Brad Pitt’s housing dream for Hurricane Katrina survivors turned into nightmare

The discussion on theconversation is really good. Adding comments here might well be superfluous. I went browsing, and a lot of things said there made sense. "good intentions" aren't enough when it comes to human habitation, and a lot of design concerns were broken, ignored, or misunderstood in a context of expediency, with a long tail.

It's sad, because this may prevent better re-runs "next time" and by golly there will be more "next time"s a-plenty. I think it's important people try, but they have to try better: This one, it didn't work.

The state run re-homing projects in Australia for the floods here, have been a shitshow: too little, badly sited, really badly handled. In some places (Lismore) they're using demountables and "little homes" which meet spec (in most ways) because we have a huge industry of fly-in fly-out mining work and consequently have a big industry which understands how to make temporary-longlife shelter. The problems are mostly organisational. (not involved, and probably could be corrected on this)

In other places (Goodna) the residents are very unhappy. Traditionally ignored, now feeling really badly ignored, facing buybacks in a market for housing which has gone crazy, to live there they had to be cash-poor, and now, even with support are going to struggle to find "good" homes.

We built quarantine camps (unfortunately not close to these flood zones) which could re-house hundreds, if not thousand(s) of the affected families, but at huge disruption.

We emptied them out of caravan parks, to free up caravans for pre-booked holiday makers, to get the revenue from holidays into the (badly battered) local economy. De-housing locals, to get .. richer holiday maker money. Its bizarre.

They spent $27M to build 209 houses. That’s $245k/house and odd that their construction costs are so high.

This seems like a charity with a good idea but poor cost efficiency.