Miss. cottages slowly moving to permanent sites

The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) is ending the use of traditional-style “Mississippi Cottages” as temporary housing, and is now trying to convert most of the diminutive dwellings into permanent houses, mainly to be owned and occupied by low-income people. Between 400 and 500 of the modular cottage are now sitting in a holding yard (see photo at right) in Long Beach, Miss., waiting to be sold to new owners who will put them on permanent foundations.
The cottages, which range from a one-bedroom unit to a three-bedroom unit of just under 1,000 sq. ft., are being offered to buyers on a sliding scale, from $351 to $13,500, depending on the recipient’s ability to pay, according to MEMA spokesman Jeff Rent. As of late August, nearly 1,700 cottages were still occupied as temporary housing, down from the peak of 2,830 units that sheltered Hurricane Katrina refugees, Rent said.
The program paid a half-dozen modular manufacturers to produce a total of 3,075 Mississippi Cottages, reflecting design ideas from new urbanist architects. About 230 of the cottages, installed only a foot or so above ground-level, without permanent foundations, were rendered uninhabitable by tidal surges during Hurricane Gustav in August 2008, and were not considered worth restoring.
Even those units were not considered failures, however.  “Very few of them had wind damage,” MEMA Executive Director Mike Womack emphasized. If they had been elevated 5 to 12 feet, as the most recent standards require, they would have survived Gustav in good condition, he said.
The federally-funded pilot program, which was aimed at supplying disaster victims with something sturdier, more comfortable, and better-looking than FEMA trailers, “was a great success,” Womack declared. “People who lived in them liked them much more than FEMA trailers, and they were much safer,” being designed to withstand 150mph winds.
Whether FEMA will produce more of these cottages when a future disaster strikes is unknown, but Womack says it would be possible to build a large number of them on three or four weeks’ notice, since six manufacturers have learned how to produce them at an acceptable quality level.
Seven hundred of the cottages have been taken out of service because the families that occupied them have since rebuilt their own homes. So far, only 36 cottages have been sold to low-income people and converted to permanent housing. Rent acknowledged that the process “is moving slowly at this point,” MEMA tries to encourage the shift to permanent occupancy by paying for the foundations and installation, using community development block grant funds.

Local opposition
“The biggest hurdle in making use of the cottages in existing neighborhoods and in clusters near existing neighborhoods has been NIMBY pressure on local governments,” said Ben Brown of PlaceMakers. Some nearby residents have argued that the little cottages, despite their pretty design, would devalue their own properties. In some instances, townspeople have resisted because they didn’t like what they believed would be the class or behavior (or race) of the occupants.
Gerald Blessey, Gulf Coast housing director for the Mississippi Development Authority, said that despite not-in-my-back-yard reactions, “we got virtually all the jurisdictions to change” the local standards and regulations that had stood in the way of permanent placement. He noted, “We’re trying to concentrate them in older neighborhoods” south of Interstate 10, where the aim is “to get some synergy” with the Authority’s Small Rental Assistance Program.
Cottages not purchased by low-income people will be offered to nonprofit groups like Habitat for Humanity, Blessey said. About 600 are in the process of going that route, he said. Some may end up being rented out. The conversions should be completed in six to nine months, he said. “It’s taking longer than we expected, but it’s moving fairly well.”