Rebuilding in the Aftermath of Disaster
In this episode of Women at WIRC, we’re revisiting a panel discussion from our 2025 Women in Residential Construction Conference ton a topic that remains top of mind across the housing industry: resilience.
You’ll hear from three women—Allysa Taylor, who, at the time, was with DXA Studio, Laura Paul of lowernine.org, and Lisa Copeland of KAA Design Group—who share their firsthand experiences rebuilding communities in the wake of some of the most devastating natural disasters of the past 20 years, from Hurricane Katrina to the Pacific Palisades fires. While each of their stories is unique, they all offer perspectives that deepen the conversation around what it takes to create truly resilient communities.
Listen to the Podcast:
Transcript:
Welcome back to Women at WIRC, where our editors from sister media brands, Pro Builder, Pro Remodeler, and Custom Builder sit down with standout women across home building, remodeling, and design. We'll share their stories, their business insights, and explore how women are reshaping the residential building industry.
Catherine Sweeney: Hello and welcome back to another episode of Women at WIRC. Today we're sharing a recording of one of our live panels that took place during the 2025 Women in Residential Construction Conference. In this panel, you'll hear from three women working in rebuilding and recovery in different cities across the U.S.
While their experiences and stories differ, they all speak to what considerations need to be made in order to create more resilient spaces.
Pauline Hammerbeck: So if you've worked on disaster recovery projects, you know how complex they can be. The women joining me have been leading disaster response recovery, and rebuilding efforts in some of the country's most challenging recovery zones.
And they're here to share what they've learned along the way. So to my left, Laura Paul is Executive director of Lowernine.org, leading long-term recovery efforts in New Orleans, lower ninth Ward following Hurricane Katrina. A resident of the community, she has led the organization since 2011 overseeing programs that have to date fully built or rebuilt 98 homes and completed repairs on over 400 more properties in a neighborhood once rendered 100% uninhabitable. Welcome, Laura.
Allysa is an architect and co-leader of Live Connected, a modular construction company creating rapidly deployable health focused homes, including for survivors of the 2023 Lahaina wildfires in Hawaii. She combines award-winning residential and community design experience with innovative modular solutions to address housing challenges. Welcome Allysa.
And Lisa Copeland is CFO at KAA design, a luxury residential architecture and landscape firm located in Los Angeles, and co-founder of the Palisades Palisades Design Network, a consortium of architects and builders supporting LA fire recovery with an MBA and experience in banking, construction, and development.
She brings financial and operational expertise to resilience planning. Welcome ladies.
I thought just to give everybody a little bit more context, that we could start with each of you briefly sharing your personal story about how you pivoted to a disaster response focus. Tell us how you got involved, where that was, and what your response has been and what you're doing now.
So, do you wanna start?
Laura: Sure.
Pauline: Okay.
Laura: Good morning everybody. So, pivoting to disaster responses for me, not what actually happened. Where are my Canada people at? I now ... live in the south. But, I'm from Montreal. I was born in Ontario, so, right around y'all.
I got fired from a job and wound up taking a super self-indulgent, road trip. I was gonna go across the southern United States. Started in Florida, rented a car, was gonna take it out California way and then drop it off and go home. I only got as far as New Orleans. I started to volunteer. I was gonna volunteer for a couple of days. I wound up volunteering for about 14 months, lived in a tent, in a parking lot, in St. Bernard Parish my first nine months, and I worked and lived on four different relief sites over those 14 months. And the last of those four sites was in the Lower Ninth Ward. It became really clear that we were gonna need a sustained, recovery there.
And what was that gonna look like? We leaned hard into home building. It was what was really required. So that's how I got started.
Pauline: Lisa? Why don't you tell us your story?
Lisa: Oh my God, I love it. I just wanted to say, I am so delighted to be here. This has been an incredible experience.
So the Palisades Design Network was really started— I have to back up a bit because I started a CFO round table. In our architecture community, mostly because I was the only non-architect in our firm, and I felt like there was an experience that I was having in a financial business way that, I was kind of all alone.
And not shoved in a back office, but I wanted to reach out and get to know other firms that were in our community. So I formed the CFO round table of like-minded residential architecture firms that were our competitors. And, the way that the Palisades Design Network came into being is two days after, the fires had started.
Good friends that live behind the Getty Museum, actually evacuated to my mother-in-law's home and then she had to evacuate in Santa Monica Canyon. And then our other friends, on the last bordering line of the evacuation zone, evacuated to our house. So we had eight people, three dogs and a maine coon cat at our home.
And we had just remodeled the year before, so I reached out to my fellow CFOs and I said, look, you know, people are going to be looking for resources, they're gonna be looking for architects, they're gonna be looking for builders. What can we do? And, overnight, we literally set up a website. I am not a website developer.
If you go to the website now and you don't like it, it's because a CFO created [it]; my husband actually does website development and we set up the website overnight and pooled all of our resources and said, 'look, what is the information that someone is going to need to know? How are they gonna file their insurance claims? Who do they file them with? And we created the website overnight. So that's how I got involved.
Pauline: Beautiful. Thank you, Lisa.
Allysa: I got into disaster relief kind of ... I studied it in architecture school. I was very into learning about housing insecurity and how to use architecture to kind of solve that problem.
And then it went away. I didn't do anything about it. In my first 10 years of being an architect, I was working on a project ... we did a lot of luxury residential, mid to high rises in New York ... and I'm working on this project and this contractor's yelling at me about not getting the pet spa specked in time.
And I'm like, I'm seriously using my eight years of school to spec a pet spa?! What am I doing? We were like, can we do architecture that helps people? That actually makes a difference? So we started this company Live Connected. We being me and my bosses at the architecture firm; one of my bosses fathers happens to be a physician.
But, we wanted to make houses that people could actually live in and use and houses that would be designed ... I mean, the wellness talk yesterday was so important, because it needs to just be an intrinsic part of design, like having proper light and air, having proper lighting. That reflects nature. That brings nature in.
And we set out to kind of do this company and this project that would design clean, well healthy, houses with, you know, proper materials. Houses that are properly speced for the environment, that perform well, that can also be affordable. And we got kind of picked up by the disaster relief groups.
We really wanted to prove that a disaster relief home could be all of that and affordable and not a FEMA trailer and not like shoving people into after like the worst day of their life, shoving people into this thing that was like, how do you live in that?
Like you got to make it dignified so people can start healing and be able to get back to their community where they're from and be able to live there comfortably while they're rebuilding.
Pauline: I think one of your colleagues described the FEMA trailers as soul crushing.
Laura: Yes. They were also toxic. They had high...
Allysa: ...Formaldehyde.
Laura: People were getting sick living in those temporary housing units that people lived in for years.
Allysa: Mm-hmm.
Laura: Yeah. If you were lucky enough to.
Allysa: Temporary.
Laura: Yeah.
Allysa: Well, that was the other thing. It's like temporary housing doesn't have to be temporary. It can be something that people can comfortably live in, and it doesn't have to be like a shoebox.
Lisa: I mean, like in Los Angeles, temporary housing didn't happen for everyone. There are folks who moved six times now there. There hasn't been any that's been there. They were moved into apartments, if they could, cars, stayed with friends. You know ...it didn't happen.
Pauline: I think what's interesting is sort of the timelines that you all sort of represent. You know, Laura, it's been 20 years since Katrina, Allysa, it's been two years since the Maui fires. What would you tell Lisa and her friends and family back home about what to expect in terms of the recovery process and what that's going to look like?
Maybe something she's not anticipating right now?
Laura: You know, the fifth anniversary of Katrina ... so every five years or so, people pay attention for a day. We just had the 20th anniversary. But [on] the 10th anniversary, our mayor at the time, Mitch Landrieu, publicly announced that recovery was over.
We were done, which was news to me. I would argue he wasn't correct about that, but it's interesting because it is a long haul and it's a longer haul for us. Brett, my colleague here, my right hand. And it's a longer haul in our community in the Lower Ninth Ward, because of the pre-storm demographic, you're talking about a 98.1% black population, the majority of whom are living well below the poverty line.
In a city that relies on the working poor to support it, but doesn't, you know, doesn't show us what's loved. We had one of the highest rates of black homeownership in the nation prior to Katrina. And unfortunately, those folks have not been made whole yet, and I think that, yeah, it's just surprising how low wealth communities, how much longer they take to get back on their feet.
Allysa: I would say, two years out ... when we started building the homes in Lahaina, we were one year away and everything was still so raw and fresh. It was, I also grew up in Maui. I didn't live in Laie, but I grew up in Wailuku, and like spent my childhood like surfing and snorkeling.
And, so just kind of going [back] the first time, I went for the project. [that] was the first time I actually went, and I was just like, whoa. That used to be [garbled], and that used to be the canary, you know. But the most shocking thing was the spirit that still was there, that everyone, you know, people were living everywhere across the island in family homes, in hotels. The hotel I was staying at, the family that moved into the very first house we built, they were staying there.
So we got to talk to them and like everyone fought like tooth and nail to stay, but ... I didn't realize that is what's happening in LA too ... developers come in, they're just like, 'We want this land. You can't afford it, your insurance is not going to build your house back. You can't afford to move back. We're going to take your land.'
And everybody was clawing at everything, but the most surprising thing was how much grit and how much community effort it took. And everyone was willing to just show up and stay there. Like people that were living an hour-drive away would still drive in every morning and come and like walk around and still go to the same businesses that were still open that hadn't burned down and still, you know, like keep the community strong.
Laura: And I, Rico was like that after Katrina. Yeah. Yeah. We went there. And checked that out, because it was similar for us. Like there would be a place like we were looking at was just sort of the average main income is like $6,700. You know? And that's what was happening there too. They had a lot of the same issues we had post-Katrina, people proving title to their homes.
Lisa: Oh my gosh ... in Los Angeles, the Pacific Coast Highway was the access route to get to the Palisades. So folks who wanted to just see if their home was still there or see their possessions. I think it was seven miles from the Pacific Coast Highway all the way onto the 10 freeway.
I know it's starting to sound a little Californian. It took the 10 to the four or five. Anyway, they, they were backed up to try to go in into their home. And then the people that were actually doing the clearing of all the ruins were backed up. But then to make it even more special in Los Angeles, ICE was parked on those same lanes, so people who are risking their lives to go up and to basically clear these lots were actually getting apprehended on their way to work. So it's like the confluence of the socioeconomic, the political environment, and then to make it even more special people that would come in on bikes and steal the last remaining belongings that might be in your home, if you were lucky enough to have your home still standing there.
It just, it's so disheartening to know that we live in a time or in a country to where people will take advantage of the last thread that you might have, and we have that opportunity to be part of the solution, all of us here, in rebuilds, and in standing up.
Pauline: You basically got to work days after the fire started. Tell me about the response that you received. What was that like? And then I'd love to pivot to listen to Laura and see, you know, if your response was similar, if your experience was similar.
Lisa: Yeah. So, it, at the networking, meeting that we had yesterday, one of the questions was, 'what can you do right now? What can you do in the next 30 days?'
So I would invite all of you to reach across the table to whom you might consider a competitor and form your networks now because, when a disaster happens, you want to be ready, you want to be ready with your network. And that's what we had. I'd already formed the CFO round table, right?
We were all able to get together and say, 'What can we do?' So the way that it worked was it gave birth to what became now, the Case Study 2.0 homes, where 50 architecture firms gathered. We all created designs, got them pre permitted. At 10 o'clock today LA time ...right now, the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety is getting together to pre permit and send these plans out.
So you can go to the website, you can pull the plans for the house. You can rebuild in the Palisades today. I'm really excited about this program. I think to your point, everyone deserves a home. Every deserves a well designed home, and it shouldn't have to cost a lot. I'm saying that ... we're a luxury architecture firm. We would never be able to do these homes for free, but we did. And, I'm really proud, you know, I'm really happy.
But create your network.
Laura: Yeah.
Lisa: Definitely. With your builders, with all of us in this room, we're all here, the next disaster, and there will be one there, we'll be ready to go.
Pauline: Laura, what about you? What was your experience when you first ... in the immediate aftermath?
Laura: Gosh, that's so long ago. It was very different. I think, you know, when 80% of the city of New Orleans flooded the Lower Ninth Ward, the issue wasn't a storm, and it wasn't ... so you'll get ... people will get their backs up if you talk about it, like, call it a natural disaster, because what our issue was for anybody who's maybe not familiar were levee breaches.
There were over 50 individual levee breaches across, just across the city of New Orleans. And, in the Lower Ninth Ward, that breach was a 25-foot wall of water. It washed homes off their foundations completely, so there weren't a lot of cases, no standing structures. It was, there was no running water, there was no electricity.
It was illegal to be out after dark. The sites we were living on were, you know, I mean, prior to my experience there, my idea of camping would've been running barefoot through the hallway at the Ritz-Carlton. And, let me tell you, it was a really different experience. You know, I remember specifically an interaction I had and I was telling my colleague about this this morning.
We worked side by side with members of the community doing the disaster relief stuff. And the original site that I worked at, we had a big geodesic dome and it fit about 400 people in it. And you would line up, and you would get a meal and then you would go in and sit together and it was a community thing.
It was really kind of a lovely experience, but I was at the back of the line. We always went to the back of the line, the volunteers with a colleague of mine who, we called Smoke Pit Dave, 'cause Dave worked in the smoke pit, the, the grill area. And Dave is trying to engage in this conversation with this older couple who were in front of us in line waiting to go in and for dinner. And he was, you know, just chatting them up and chatting them up, and they were really recalcitrant, really quiet, and they were kind of looking at the ground, and he was trying to engage them and couldn't. You know, he was like, I hope you like barbecue chicken. Like that's what we're having ...he grilled up some chicken, you know?
And the wife finally looked at him and I was, it was kind of just a weird, odd vibe. And she looked at him and she said, 'Yeah, we like barbecue chicken. Fine. We're not really accustomed to taking charity.' And I remember, I get goosebumps every time I tell this story to this day. I remember at, in that moment, it had not occurred to me until this point to think of it that way and to think of what it would feel like for that, you know? And I was stammering and, you know, didn't know what to do. I was going to hug somebody or do something terrible. I wasn't sure. And Dave looked at her, and goes, 'Well shoot girl, I done cooked up 2,000 pieces of chicken and you don't eat them. I gotta eat that for breakfast.'
I just went in to dinner and sat down and had dinner together. But it was the perfect response. Right? But if I had a takeaway, you know, from a conversation like this, and we're talking about these types of events there, but for the grace of God go any and all of us.
Okay, it's the Palisades, it's the Lower Ninth Ward. It's happening more and more. Apparently we've done some damage to the planet. It's a real thing, you know, and I think everybody needs to kind of hold that in their heart and recognize that, you know, that could be you. That could be the equalizer.
Laura: Yeah.
Lisa: I mean, it's, we were talking about this last night. It's like if we face Mother Nature, she's going to win. It doesn't matter how much damage that we do, she's going to win. She's going to win whether it's a fire, whether it's a hurricane. So, I mean, I just want to put it out there. She's going to win. There'll be another one. And we need to be ready. That's all we can do.
Pauline: Let's talk a little bit about working with local governments. Obviously, you know, it's a very local process. What's your biggest frustration with how that process has gone and have you found any ways to navigate that?
I know that's a pain point for everybody just in the regular building process, let alone, you know, during a disaster. What's that like? Any tips to make it better?
Allysa: I'll go. I think that I mean, we, so our project was, by FEMA and I will give them a lot of credit because they actually got totally, I'm not gonna swear, but you know, the word, did not do good in Katrina and got a bad human response. So, they realized that they had to clean up their act. They actually made an effort with the Maui project to provide houses that were better for people and actually—
Laura: We taught y'all a lot of what not to do.
Alyssa: Thank you.
Laura: You're very welcome. Yeah.
Pauline: Unfortunately Katrina was the eye-opener.
Alyssa: Yeah, very much so. And kind of like the line in the sand it seems like. Well, and just the timing of their response, too, with Katrina. The fact that you're still doing what you're doing 20 years later and the fact that they still can't figure out like FEMA, I mean, as they can't figure out how to actually respond to that.
They did do a decent job, I think of Maui. They, so that being the federal government, I think the local government took that to heart. The County of Maui actually hired a third party company to review permits, not just for our houses, but for individuals that were rebuilding their houses.
They wanted to expedite the permit process. So they hired a company in California to review everyone's drawings. That being said, that was good. But then on the flip side, they didn't offer any support to people who needed a place to live, to people who, needed to find an architect. Like all the resources you're talking about, they didn't offer.
The government, the local government didn't offer any of that. So the community had to come together and figure it out on their own, so it was a, you know, they did what they could. And they didn't do other things.
Pauline: How did you connect with FEMA? Did you approach them? Did they pull you in? What was that like?
Allysa: We actually, so we did all the R&D on this house. We did all the work, all the design work back in like 2019. We kind of worked our butts off to figure out how to solve this problem, and then submitted the house design itself to an RFP for the State of Texas. Thestate really just wanted to gather linnovative housing solutions, for the general ...to kind of analyze, you know, like, oh, these are the options we have for disaster recovery, should the next disaster happen.
This was after Hurricane Harvey. They wanted to really find solutions that they could pack houses in a warehouse and have 50,000 of them ready to be deployable if the next Hurricane comes, which is a great effort. And now, Texas A&M has taken over that study, so they're still ongoing, but I think FEMA kind of took that home.
The state put together a booklet, and I think FEMA kind of took that as like, oh, here's 50 different companies that have solutions. And Texas picked us as the top three. So, FEMA approached us after that and they actually kind of came after us. We exhibited a house at the International Builders' Show two years ago, and FEMA showed up, like the director of FEMA housing was like, 'Hey, we have this RFP coming out. You should like check it out.'
So yeah, I mean, but the point of that is like, if you do the work, if you create something that can actually function, that can be like worth it, it's a no brainer. It's like selling puppies.
Lisa: Yeah. Right.
Pauline: So Laura, you know, you've renovated properties, you've built properties. In terms of the renovations, are there features or qualities about a home that you've seen consistently fail that it's the same thing time and time again that maybe everybody in the audience could think about.
Laura: You know, one of the things that I, you know, encourage people to think about really critically is where you're building, right? We've had some failed experiments. Some, really spendy failed experiments that came about because people didn't take into consideration the environment in which they're working. That's the kind of free rebuild we do.
Well, that's a pre-Katrina house. A brick house, which is kind of rare actually. And one of our staff people standing on the roof with no safety harness in one of the things (but, you know, it stays in this room). It's a good image just for us, because we're so catch as catch can, and we're so ... we're small, we're scrappy, you know, we're working with volunteer labor, you know, donated materials in a lot of cases, trying to bring the cost per square foot down for low wealth families so they can get back home and, you know what we call them legacy residents.
These are pre-Katrina residents of Lower Ninth Ward who are managing to hold onto their property long enough, you know, that we can come and help them. And we, you know, the reason we exist, the recovery program that was put in place, was federally funded, state administered program called Road Home.
And the Road Home program was actually found to be discriminatory in a federal court. And the reason for that was that they spent a lot of time and money and resources assessing damage and estimating cost to repair properties. And then they threw all that data out and went with pre-storm property value instead for settlement.
So if you lived in a low wealth neighborhood, settlements in our neighborhood were 25% of the average. And you can't rebuild a home any more cheaply. Well, we can, [but] we can't do it any more cheaply in our neighborhood than you can across town. But there have been new home developments. There's an, an organization called Make It Right, which is now defunct, which was founded by Brad Pitt, and I don't know if anybody in the room knows that story, but they raised, it spent over $100 million, which is about $98 million more than we've raised and spent 20 years working. And that, you know, that project, has been a dismal failure. Mostly because the architects who designed the homes and the people who built them didn't take into consideration our climate, our issues.
To speak to your question finally, you know, we deal with a lot of termite damage. We deal with a lot of, damage, with water intrusion into homes and black mold after Katrina and it took probably four years for us just to gut every house, and we had to gut every house down to the studs, to remediate all that mold, to throw all the personal effects of families out into the street. So it's been, it has been, slow.
Lisa: Yeah.
Laura: And, you know, again, we are still doing that work. So if, if I had advice for anybody about first response or early response, it's easy. It gets harder as attention shifts, people's attention shifts to other disasters, which we're experiencing more and more.
So, I would say keep, you know, keep your relationships. Keep those networks, like Lisa was mentioning ... [they] are super, super important.
Lisa: Yeah. I mean, these two, seriously, we did not know each other before we got here, and these are the ladies you want next to you when the crap hits the fan. And I mean, having, having them hopefully gives the rest of us hope that we might be able to survive through a disaster. But they're the first number. Put 'em all in your phone right now. They're the people that you wanna call right away when it goes down, and I wish I would've known you.
Laura: You know, I feel like we all know one another to some degree, and you know, those, again, those relationships and those networks and be able to call somebody who's an expert in whatever in the field and say, you know, what can we do about this or that, or what were your experiences?
This has been incredibly helpful to me, too, just to meet all of y'all and have this kind of larger conversation.
Allysa: Yeah, and also just being able to .. like the immediate response, like you acted immediately. Just being able to jump in and be like, okay, what do people need now? Like you, if you know anyone in your network that thinks that way, just grab onto them and like, don't let go.
'cause it's really what you need. Like, I remember the day the fire happened, my sister called me and she's just like, Laina's burning down. And I'm like, oh yeah, whatever. They'll put it out. And she's like, no, it's literally gone. And I was like. Oh crap. Well, okay, I build houses. Let's see what we can do. Yeah, like you gotta ... just the response ... it took us a year to get houses there, but that's what it takes sometimes. But like ... having people that, you know, that are ready to take action and jump in.
Lisa: Yeah, 100%. Yeah. I mean, if you don't know who that person is, make it happen right now.
Pauline: Well, Allysa, tell me ... I love the spot that each of you ... it's a very different angle to disaster recovery, but tell us about what is it about your homes that offers the dignity that you said you're trying to instill in people, survivors, and, you know, living through a very difficult process. What about your homes? What features or design elements help that along?
Allysa: It's, I mean, the talk yesterday on wellness was very poignant because it's really something that you can integrate into all homes, into all design easily. It's having like ... we were very adamant about, going through the process of this design, this front window wall with these kind of corner angle windows; those are custom windows, and we had to make them by Marvin. I actually called Marvin and I was like, 'Hey, we're building 109 disaster homes. Can you make these windows for us really fast? Like you got to make them in two weeks. I don't need a 12-week lead time. And, make 'em cheaper, please.'
And you know, they did, they got 'em, they put it at the front of their production line, sent them to our manufacturers, and it was fine, but we were so pushy about it because we wanted, the light to come in from the top. And like these porches, this is a three-bedroom house. FEMA dictated the size of the houses. They had to be one-, two-, and three-bedroom, 14 feet wide, 35 feet, 55 feet, and 75 feet long. So, we were like, we still want porches. We want people to have porches, because Hawaiian style, Hawaiian culture could be New Orleans, stood out there.
Laura: That was something that designers didn't take into account. And people looked at the original, drawings and they were like, where? Where's my porch? It's an incredibly important part of that culture, for sure.
Allysa: And it sacrificed a little bit of living room space, like who cares, whatever. But that, and like the gable ceilings, our manufacturers wanted to just make the straight boxes, 8 foot by 14 foot, especially since it was an offsite construction, that's a very common box size. Easy for them. They can print them.
But we were like, no, we're keeping our roof, we're keeping the gable ceiling. Because on the interior, you walk in and it's a small house and you've got this family of five people, but it feels large and it feels dignified. It feels welcoming with the cathedral ceiling, we could get ceiling fans that are out of the way, not hitting anyone's heads.
We had air conditioning in there. We refused to use drywall. We used ... and the walls were simple; they were just plywood, but we used maple plywood, naturally treated, not with a sheen or with any kind of weird gross finish on it, but the maple ply pulls in the natural light and reflects it upward onto the tall ceiling.
We were pushy about having three foot wide windows instead of two foot. You know, we like, we had to be really pushy about these tiny, tiny design details, and it was something that would look insignificant to someone who's not a designer. I mean, you're all home builders. It's a thousand small moves that made a huge difference.
And it's something that didn't incur any extra cost. Our windows were $50 more than the smaller windows, you know, but the, the pushiness of the design made a huge difference. Like this family, the little girl on the front porch, she ran and she's like, this is a new home. It's amazing. Like, I have a video if any of you want it.
It's really cute. But like, it's putting in the work on those tiny, tiny design moves made such a big difference from the Brad Pitt houses. Like totally insensitive to the way people live.
Laura: It's just, well they, they went so hard for the Platinum LEED certification. Yeah. They are huge houses that have windows the size of postage stamps.
I get that. You don't wanna let a lot of natural lighting because it's going to heat up the inside of your house, but someone's got to live in that. Yeah. Right. You know? Yeah. And you can't, and not to mention the fact that some of them have had to be demolished or remind, you know, aesthetic choices or choices that give you dignity or, you know, that make the space feel welcoming. Go back a step from even that and just build something that isn't gonna fall apart. That isn't gonna fail.
We're literally in a situation where, well, I've got a client living in a house right now. I'm not a client of ours, but he's in a Make It Right house. And we went over and did an inspection and I felt a little guilty about even having like people walk onto that site, I was afraid for their safety and he has family living in this house and it's falling down around him and there's no rebuilding it. He's got to tear it down. He doesn't like to hear, but it's just not safe.
Pauline: Okay. So you touched ... on porches being part of like the local cultural ethos in both places. That's very interesting. I'd love to talk about that a little bit just on the community level; you know, how do you balance kind of the urgency sometimes that comes with these disasters, with maintaining that community, culture, and ethos.
Laura: I mean the Lower Ninth Ward, you know, because it, it was one of the first areas of the city where freed slaves and freed people of color could own property. People built modest homes. They passed them down from generation to generation within their family. So people have been living in that neighborhood for generations and on this legacy land.
And the, the commitment to that community and the, the temerity that it takes. To return to that community when there are no services. We're a food desert. There's no economic redevelopment. We had seven public schools prior to the storm. We've got two now, and one of them actually just lost its charter.
So if there's very little going on in terms of ... you know, but that, that front porch culture, that sense of community, that knowing your neighbors and being part of a neighborhood and wanting that back, the people that have returned are incredibly tenacious. And incredibly brave, for want of a better word.
It sounds a little patronizing, it's not what I mean, but it's amazing how, how much pride of place if you think about your own neighborhoods and your own communities. It's not always that way. I've not always lived in what I consider to be a neighborhood or not always been close to my neighbors and my community the way that I am now.
Just having been welcomed into that neighborhood. By virtue of what we do, you know, more than anything.
Laura: Yeah. But people who've grown up in these communities and have for generations lived in these spaces, we need to honor that and we need to be able to bring those folks back. But a lot of people are like, well, why rebuild the Lower Ninth Ward?
And I'm like, I'm not sure where you want people to live. You know? More than half of the Lower Ninth Ward is at or above sea level, which is more than you could say for the entire eastern seaboard ... you know? And if it's not a hurricane and levee breaches. And, you know, it's something else, and, again there but for the grace of God, go, any of us in any neighborhood.
Allysa: Well, the same in LA, like fire prone areas. They're like, 'Why do you keep moving back to fire prone areas? It's like, because that's home.
Laura: But there's an emotional argument. There's also a financial argument like, you know, you own property. Like if we don't rebuild those houses for those folks and get them back onto their properties, they're never going to be homeowners again.
They are never going to have the financial security of homeownership ever again. And a lot of what's going on in terms of development in our community is Section Eight Rental housing. You know, that people are building and, and that's, the neighborhood was super clear about not wanting that, not because it was a NIMBY argument about low-wealth people, but because in our community, prior to Katrina, low-wealth people owned property. Right.
And that is something that we've, that we've lost and that we won't ever fully recover, which is a real tragedy.
Lisa: Yeah. I mean, in the Palisades I think it gathered so much attention because it was a place of wealth. Everyone had ocean views. Right now, it's all ocean view. I mean, the entire community's been wiped out. The resiliency story, we were talking about how resilient is not, a word I think that the three of us enjoy, because at least for the Palisades, they were a porch community, believe it or not.
...when, you know, as the song goes, nobody walks in LA ... [but] everyone walks in the Palisades. It was a very, very, community-based living situation where even if you had a 10,000-square-foot home there, you still had a porch and you engaged, with your neighbors. There was a great story that was shared earlier, this week about a cul-de-sac and that had been completely burnt to the ground and all of the neighbors have gathered together and are rebuilding together on that cul-de-sac. and I think that speaks a huge, statement towards community where it's like, I don't want new neighbors. I want the same house that I had. I want it in the same spot that I had with the same people.
Laura: Yeah.
Lisa: That's what I want. That's the common thread, right? Of a rebuild, is that, how do you, how do you bring back and restore what has been taken from you? And it comes back to having one another, you know, that defines, your home.
Thanks for listening to Women at WIRC. This podcast is actually a spinoff of our annual Women in Residential Construction Conference, which we've been hosting since 2016. You can learn more about the conference and see when we'll be in your area by visiting Womensconstructionconference.com. Women at Work is a production of Endeavor Business Media, a division of Endeavor B2B.
Until next time, keep up the good work.
Women at WIRC is produced by Custom Builder, ProBuilder, and ProRemodeler, sharing the stories and insights of women in residential construction (WIRC). Subscribe to the podcast where ever you get your podcasts: