Despite the city’s strategy of auctioning blighted properties, houses like this remain 10 years after Hurricane Katrina. Vandals have stripped the home’s cypress floors and other architectural artifacts. Debbie Elliott/NPR
“We’ve still got a lot of blight. We’re by no means done,” says Deputy Mayor Andy Kopplin. He says the city of New Orleans is waging an aggressive battle against blight, and has made inroads.
“We’ve either fixed up or demolished somewhere between 13,000 and 15,000 units, as a city,” he says.
A poll by NPR and the Kaiser Family Foundation found that a little more than half of the people in New Orleans agree that progress has been made on dealing with destroyed and abandoned homes and other properties.
via New Orleans Neighborhoods Scrabble For Hope In Abandoned Ruins : NPR.
The café’s interior is built from reclaimed wood. It’s all milled of trees felled by the storm’s winds on Aug. 29, 2005. Instead of adding the trunks and limbs to the giant piles of post-storm roadside rubble, Fitzmorris used to it realize one of her dreams.
via Cafe built of salvaged Katrina wood opens 9 years after the storm, fulfilling lifelong dream | NOLA.com.
“I started collecting Katrina-damaged materials,” he said. “There were miles and miles of materials going to the landfill, and it was breaking my heart, so I tried collecting as much useful stuff as I could out of the piles.”
Some property in town that they owned gradually became their warehouse, where Ronnie stored the reclaimed items.
…
Longleaf pine barge board can be seen on the walls of the breakfast area, and ceiling beams are of cypress from a plantation that once stood on the Mississippi River. Boards on the walls and around the fireplace are reclaimed from other parts of the house; many of the boards retain bits of their original paint. The kitchen island is made of some of those rescued, weathered boards and other found items.
via Bay St. Louis couple make the old something new | Home & Garden | The Sun Herald.
Reclamation Administration: News and Research on Building Material Waste Prevention