Mississippi Renewal Forum20 years of impact

Rob Studerville: Edited, go to CNU.org/getinvolved/see… get seeing you accredited. There's sort of… the game. And, um, uh… Today, of course, we're going to have a discussion on the Mississippi Renewal Forum, a landmark event of CNU, and certainly. This is a momentous occasion, and it took place 20 years ago, uh, starting this week. We will discuss the impact of the forum on the Mississippi Gulf Coast over the last two decades. In the interest of time, I'm just going to give a brief introduction to the guests. And clockwise, from upper left, we have Andreas Dewani as principal and co-founder of DPZ Co-Design in Miami, and a co-founder of CNU. He led the Mississippi Renewal Forum. Allison Anderson is the founding principal of Unabridged Architecture, based in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. And she is also an author. As I said before, she was on the architecture term team at the, at the forum. Victor Dover is principal and co-founder of Dover Kohl & Partners in South Miami. He led the design team for Ocean Springs, uh, for Ocean Springs, Mississippi, one of 11 cities involved in the forum. Joe Cloyd is a real estate developer and entrepreneur who resides in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. He moved to the coast in 2005, prior to Hurricane Katrina, and worked on the staff of the Governor's Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding, and Renewal, taking part in the forum in that capacity. And Steve Muzon is founder and principal of Muzon Design. He is an author of multiple design books and a senior fellow. Steve's Katrina Cottage 8 won a charter award. He served many roles at the Forum. I'm Rob Studerville, editor of CNU's Public Square. I was at the forum with my writing partner, Phil Langdon, at the time, and we covered it for New Urban News, my publication, and the Professional Journal of New Urbanism at the time. And this was the, uh, the New Urban News that came out immediately thereafter. Um, we also produced a daily publication during the charrette, called The Bulletin. And, uh, I distributed it throughout the, uh, throughout the design charrette to all the teams every day. And, uh, I welcome the panel and the audience to On the Park Bench. Just to give a little bit of history, uh, um, about two of a hundred of us went to Biloxi for the Mississippi Renewal Forum, which started October 11th, 2005. There were something like 120 or 150 urban designers, architects, planners, and engineers participating in the forum, most of whom were CNU members. About 25 local architects joined the team. There were mayors, people from the state of Mississippi, uh, people from FEMA, many others who were there. Plans were created for 11 cities along the coast. Form-based codes were written for 10 cities. Practitioners came from all over the United States, and even some designers were sent by the Prince of Wales, now King Charles, uh, through the Prince's Foundation. Most of the major new urbanist firms sent designers, and the event lasted a week, or a little over a week, I'm not sure. Um, the history is too involved to completely recount here, but Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, he was the governor at the time, invited Dewani in, and he called in help from the entire CNU because it was such a big event that had to be, um, put together. All the teams of CNU members were organized within a few weeks. Uh, the enormous design event was funded by two $1 million grants, one from Jim Barksdale, who was a tech entrepreneur, uh, and the other from the Knight Foundation. The event was organized out of the DPZ office, and a staffer named Catherine Burgess deserves a lot of credit for putting it together. The results were published by Diane Dorney and her Town Paper, and by extensive coverage of New Urban News. Many of the design firms continued to work in, um, for the devastated cities for years afterwards, some returning dozens of times. It was one of the biggest design charrettes in history, although not all of the plans from that forum were realized by a long shot. It did have a significant long-term impact on the coast, and we're going to hear about some of that. I'm going to turn this over to the first of the panelists, Allison Anderson. And when all are done speaking, we'll have, uh, hopefully time for Q&A from the audience, so please use the Q&A function of Zoom, uh, to ask your questions, and we will get to them more or less in the, um, order that they are asked. So… Allison Anderson: Hey, everybody! I'm Allison Anderson. I live and work in Bay St. Louis, and I was here from 1995, so I had been here along the coast. And participating in this charrette was really a highlight of my career. Um, because I'm from Bay St. Louis, I thought it would be interesting to look at Bay St. Louis and the impacts and the recommendations of the charrette team, which was led by the incomparable Bill Dennis. And then talk about how these things had an impact on our community. Um, so I thought I'd go through the recommendations one by one, and just kind of show you what's happened since then. So the first recommendation was to make the waterfront a great public amenity, rebuild piers, that kind of thing. Um, as you can imagine, uh, oops, sorry, finger is working weird. Um, that has happened. We actually built a big marina downtown, and although it doesn't have the immediate connection, um, and the waterfront parks that we imagined, there are connections. The Corps of Engineers put a few roadblocks in our way, but it has become a real benefit for our town, it's an economic boon. There are lots of bars and restaurants, and now hotels are popping up along this… this main drive, along the downtown 100% corner at Beach Boulevard and Main Street. So that really did happen. Number two is to create a network of walkable streets and green space. This was a drawing from the charrette. This was a drawing we presented to the city when we were given the opportunity to design Depot District in downtown… town, district, streetscapes. So, very similar. We went ahead and did a whole slew of projects that rebuilt sidewalks, uh, enhanced infrastructure, and the green space infrastructure, these greenway corridors. Turned a ditch into a duck pond, and created a kind of iconic, um, streetlight that has become really adopted by many of the artists and merchants here. Um, number 3 was to create an incubator business center. This was a drawing that my partner, John Anderson, did during the charrette. This was, uh, for Waveland, not for Bay St. Louis, so that's actually where this was created. The Waveland Business Center was intended to be an incubator for businesses and things like that, to bring them back to the historic, uh, downtown street of Coleman Avenue. It had to be built 6 feet above the street level, so that was kind of a challenge, but we went ahead and did that. Um, it kind of… because of a change in administration, it kind of failed during, um, its incubator period, but it was since then, um, turned over to an art gallery, and it has become an incredible catalyst for downtown Waveland and for Coleman Avenue, the street. The fourth recommendation was to build hidden parking areas to support retail. Again, this was the drawing during the charrette. Um, and what we did, we were given the opportunity to build a, um, a parking structure off the main streets of downtown, sort of tucked away, hidden in an area where the Hancock County Jail had been, uh, previously. So we removed the jail, uh, we reclaimed 85% of the material from that, and we rebuilt this parking garage, which was then added onto when the Longfellows Civic Center was moved out of the floodplain and onto the top of the parking garage. So, this has really become a very active area of downtown. Originally, it was kind of hidden. Now it's much more active, um, and serves the entire downtown area. It's been really well adopted by the community. It's every wedding photographer's favorite place to go to go shoot wedding photos or engagement photos, or that kind of thing. Kids have skate parties there. It's… it's a lot of fun. The fifth recommendation was to rebuild St. Stanislaus College in a compatible, well-researched historic character. Now, here's where we left the plot a little bit. We did do this, I would argue. But we rebuilt it to the 1970s character, which was… which was the original building. Well, which was the existing building, not the original building, which was the existing building. We were, again, somewhat constrained by the Stafford Act. And we only could put back exactly what had been there in the original, in the original, uh, losses from August 28th, 2005. So we fought for many, many years to do something. And we ended up with a very sensitive historic restoration? But it was to the 1970 character, and not the 1800s character. Uh, the interiors did… did have a little bit more life in them. The number 6 recommendation was to enhance Old Town with space for public events and facilities for artists. Um, and so this depot area really became the sort of center of that. So one of the things we were able to create through our office was this quarter-mile-long festival grounds. And it really gets used for all kinds of things, for art and music and parades and activities, um, throughout, throughout this… this big, long green space. Uh, and then, of course, we were recently available to take an old metal building and transform it into a home for the arts of Hancock County. It serves as a kind of anchor at the very end of this border mile long festival grounds. The seventh recommendation was to add density to defray the cost of rebuilding. Again, a sketch from… from the charrette. Um, this… we have been less successful with. All the other of the seven, uh, sort of recommendations. We've been pretty good at following, but this one has been a bit of a struggle, because after people lost, um, their homes, they lost the sort of familiar landmarks of their community. They really have been hesitant to accept additional density. We've done it in certain places, this is a pocket neighborhood in… in… Downtown Bay St. Louis, um, sort of at the fringes near the highway, near the seminary, so we have been able to accommodate that, but in other places, it just has an… in more established neighborhoods, it's been… it's been a challenge. However, the impacts have been pretty substantial. Bay St. Louis, because of its… I would argue, because of its sort of adherence to the plan from the charrette, this was the first city to regain 100% of its population. Admittedly, 10 years after the storm. Um, it also currently has the highest property values along the coast, and you can see the numbers here. So we've really done a lot to build the hard infrastructure, the walking paths, the landscape, the lighting, all of those things to make this a really welcoming, accessible, walkable community. Um, so that's us. If you need to get in touch with us. I'm gonna turn this over to Joe Cloyd, who's going to talk a little bit about Pass Christian and Ocean Springs. Joe Cloyd: Thank you, Allison, that was, uh, that was great. It's, it's awesome to be refreshed, um, from some of these lessons and aspirations that we had 20 years ago. Uh, I was, uh, I was a very young staffer, um, for the Governor's Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding, and Renewal, uh, back in 2005. I was living, uh, in what affectionately became known as the Isle of Debris. At the time, I lost my home, and so I was hanging out there, and so I enjoy being a, uh, more of an observer and less a participant in the Mississippi Renewal Forum, so I'm honored to be among all of y'all today to have a brief conversation about this. My role, I believe, today is to talk about really a specific, uh, implementation that came about as a result of the, of the forum. What you see on the screen here is called The Cottages at 2nd Street. It's in downtown Pass Christian. Uh, a partner and I did, uh, two of these projects, one in Pass Christian, one in Ocean Springs. They were pretty similar. They used the Mississippi cottages and also integrated some panelized site-built cottages of the same architectural variety. Uh, Bruce Tolar, uh, completed our, um, site plan, but, um, as I appreciate it, uh, Andreas did the original sketch of this. Andres, you've done a bunch of these, but, uh, back at the Mississippi Renewal Forum. So this is really evidence that something concrete, in many things concrete, happened as a result of the forum. These are 40 cottages here in downtown Pass Christian. It came about. We opened this in 2011. And, uh, originally, it was… it was done as rental, uh, so it sort of felt like an apartment, uh, from an economic perspective, so we had renters there all long-term. Um, as the market, uh, evolved in Pass Christian, uh, we ended up, uh, creating a condominium plat with these cottages, and ended up, uh, selling them individually to homeowners and a few investors, so it's a real mix of people living there full-time and some short-term rental and long-term rental. So it's really been a… it's really awesome to see how. There's an example of a one-bedroom Mississippi cottage that's integrated into this development. It was 20 Mississippi cottages and 20 that we built on site. Um, like one of the projects that Allison was talking about earlier, they, uh, that we were required to elevate them. It was either 5 or 6 feet, I don't remember off the top of my head. We ended up elevating them 9 or 10 feet, so that parking could be accommodated under them. And it did allow for, uh, heavier density. The entitlements for this project also would have come as a result of the Mississippi Renewal Forum. Uh, this was in the area of downtown Pass Christian that did adopt form-based codes. And the front half of this property was T4+, and the back half was T4L, I believe. Um, and so we work through, uh, work through that with the city planner at the time to come up with the final plat on this, and it's a project we're very proud of. It's, uh… these pictures would have been from, I believe, last year, so that these would… these buildings would have been 14 years old. It's aged, uh, quite nicely, um, in Pass Christian. So, uh, and that town's done a great job, just like Bay St. Louis and Waveland have, just in general recovery as they were, um, you know, near or at the eye of the storm and took the brunt of Hurricane Katrina, unfortunately, 20 years ago. Um, you can go to the next slide, Allison. So, um, moving on from Pass Christian. Um, this is… this project's a little, um, less a direct result, but more about, um, the mindset that shaped a lot of the development, or some of the development community down here. This is a building that I bought with my wife a few years ago. It's a pure mixed-use enterprise, which is honestly fairly rare on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Um, downstairs, through that salmon-colored door, is a really cute boutique. Uh, they do men's dresswear, it's called Mimi Rinke. Upstairs, you have four hotel rooms. And then along the side is office space, and so it's one of the historic bank buildings in downtown Ocean Springs. And I know that promoting mixed use and walkability, um, Green City, parking along the street, um, all of that. Victor came as a result of what your team's efforts were there. Uh, this is one of a couple of hotels that I've developed here in Ocean Springs, but just thought the mixed-use benefit of it was, uh, certainly worth talking about. You can go to the next slide. And so, this is the entry. It's, again, it's a small, uh, small hotel, it's 4 rooms, and I own the building adjacent to it. It's got 2 rooms in it as well. Um, go to the next slide. And so the… we… we tried to do, um, you know, just nice, fresh, calming furniture… furnishings, um, it's been a very productive, busy asset there in downtown. Certainly this week, with Cruisin' the Coast, uh, coming to, uh, to the Mississippi Gulf Coast right now. Um, and here's our, uh, here's our stairwell. So, uh, I guess in synopsis from my perspective, um, the Mississippi Renewal Forum really has had, uh, you know, tremendous, specific, uh, assets that were created as a result of it, but then I really do think that what it did is it opened the eyes of, uh, people that were either in the development community or were hoping to be, like myself, to enable a better, fresher thought to move the Mississippi Gulf Coast, uh, further along than it was before Katrina. And I, um, I thank all of y'all that are on this panel with me for, uh, creating that inspiration in such a difficult time. And I don't remember… Steve, uh, Rob, I don't remember who follows me, so… I'll keep the call back to you. Rob Studerville: I think Steve is gonna be… No, I'm billed now on what Joe started with Ocean Springs. Rob? Um, I think that, uh, sure, you can go… you can go ahead and, and, uh, and start with… start on that, Victor, and then you go to Steve, and then finish with Andreas. Victor Dover: Okay, great. Um, you know, Andres will tell this story about setting all this up, but not long after the storm, he called me up, and the reason was because about a month or two before the storm, we had been studying a little site in Bay St. Louis, and I had had the occasion to drive the whole length of the coast, seeing all the… the communities along the coast in the state of Mississippi, so… just as part of a study tour to do that project. And so he said, well, okay, so, Victor, here's the list of the 11 firms that are going to take one community each, uh… You assign them. So, I knew a little bit about all of them, but I knew the most about Ocean Springs, and very selfishly, I'll tell you, I picked Ocean Springs because I thought Ocean Springs probably had the best prospects for a rapid comeback. And in some ways, I think we were… we were correct. Ocean Springs is sitting on the high ground, you know. D'Iberville and these… and these early pioneer explorers who first came to the area picked the high ground on a bluff, relatively speaking, um, on… along the coast, uh, for the location for Ocean Springs. And then other cities which are nearby and around the same bay are lying a lot lower. So we knew that there was going to be a better shot. Urbanism up on the hill, just like the founders did. Andres, I hope you'll tell the story about the helicopter ride over the coast, uh, because I made an ill of an impression. The governor arranged for these Black Hawk Helicopters, the doors off, and I'll never forget riding along the coast and looking out at the devastation, and then looking down at what was in the water under us. I hope you tell the story better than I do. I hope you'll add that on. In my opinion, uh, former Mayor Connie Moran is the most important reason why Ocean Springs made a dramatic comeback after Katrina. We met her at the forum. She ran with the plans, she added to the plans, and she rallied citizens and the public and private investors. She was rallying for trees, she was rallying for historic places, for… for public space, especially along the waterfront, for urbanism, generally. And, uh, Katrina came when she was just a month or so into the job, so this was her whole career as mayor, long term, long-time mayor of Ocean Springs, was implementing rebuilding after the storm. She stuck up for those all-important building-to-street relationships that we always talk about as urbanists, and… and Joe showed some of them. But I think she also will be remembered for standing up to the Mississippi DOT, um, and uh… on occasion, quoting Rick Chellman, describing the DOT's preferred design for a bridge as a lurching spasm of concrete. For now, as we now know it, an LSOC. Uh, thank you, Rick, for thinking up that term. But she was fighting for pedestrian and bike access. And just, you know, a little more about the plan. As Joe mentioned, it was a Green City framework. We, uh, as urbanists would, we re-characterized the map as a city of neighborhoods. Uh, we knew the redevelopment was going to happen slowly over a really long period of time, so there was a big focus on incremental infill in existing neighborhoods. So that ended up meaning there were specific plans, uh, for special places, like the harbor, bridge landing, or Front Beach, or the railroad Historic District, and all along. And then also encouraging mixed uses, which, as Joe pointed out, had not been the norm. But we could see it in evidence, at least to a small degree, on the historic Main Street in Ocean Springs. Um, and then as a follow-up, we were invited back. Dover Kohl & Partners team was invited back in October of, of, uh, that, uh, that, well, we were invited there in October of 2005 to start with, and then we were invited back in, in 2006, to lead a charrette for a more detailed plan for the waterfront, one of those areas that were highlighted right after the storm. And then we came back again in 2008 to design the downtown master plan and that ring while calibrating SmartCode for the city. Um, and we kept thinking about Bienville Boulevard, which is the long, uh, street that… or highway that connects all the communities along the coast, um, as, uh, potential place for transit-ready, mixed-use development. Uh, that's still simmering. And there were a lot of people touching the plan: Torti Gallas, Prince, uh, Rick Hall. I mentioned Rick Chellman, Chad Emerson, my wife and architect Marise Chell. Christian Price, who's a landscape architect in the, on the Gulf Coast, has also been real active in urbanism-minded follow-up projects in the public realm in downtown all these years since. So Front Beach got rebuilt. They, you know, they established a real place for walking and biking parallel to the shore, and they spruced up the historic places like Fort Maurepas, the Walter Anderson Gallery. And then in downtown, they did bounce back relatively quickly, and infill developments like the ones you saw have been appearing. There's a new sizable one. So you can Google this, it's at 1515 Government Street. And that's a street-oriented, mixed-use kind of assembly around a big courtyard, uh, with a food hall and condos upstairs, boutiques and restaurants, and the new OS Hotel next door. Mayor Moran, again, should be credited here. She was at the center of an effort to get a 2011 grant, um, to, uh, to build parking, and that unlocked the potential for the adjacent properties and the hotel, and the larger neighborhood. I think I was an enormous three-story mural along one side of that courtyard. This is all just opened in May or June of this year. But that… that money, that grant that she got, was not from post-Katrina rebuilding funds. It was from post-BP oil spill funds, uh, compensation funds stemming from the BP oil spill, and that was used to unlock the potential that the Katrina Plan brought out. Um… Two last things. The earliest plans, uh, included Marise's idea of using Katrina cottages to assemble cottage court, pocket, neighborhood, neighborhood infill along Government Street. And one of those was spectacularly implemented by Bruce Tolar and John Anderson. It's called Cottage Square. Google that. It's been influential all over the country. Um, and so I'll stop and wait to hear how Andres builds on that. But, uh, Steve is going to go next. Steve Muzon: Yeah, um, prior to the charrette, I actually had a number of roles. I'll briefly mention a few of those, but my main role post-charrette was working with the Katrina Cottages to try to get, uh, try to move those in a good direction. Um, and uh… but… the, um… the whole process started with the call from, uh, Michael Baranco, uh, right after, uh, landfall. Uh, and he called Wanda, and said, "You've got to have Steve come in tonight, uh, when he gets back in town," uh, and uh… So I called him, and he said, uh, "Just so you know, we're working by candlelight here in Jackson, Mississippi, uh, because it affected us this far inland, uh, as well." And he said, uh, "We started a governor's commission, we would like to have you come and speak to us about how to rebuild in a new urbanist way." And I said, "Well, that's way too big for me, I'll go to… go over to DPZ and talk to Andres about doing that." Got over there in, uh, over the next, uh, the remainder of the week in. Basically, Andres said, "This is, uh, we don't need to have just one firm doing this. We need to call in all of the major new urbanist firms." And so he picked up the phone and called John Norquist, and, and six weeks later, uh… the, uh, we had almost, uh, 200 professionals in one room. We own the, uh, the Mississippi Renewal Forum. And there were quite a number of the folks that worked there that were involved for a number of years afterwards. And, uh… But before the charrette, one thing that weekend, uh, Andres said, he said, "You know, the… it's now been, I think it was 13 years since, um, since Andrew, uh, hit, uh, Homestead, well, really, all of South Florida." Uh, and he said, "There's… there's, uh, some children that started kindergarten in, uh, in a FEMA trailer that graduated from high school still living in that same FEMA trailer." He said, "We cannot afford to have that happen again," and so we decided we… We didn't have a term yet, but we said, uh, but he said, "These need to be FEMA trailers with dignity," and so that was one of the first kind of, uh, anchors to, sort of, hang on to, if you might say. And very early on, I, uh, I put out a call to the New Urban Guild, uh, to… to design some… Uh, what at that time we hadn't yet named. Uh, actually, you know, I take it back. Andres came up with the name, and I think that, that, uh, he may have done that right before I sent out the email, and it turned out that there were, like, of all the guild members, several did more… more than just one. There were, I think, 37 designs that were done before the forum. Um, and uh… then it wasn't too long after the forum that, uh, ended up putting together a book of those designs with a bunch of resources, uh, it was called "Emergency House Plans," and so it was, uh, all the work that everyone had done pre-charrette that was, uh, that was in that book. Um, but then after the charrette, uh, we had… we had the dream that we could actually get these things on the assembly line and get them manufactured by housing manufacturers, and I was… Uh, for the, uh, for 3 years after that, um, I was speaking at, uh, manufactured housing, uh, events all over the country, in, you know, trying to… to sway them into doing it. And I'll say this, um… I remember one of Gary Justiss's plans from pre-charrette that I turned over to one of the manufacturers. They came back to me and they said, "Isn't this beautiful? It's exactly what you asked for." And it turned out that there was… other than the ground plane line, there was not another line on their drawings that was the same place as they'd been on Gary's drawings. And so that kind of highlighted for me at that point the, um, you know, the real struggle it was going to be. Uh, and I remember in the summer of, uh, of '08, um, I went down to meet with the presidents of one of the corporations, and he said, "Steve, what you're asking us to do isn't just a slightly prettier version of what we're doing already. It really is a whole different type of product, and… And the problem is, is that… the people we have working for us, um… or their culture is the culture of trailer makers, and… He said, "So we don't need just new factory buildings, we need new employees to… to, um, uh, you know, to man that effort." And, um… He said, "Right now, I feel like it's just a bridge too far." And of course, we all know what happened in October of '08 with the, uh, you know, with the meltdown that led to the, uh, to the Great Recession. And so, actually, he was exactly right. He didn't know that was coming. But that would have been a horrible time to be spending many millions of dollars on, uh, on getting a new operation like that going. Now, since that time, there's been a lot of, uh, of things that… that Joe, uh, you know, others have been involved in, and… If anyone, uh, hasn't seen, uh, the original Cottage Square, and then the collaborative effort that Joe, uh, was involved with, uh, immediately adjacent to that, there is some absolutely amazing stuff done there. And, you know, now there's… there's all sorts of talk about mixed-use communities and so forth, pocket neighborhoods, and you kind of go right down the list. But that was the first place that that actually happened. There was actually… as many businesses there as there were, or still are, residences there, and uh… You know, so it's been kind of a springboard for a lot of people to start, uh, kind of building their dreams. And, uh… Anyhow, it's, uh, there's… For a while, it looked like that the Katrina Cottages had just died. But the fact of the matter is, if you look at the… uh, the net effects of what happened, in the way that things have spread, I mean, I could go on for an hour talking about that, but I'll leave it alone, pass it off to Andres. Uh, but it really… there's been a tremendous amount of… of… ripple effects that have done… done a lot of good in the years since then. Andreas Dewani: Yeah. My turn? Well, you guys have certainly jolted a lot of memories. I, uh… I had… I had… I had remembered very few things, uh, that I had prepared, very few remarks, but I now have to add a few more. And starting with Steve's. Uh, and I suppose overall, the most remarkable thing is how easy it was to put this together. Because the new urbanists were on the same page. We actually shared a doctrine, we shared a great deal of technology, and it was an extremely collegial group. I think of the 11 teams that were made… that were assembled, remember, um, of the 11 teams. Um, but I suppose the backstory is this. Once I was sent, uh, Baranco arranged my going to see Governor Haley Barbour. And, uh, I made a very, very small pitch. He was a very busy guy. And it was a very short pitch, and he just said, uh, "Do what you know how to do." That's it. He said, "Do what you know how to do." And so I came back, and I said, "We're going to start with one town, experiment, and then move on to the other… the other 10." And he thought about it for a little while, and he said, "No, we have to do all 11 at the same time for political reasons." And, uh, so, um… we began to call the new urbanists, and it was… it was sequential. It wasn't, um… you know, I didn't call 11 people, I might have called less, and I said, "Call others." And, um, and so 11 teams were assembled very quickly, but bear this in mind, every team was a composite. Okay, it wasn't a Torti Gallas team or a DPZ team, or a… or, uh, you know, a team from the Prince of Wales. Every team was composed of, um, of people from different firms, and it goes through… it was an amazing performance, because it shows you to what extent we had succeeded in achieving a kind of technical expertise equivalent to that of suburbia. You know, suburbia is a very… is a very smoothly functioning machine, and we, at that time, also were a very smoothly functioning machine. So, I guess what I did, I must have done this, I must have called 11 people. And then, um… And then another, uh, I think it was 170, of which about 25 were locals. 170 were put together. And we just assigned randomly. If you can imagine this very, very large hall, which was a casino in a surviving hotel. There was this spine of architects, people that were providing drawing services and architectural services for every team. And then there were ribs of tables at right angles to the spine of architects. And each of those was assigned to a different city. Some of the cities were immediately… This was in Biloxi, so one of the Steph Polizoides was, uh, leading the Biloxi team, but some… somewhere an hour and a half away. And, uh, so there was… imagine this large hall with a spine of architects in the middle, and 170 people working night and day in hybrid teams, and yes, with so much simultaneity that the hum was constant. I'll never forget the sound of 170 people speaking professionally. Same tone of voice, no excitement, etc. Then the mayors came in generally. It was… what we found about these charrettes after Hurricane… it wasn't our first one, we also worked with Andrew. Is that the citizens actually… their lives are too destroyed to come in. And the elected officials, generally the mayors, come in as a sen… because of the duty. Their duty as leaders. So the public interaction was with mayors, not with vast, uh, vast numbers of people. And that was another source of the efficiency. And some of the mayors really took to it. They became Connie Moran, I don't remember the names of the other mayors, but… But each team really trained the mayors. And, uh, now, paradoxically, the one mayor that didn't want to hear about it was the mayor of Biloxi. And he had a… He knew exactly the date that his city would go bankrupt. Exactly the date, almost till the hour, for lack of tax space, and he said, "I can't wait for any of this, I'm just going on with it." And so he did his own, his own restoration of the casinos in Biloxi very, very quickly, and I'll get back to that. The others generally followed the new urbanist pattern. There was not a… of course, not a thorough presentation at the end. It would have been impossible with 11 plans. But most of the teams, or the leaders of the teams, continue to come back. You know, like Victor Dover, Robert Orr, others continue to come back over and over again. Robert Orr told me that he came back 40 times, which is extraordinary. Most of it unpaid. So that was the ethos. One small anecdote, as you know, we've had a critic, a very, a very cunning, an intelligent critic called Michael Sorkin, who has always written very… very negatively on the new urbanism. And, uh, very intelligent fellow. And he showed up. He came down from New York, and he says, "I really understand you guys now." He just showed up, I remember speaking to him, he was there one afternoon, and he couldn't believe what it was like to witness that, um… And I was thinking, never in the history of urban planning has so… has anything like this happened. It was probably the high point of urban planning in the history of the world. Can you imagine 11 cities, uh, in, in 8 days? Um, it was amazing how compatible the work was. Most of it was published later. And it was virtually interchangeable, you know, for good or ill. I know our critics say it was too interchangeable. Okay, so that's what it was like. Um, a couple of anecdotes about Steve, and we all remember different things. When it first came in, when this first came in, and Steve was ever-present and ever willing. Um, I said, "Steve, what you're gonna do. He's get in a car and take a tour of all the… all the mobile home factories, you can… you can, uh, you can get to in a week." This is right away, right from the beginning. And Steve went off. And, uh, and became an expert in, you know, a single-point expert on that industry. And when he came back, he came up with, despite he thinks that I did, he came up with the name "Tiny House." It was you, Steve. And I said, "Steve, that will never work. It's too cute, it'll never catch on." Okay, and that was your… that was your creation against my… my better sense, which I think was pretty funny. Because it's one of the… of course, it's now entered the… the English language. Uh, when we showed up at the… at the charrette, it was extraordinary. Um, it was exhilarating. We had that helicopter ride in which we would actually see that the waves had come in, had come in deep into the site, and as it receded, it had scraped into the ocean all the debris in cars. And we can see from the elephant… what we could see from the… from the helicopter is that the debris had actually been cleared by the kind of wave that came in and brought it out. You could see the cars, all in the ocean. You can see the pieces of houses in the ocean. And that was interesting, because most of the problems I've had in hurricanes we've worked in later is that you have to clear the debris for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks. Just the sheer debris that has to go, including the branches. So that was an interesting phenomena to see that. Um, the other, uh, the other thing now, there were a couple of things that… that I certainly would have done differently. Um, we made technical presentations. Uh, Haley Barbour, a very capable politician, would always make… and others, uh, would always make therapeutic presentations. We were technicians, and they were therapists. And what I didn't… I now realize that our technical work was too early. The people that came in and seemed to be dressed and viable, you know, functioning, they were actually in shock. In retrospect, I realized they were in shock. It was hard for us to tell. But what they needed to hear was reassurance. And yet, at that point, we exhausted all our fees in the technical work. What I would do differently… and then another thing that happened, since everyone's life was more or less destroyed, including the mayor's, I mean, the mayors that came in did not have houses. Had no place to live. It was a total shock. What I realized that I would do differently, I would come in with that early charrette that was therapeutic, basically listening. And then when we find out who actually would be the next generation of mayor. Okay, listen to this. The next generation of mayor. Very few mayors held on for the implementation. Connie Moran is spectacular, the mayor in Biloxi, another one. I think we have to wait to see who's really around for the implementation, almost to the next election cycle. You know, we still… we still have the information, we've still done our work, but the people who are going to rebuild it and take care of it are not present. And so I would… I would reserve the fee for a much later technical charrette. Okay, and I've since confirmed that several times. It's too early. The people who… the people who attended were actually, with 2 or 3 exceptions, not the people who were in charge later. And so there was very little transmission of understanding. That's the first thing that I would do differently. The second thing that I would do differently is that most of the people I met were professionals. For example, I remember one of the cities, the mayor was a gas station owner. And which is typical of an American mayor, you know, a good American mayor is a solid citizen. That doesn't mean they know how to handle a crisis, that doesn't mean they know how to handle Washington. But the mayor of Biloxi had a retired general on his staff. You know, he basically had a staff officer next to him. And he did everything very, very quickly, because generals, military generals, of course, are not freaked out by crisis. They're trained to that, but everybody who's a flag officer or general officer has been to Washington, so they know the bureaucracy, they know how Washington makes, they can pick up the phone and get the money from George Bush to do it. So one of the things that I've always recommended is have, you know, all the coastal communities, and there's hundreds of retired flag officers and generals, retired all over the South. You know, put one on contract and have them ready to join, actually, the crisis team right after a crisis of this type. Just have them on standby, and you're gonna get… and I know this because the other two… we also work in New Orleans, in Louisiana later. And twice we work with generals, twice. After that, and it was very, very efficient. They knew exactly what to do, and the project simply got done. So that's one recommendation. Staff up with a general officer in retirement, a civilian. The other recommendation I have, which I… we should have… we should have told from Andrew, is this. Even when there's money from either insurance or grants to rebuild, it is very difficult to persuade people to rebuild in place. Okay, there's two reasons. Number one is the crews, the work crews, aren't there. They're just not there. Okay, the work crews have also been wiped out. And whoever, uh, whatever work crew is available, they're busy with the wealthy people, rebuilding the wealthy houses, the expensive houses. And most normal folk do not have the work crews to rebuild their houses. So what they did is they move north of I-10, which is the highway. This is exactly what happened after Andrew. After Andrew, we, you know, Liz did the South Dade Charrette, I did one Test City. And what happened is the population of South Dade moved to West Fort Lauderdale. Amazing, amazing. But you understand why that happens. The houses are available there, they're built already, they're built by volume builders, and they need to go there. So I would suggest that whenever we work in a… situation like this again, that we… we design… we find out where they're likely receiving areas are. The areas that will take the refugees and have at least a portion of our team designing the places where they're likely to move, so they don't move into suburban sprawl. You see, we still work reviving the existing cities, although my opinion, only the wealthiest, the wealthiest and most valuable lots will be rebuilt properly and quickly. And then design the receiving areas and pre-permit it. And that's what happened north of I-10. Of course, we, you know, it wasn't our… our business, even look what was happening there. But it certainly happened already twice in my experience, so that's… I would add that to the thing. Rob Studerville: Okay, let's get to some questions, if we can, and uh… Thank you all for very fascinating, um… viewpoints, perspectives on the renewal form and what happened afterwards. Um, I want to remind people to ask questions. Use the Q&A function of Zoom to ask questions. Right now, we have just a couple of, um, a couple of technical questions. What is the Stafford Act? Allison. You referred to that in a building that was redone. And, uh, another question was, uh, where do you find information on the cottages, um, the Katrina cottages, or the cottages that were mentioned if you go online? Allison, you want to start? Allison Anderson: Sure. So the Stafford Act is the sort of definition of how… Sorry, go ahead. Public monies can be used to rebuild communities after a disaster. Um, it is the act under which FEMA sort of operates all of their public assistance, their hazard mitigation grants, those kinds of things. And so the Stafford Act requires them, uh, to pay for the restoration of a building, but only to the day before… literally, this is in the act, the day before… the condition the day before the event. Um, the only… the only thing that, uh, actually could improve the… the potential condition of that is if the building was not to code prior to the event. But it has to have been occupied, it has to have been vital and functioning, and then, um, the Stafford Act sort of defined… like, you can't have one square foot more of window than it had before. You can't have one square foot of ground space, um, afterwards than you did before, so it kind of is a definition that requires that the U.S. Government, the federal government, to put back what was lost. Rob Studerville: In terms of finding information in the Katrina cottages, you… there are some good information on the CNU website. You can go to Public Square and look up Katrina. And, uh, there are some, uh, including an article, a Great Ideas article on building, uh, emergency cottages that gave the history of Katrina Cottages, but Steve, you might have some other information on cottages and, uh, you know, the projects that were done. The publication. Steve Muzon: Yes, as a matter of fact, the, uh… the, uh, the work that began with Bruce Tolar at Cottage Square, and then with the work that Joe did adjacent to that, I actually was there, uh, just fairly recently in, and photo-cataloged every single building there, and I need to get that. And that includes… because a lot of the, uh, the very notable cottages from the very beginning are there. In other words, one thing that Bruce had done is made a real concerted effort to get all of those cottages actually to the… to Cottage Square, and uh… I will… I will do my best, one, to help me with this once I get back from Germany. Um, but, uh, I will get that catalog of images up online somewhere, send the info to Rob, and then, uh, so that will make it an easier to get ahold of thing. Actually, Rob, if you wanted to have a… a link to it, or whatever, that'd be great. But anyhow, I will… I will make that available, because there's… there's some really great stories, uh, there that everyone needs to be able to get to easily. Joe Cloyd: I think it's 20, 2400. But there were something like 4,000 Mississippi renewal cottages built, and we were… 2400, not 4,000, but they were distributed to many different locations, and some of them were moved. I mean, they've been… they're… you can find them all across the country now. Andreas Dewani: But you know what happened? HUD… did… HUD was the… the funding was not allowed to fund permanent housing. So the condition of their installation was that they be removed. And so they're resold to a lot of people, even though they were in use. That's why. But HUD has changed that rule. They can now… they can now help out with permanent housing. Joe Cloyd: Okay. So a, um… But yeah, that's true. Um, you know, the sites that I was a part of were all built on permanent foundations. I think the… the main program was the Mississippi Alternative Housing Pilot Project that… where people got Mississippi cottages placed on their own lots. Those were set in temporary fashion. Um, they did a couple of other, um, you know, cottage development programs, and they did allow you to set them permanently. Uh, they required it for us, which we were grateful they did. Um, I have a website, and it's a little stale, cottagespasschristian.com would be one if anybody wants to take a peek at. It does have some information on the two cottage communities that I built in Ocean Springs and one in Pass Christian. Um, so that's one specific to the imagery that, uh, that was displayed earlier. Steve Muzon: One thing that Andres had done very early on, he said, "You know, there's, uh… these people are down there, uh." The kind of the gallows humor was that, uh, "I am a proud slab owner in Pass Christian," or wherever, of whatever the town. Uh, because that's all they had left was a slab. And they were still having to pay mortgage payments on that slab that they couldn't live on. And I went in and did a, did a photo… well, really, it's kind of a… image book, 17 months after the storm, and there were people still living in tents, um, and uh, you know, and all sorts of other makeshift, uh, housing, and… but Andres' idea was, he said, "We have to be able to let people get a foothold on their land again. If they cannot get a foothold on their land, they lose hope." Uh, and so the idea was, uh, you know, he said, "Hey, all these first Katrina cottages. We've used up all of the exterior walls, uh, in such a way, because they're so tiny, that you can't expand." He said, "We need to have a second generation," uh, which is what Katrina Cottage 8 was. It was the first of that next generation that was specifically designed to have some kind of grow zones from which you could sprout a wing or whatever. Could come, uh, eventually. Incrementally, it could become the full house again. Uh, but if you can't… if you can't live in something out of the rain, um, and uh, heated and cooled, on your site, it's like, "What are you gonna do? Just go bankrupt?" Yeah. You know, and so anyhow, that was, uh… uh, that was a big, important thing, uh, of getting to that second generation where you can actually use that as a foothold to start reclaiming your site. Allison Anderson: The other targets… Eric, those are designed that seed cottage during the charrettes, and it was really… it had a great impact on… on that thinking, I think. Steve Muzon: Yeah. Allison Anderson: Yeah, we call it the Kernel Cottage, not Colonel like the officer, but Kernel like a seed of grain, that it… you plant the seed and then it grows from there. Rob Studerville: So, we had a question about, um… uh, you know, the money in Mississippi went to homeowners and governments, the renters were left floating. What can be done to change… what could be done to change that? A future disaster like Katrina? Andreas Dewani: Uh, well, you know, um… this deserves the study of Louisiana and Mississippi. They took two different, uh, two different, uh, tax… well… Mississippi being Republican, they gave the money directly to the owners with some consequences in the uptick of casino work, as I understand it. In Louisiana, actually, it was given to on condition of rebuilding. The thing is that the money was distributed very, very quickly in Mississippi. And it took about three and a half years in Louisiana after that decision was made. Because you have to really check that it's going to be done. And so it's two different models. I don't think they've been properly studied. Rob Studerville: Um, I'd just like to ask a general question, um… Uh, what do you think the effect has been in the Gulf Coast in terms of resilience? If there was another Katrina hitting, would it do better? Would the Mississippi Gulf Coast do better? Andreas Dewani: You know, Steve did a study of surviving houses. Right, do you remember, Steve? That was your specialty. You went out and saw the suburban houses, two kinds of houses survived. Very… houses of very early construction. There was solid masonry painted with lime… with lime paint. They didn't even, uh… didn't even, uh, mildew, right? Steve Muzon: Well, and it turned out that the two, uh, the two models that are used in that publication. And those survived as well. So… Uh, they were sitting side by side, um… And was it in Waveland, I believe? But, you know. Andreas Dewani: Mm-hmm. Steve Muzon: Yes, but right now, the… right now, it's the Florida Building Code is national. So basically, anything you build, and you follow the codes of elevation, we'll, in my opinion, is that they will survive any hurricane. Andreas Dewani: You did it. Allison Anderson: Yeah. I would disagree. We had a few failures ourselves that had been built to that standard with the continuity load path and everything else. Andreas Dewani: Okay, well, those need to… those need to be studied, though. I've answered that question. Allison Anderson: Yeah. I would answer that question, Rob, that our infrastructure is much more, okay, because… resilient than it was in the beginning. You know. They replaced every, every linear foot of linen… you know, infrastructure for a quarter mile inland for the whole hundred miles of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. So we know that that is better prepared for the next disaster. I would argue that the second thing that's happened was something that was happening in the middle of the charrettes. And that was the FEMA… the firm floodplain maps have really changed, and Mississippi adopted the higher standards recommended by FEMA, while Alabama and Louisiana on either side of us did not. And so, our… our, you know, required base flood elevation for building is much higher here than it is in our neighboring states, and so that does help us prepare for sea level rise, for those kinds of things. So, in those two aspects, I think we are doing… I think we are better prepared. Andreas Dewani: Well, we did a project in Texas with Steve. In Galveston, that, uh… that is elevated, and one of the things that we began to address is what does the urbanism look like when houses are on stilts? It's very, very… I think Steve had some successes there. But there… it's, um… that's worth studying, actually, because there's… how many houses built there now in Galveston? A couple hundred, something like that? Steve? Steve Muzon: 400, okay. Andreas Dewani: So if you want to see the aesthetic, a new urbanist community on stilts, that deserves a critical eye. Steve Muzon: Well, we designed it for two things. We designed it for how do you have that interaction between the person at home and the people walking by on the street, uh, if you have to be up that far in the air, is there some intermediate porch level where somebody can sit further down, and we worked out ways of doing that. But there's also a proposal that I've made to the developer there, that, uh, in time, I believe in 100 years, there will be an entire network of streets that are built at… at what should be the street level for the houses that are existing, uh, and then… everything underneath would be, uh, parking and such that would blow out. Andreas Dewani: Now. DPZ has gone in, uh, in recent years, and actually, uh, uh, made proposals for the elevated city, where everything comes up from the beginning, uh, as opposed to, uh, in Beachtown, where I think it may take 100 years to do that. That deserves some study, okay? But there's also another one. Uh, Daytonica built a spectacular dormitory at the University of Miami that, um, I very, very, very popular, and I presented it as a prototype for a building on piloti that still has a fantastic urban, uh, uh, frontage. And that was published in Common Edge. Okay, if you look it up in Common Edge, it's a very… it's… it has photographs, it has plans. And you can see an idea. Okay, of course it's an architectonic, a hyper-modernist building, which they're very good at it, but the parti is exceptionally good. What to do when stilts are very high. Okay, and this is a very large, hundreds. It's a… it's a whole college dormitory. Have a look at that. Common Edge. I hope you all subscribe to Common Edge, it's pretty good. Allison Anderson: It's a magazine that also has a grassroot that survives, you know, that is sort of planned for hurricane wind resistance, so that's a great example. Andreas Dewani: Yeah. Well, the problem is that the urbanism's second-rate. The street frontage is horrible. But at Daytonica managed to do it. It's very good. Steve Muzon: Well, and actually… And actually, Common Edge the site grew out of the aftermath of Katrina. I don't know if you realize that, but uh… Yeah, that was where… that was the seed that was planted. He was the editor of, what, uh, Architecture Magazine? Started it? Andreas Dewani: Metropolis, Martin Peterson. Steve Muzon: Get it or Metropolis, yeah, it's a good one. Rob Studerville: Okay. I'm gonna ask one last question, maybe pose it to Victor and Joe, but, um, this is a good one that came from an audience member: "What can planners and designers in coastal communities proactively do to mitigate and reduce human suffering post-disaster before the next major hurricane? Are there certain policies you would recommend advocating for pre-approved plans? Streamline processes, etc." Victor Dover: I went yes to both of those. Um… For sure, and I think, listening to the tales, uh, that Steve and Andres shared, Allison. I was reminded that, uh, Katrina in Mississippi was responded to by the Hurricane Andrew generation. We were, like, taught about how hard this can be, and how much can go on by… the recovery in South Dade after Hurricane Andrew, and so that was… I think on all of our minds while we were working in Mississippi in 2005. It was also on the minds of a lot of the same people after Hurricane Michael, and including the storms, you know, effects in Puerto Rico, but also the… and Maria and the… the… work of Hurricane Michael on Panama City. I'm sure that a lot of technique and thinking and approach, including pre-approved plans and getting ahead of the next disaster, these were coming up to the surface in the Mississippi Rebuilding charrette, the… the mother of all charrettes, as I think you called it on our first conversation, Andres. And for me, that was really vivid, because, as you know, Katrina went, um, over South Florida first as a weaker storm, knocked out the power for a little while, and then strengthened in the Gulf, and hit Mississippi and New Orleans. Um, but not long after, we got home from the Mississippi Renewal charrette at the Isle of Capri, Hurricane Wilma came, and so for a couple of us who had South Florida firms who were working on finishing our drawings by the deadline Andres had imposed for Mississippi, we're doing so by candlelight and with generators, because we didn't have power in Miami. So you basically realize that we're all in this together. Everybody who's living with, uh, a constant threat of catastrophe. And so the most important advice I would give is to tell those mayors, managers, planning directors, redevelopment directors, that it is coming. And, you know, Katrina was only the big one because it was… big until Michael was big, and then… more is coming. So you have to assume that they're going to need to plan, and they need to start on the plan before the storm hits. What did we discover? All over the Mississippi and in Panama City as well. That there had been a 50-year disaster slowly unfolding before the storm came and slid everything into focus, because the disinvestment in the old parts of town, the… the sprawl and the strip… element, and so on, uh, were all unfolding very slowly. And had more, kind of, in the end, probably more catastrophic effects, and are doing more, uh, to cause constant… prolonged human suffering than even a storm disaster. Rob Studerville: Okay, um… Did you have any thoughts on that, Joe, as a developer? Uh, what they should do ahead of time? Joe Cloyd: You know, I think having some pre-approval process in place for basic rebuilding, I think, is, is great, just to streamline. Rebuilding permitting process, I think, would be a very practical thing, I think. You know, to the extent that you could actually have whatever architectural vernacular works in a particular area, but a Mississippi cottage pre-approved, uh, via FEMA would really help. I know the economics of that are probably a challenge, depending on the volume of need. But, um, those would be two significant value… two significant things, and then I think the other one is one that Allison was talking about, is just. Allison and Andreas, it's as… the Florida codes are becoming more nationalized. Build better now, so that you're in better shape to be able to weather a future event. And, um, you know, that's something that I've taken to heart, having gone through Katrina living on the beach in Biloxi, uh, at the time. And, uh, you know, I look for high ground. If I can't find high ground, I build up and make sure that it's super strong. And, um, and so I think… I think the decisions that people make pre-disaster are gonna influence that outcome in a significant way. Andreas Dewani: I would like to bring up one thing that Steph Polizoides, who's not here, said. Uh, the second house, the first house that Steve visited, the recent one to the Florida Code, was elevated. The second house was built out of solid masonry with, uh, with lime paint, you know, lime stucco and lime paint on the first floor. And what you do with those houses, and without insulation. Okay? What do you do with those houses, it's just like the old Mackle houses in Florida. After they're flooded, you hose them down. Okay, and they don't mildew. Because they don't have a cavity wall. It's what Steph called. Steph Polizoides called, "houses that can go for a swim," or "buildings that can go for a swim." I think the future actually has to study houses that can go for a swim. I am terrified at insulation, what's happening with the black mold all over Florida. It's the conversation of the year. I've just had my black mold. You know, everybody's allergic, every… I just had my black mold. My black… black mold. Inside the cavity sandwich wall, which is insulation and all this… all this sloshy crap when it gets wet, is the problem. Often, the structures were up, not in the case of New Orleans. Not in the case of Mississippi. But in the case of New Orleans, where the tide just rises, the villain is the sandwich wall. Okay? And that's what Steve discovered, and I think it deserves to be put front and center. The old way, really the old way of building. Steve Muzon: One thing that we have studied, just real quickly, uh, when Michael hit Mexico Beach and destroyed almost everything, there was one house there that was, uh, became known as the Miracle House. And we've met with the… and Seaside has brought him in to speak as well, uh, to the guy that built the house, and he said, "You know, uh, there… it didn't cost that much more. All we did is whatever was required by code in terms of the size of something." He said, "We just upsized everything two notches higher." So… Andreas Dewani: Yeah, but Steve, if it gets wet, you still have to tear off all the sheetrock and hollow out the walls. That's what I'm talking about. It's… the structure can stand. But you saw the black mold. We have to deal with the black mold. Steve Muzon: We're right, no, no, no, I understand that. Yes, those are… those are two problems that are related. You know. Andreas Dewani: Those are two different things, and they… the two houses you studied were different examples. Steve Muzon: Yeah. Andreas Dewani: Yeah. And we need to focus on the other one more. Just to remind you, the Mackle houses, which were Florida's Levittown, with terrazzo… terrazzo slabs, straight block walls, and trusses on top. Hurricane after hurricane after hurricane, they flooded, and they were just hosed down. And they got bought new furniture. Okay, and that's very inexpensive to do. But of course, you have to… you have to meet the environmental, uh, the environmental requirements by other means. Right now, for me, insulation is the villain. Okay? It's the villain of the hurricane. Rob Studerville: Okay, I'm gonna call it now, but this has been a great discussion. I really appreciate it. Allison, Joe, Victor, Andreas, Steve. And everybody who joined in, I appreciate it, and this has been fun. Revisiting this event, uh, which was certainly one of the more interesting, uh, events that I've ever taken part in my life. Uh, so, everybody have a great day. And I'll see you all soon. And also, I'll see you in two weeks, and I'll see you, actually, sooner than that.