michael was still running his office by candlelight, as Jackson had taken a big hit from the storm, too, even though it is well over 100 miles inland.

I realized immediately that the job was too big for me. I'm a decent speaker, but the rebuilding of the entire Gulf Coast deserved the very best, and deserved more than just a speech. I called Andrés back and arranged to come back in the morning to discuss this new development.

05 September 03
MIAMI, FL - I returned the next morning to DPZ's office, and we spent most of the day strategizing on what to do. One of Andrés' early realizations was that the job wasn't just too big for me; it was too big for any one person, if we hoped to really make a difference. So he placed a call to John Norquist, the President of the Congress for the New Urbanism, and put him on notice that we likely would call in the CNU.

We next turned to the planned meeting with the Governor. It wasn't going to be good enough to just go over and say "we're great designers; hire us." We had to have a proposal for a general framework for recovery. So we turned to the housing issue. At that time, reports were still sketchy, but it was obvious that tens of thousands of homes had been lost, if not more... the final numbers, as we know, would climb into the hundreds of thousands because of the flood damage in New Orleans.

Andrés said that "This is a problem of such unprecedented proportion that no single delivery system is up to the task. We must have all hands on deck. We must have a solution that delivers houses that are manufactured, houses that are panelized, and houses that are site-built." Later, modular houses were differentiated from manufactured houses as two types of factory-built houses, and kit houses were added to the mix.

The next thing we realized was that, in areas where the greatest destruction had been by the storm surge, the houses that were lost were generally the oldest and the best. Replacing them with something less in the interest of speed would forever cast a pall over the region, and our grandchildren and their successors would regret our actions for ages. So the architecture had to be at least as good as what was lost; a very high standard.

Finally, we realized that just because the design was great didn't mean that it would be appropriate to the coast. What we rebuild, then, should respond to the local conditions, climate, and culture of the place where it was to be delivered.

I'll add more to this later as time permits...

Stephen A. Mouzon
November 2006