FEMA proposes neighborhoods

For the first time, the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) is proposing building emergency shelters in a neighborhood form that could evolve into permanent settlements over the years. Experience with Hurricane Andrew shows that people tend to stay in temporary housing for a long time and children grow up in these units, yet they have the tendency to become rundown and devalued because of the design, Andres Duany said at the Mississippi Renewal Forum. The old FEMA designs are single-use and monotonous in the extreme [see top aerial rendering, below]. The new designs, illustrated by The Architectural Studio of Baton Rouge, use new urban principles to lay units out in a neighborhood form with a village center [see middle image]. Over time, as residents rebuild with permanent housing, it becomes a real neighborhood [bottom image]. The approach has been used for a proposed emergency housing village in Baton Rouge Parish, designed by Jorge Quintero for the Joint Housing Solutions Center. The 41-acre property has a village green with community center, surrounded by small blocks for mobile homes, travel trailers, or other housing. Not only is this design a departure for FEMA historically, it also marks a shift in the agency’s approach from the initial days after Katrina. FEMA hired the architecture firm RTKL to design an emergency housing village near Baton Rouge in early September. When RTKL proposed a new urban neighborhood to be built with modular housing, FEMA did not want to spend the time and went ahead with a more conventional layout, according to Paris Rutherford, director of the firm’s urban design group in Dallas. Another paradigm shift for FEMA is the concept of building smaller, infill developments in multiple locations instead of a few large trailer parks. In September there was talk of some very large emergency housing developments consisting of many thousands of units, but a backlash against that idea has FEMA focusing on sites with 200 or fewer units. In Mississippi, some of the beach communities are quite small and could not absorb large-scale development, says Michel St. Pierre of Bechtel Infrastructure Corp., which is working with FEMA. “It’s a more modest approach, but a more appropriate approach,” he says. There’s a need for 35,000 emergency units in Mississippi, FEMA officials said. The agency is prepared to buy 125,000 trailers for the multistate region affected by Katrina, according to a Knight Ridder news report. u