Mr. Lang’s Neighborhood

After Hurricane Katrina ravaged his hometown, architect Drew Lang ’91 returns with a vision.

By Deborah Marquardt

New Orleans has been called a city on a knife’s edge.

Journalists and residents paint a complex picture of a city nearly frozen with inertia at the overwhelming size and scope of its job; of a Louisiana relief program, The Road Home, mired in so much red tape it had processed fewer than 1,000 of nearly 106,000 applications as of early February; of a few neighborhood pockets still without electricity; of spotty rebuilding, and a city population that has stagnated at 230,000, half pre-Katrina levels.

The optimistic believe that Katrina can be a force for positive change—that the city has a chance to reinvent itself.

In a city where hope and vision are in large demand, Drew Lang '91 and Alison Stouse '89 seek to reclaim a neighborhood that was claimed by Katrina. - Photo by Jackson Hill

Yet, people like Allison Stouse ’89, born and raised there, have roots too deep to abandon New Orleans. “I was frozen by the enormity of it all. I was frozen by the sadness of it all,” admits Stouse. “Not a day goes by when the conversation does not turn to how life has changed since the storm. Not a day goes by when I don’t drive through a devastated neighborhood and see another house being gutted, demolished, sold—or worse, just sitting.”

Then there are those who are coming home, if not to live, to help. Drew Lang ’91 is a New York architect now.At one time, he was eager to leave New Orleans, to stretch his wings beyond the bayou. Katrina changed that. Feeling helpless so far away, he inundated Stouse, his good friend since Middlebury, with e-mails, sharing news he learned from television and asking for on-the-ground updates. He wanted to jump in right away and start helping with the region’s recovery, but Stouse had her hands full coping with her own family’s crisis, and she admits that she was overwhelmed by his zeal. (It was common, she says, for those with a strong attachment to New Orleans who weren’t living through the chaos to be the first to focus on rebuilding.)

Back in New York, juggling the needs of a demanding private practice along with those of his family, Lang entered a New Orleans design competition sponsored by an environmental advocacy group. The object in the first stage was to provide a sustainable urban design for a 1.25-acre site in the Lower Ninth Ward, focusing on a green, healthy, multifamily building, with a community center and single-family housing. Lang’s entry, “The Levee,” was one of six finalists. And while his proposal ultimately didn’t win, Lang didn’t waste any time in channeling his energy and acumen into another, grander project. “At first I wanted to identify a civic building” to rehabilitate, he recalls. Instead, he found a neighborhood.

New Orleans has an irresistible allure for architects and urban planners. Virtually no other American city has the inventory of historic buildings, ranging from the 18th-century elegance of the French Quarter to Victorian Uptown and postwar suburbia Lakeview. Pre-Katrina, the city also had 30,000 housing units classified as abandoned or blighted all over town. Katrina’s flooding provided, in essence, a fresh start. That is both the opportunity and the frustration.

A wave of plans in the last 18 months suggested various solutions for starting over, including not repopulating low-lying areas. Citizens talked, planners listened, months passed, only to have most ideas rejected by city administrators. The latest Unified New Orleans Plan awaits an April vote, and the Times-Picayune, New Orleans’ hometown newspaper, says it’s time to stop talking and take action.

Pushing against the inertia are efforts like Lang’s. On a visit to the city not long after the hurricane, Lang drove around with his mother, Jule, a longtime board member of the city’s Preservation Resource Center.

“At first, I didn’t see it,” Jule Lang says of her son’s idea for the Faubourg-St. Roch neighborhood. “But Drew did.” Within walking distance of the French Quarter, the area dates to the early 1800s, and by 1920 it became one of the city’s first racially mixed neighborhoods. Its nine blocks sustained less flood damage than nearby areas, thanks to higher ground. It’s distinguished by a once-vibrant market that had fallen out of use in recent years except by a few fish-mongers. There is a wide grassy median, framed with trees, called “common ground,” and a park, now populated with FEMA trailers.

Lang, joined by his mother and Stouse (who is also an architect), launched an effort to revitalize and repopulate the neighborhood. He purchased a corner lot on which he intends to build a commercial space and four residential units to be sold at cost (no more than $150,000). Design work is under way, and he hopes these first buildings will be ready for habitation by October. The goal is to generate a sustainable model, using technologies introduced in his competition entry, such as passive-thermal-engine systems for heating, cooling, and dehumidifying. His project will reduce carbon emissions by 50 percent and energy consumption by 90 percent.

Safe, healthy, comfortable, affordable, sustainable. He says it can be done.

Stouse and Jule Lang are focused on the common ground, particularly a mosaic walkway, the design of which will be decided by an art competition. It would serve as a catalyst to attract people to the neighborhood.

The project seeks donations, grants, and low-interest loans. Buyers will be required to inhabit properties for five years before selling. Sale proceeds will be returned to the project to fund more efforts. Partners include the Creole Cottage Project, which operates a construction academy for high school students, the New Orleans Craft Guild, and Rebuilding Together, already at work in Faubourg-St. Roch repairing homes for low-income elderly and
disabled homeowners.

The project has caught the eye of Ed Blakely, the recently appointed “recovery czar” for New Orleans. “[Blakely] came into a meeting wanting to identity several model building projects that can begin very soon,” Lang wrote in a recent e-mail. “He also came to the meeting with an interest in finding ways to build sustainably in New Orleans and an interest in promoting new industry based on environmental building projects. So we’re on the same page.”

Lang adds, “He was clear that the legwork is ours to do. He did not explicitly say he would support our project, but his implicit support was clearly felt, and we hope, of course, that once he has control of the funds, he will help push our project along. We’ll see.”

The idea also dovetails with a goal of the Unified New Orleans Plan to encourage residents in certain high-risk areas of the city to return and resettle in more sustainable neighborhood “clusters.” Says Stouse: “People are going to have to make choices about where they want to live. They will gravitate to places that are vibrant, where they see hope.”

Deborah Marquardt is a writer in Norfolk, Virginia.