After Hurricane Katrina, actor Brad Pitt formed a non-profit called ‘Make it Right’ with the plan of building new green or ‘eco-friendly’ houses which would be sold to residents at highly discounted prices.
Unfortunately, the houses didn’t hold up long. There were issues with mold, shoddy construction, water leaks and worse. Now, the ‘Make it Right’ organization is nowhere to be found and people are gearing up for lawsuits.
NBC News reports:
Brad Pitt built dozens of homes in New Orleans after Katrina. Now they’re falling apart and residents are suing.
Kamaria Allen had no plans to return to the Lower 9th Ward after losing everything in Hurricane Katrina. But then she saw the new houses.
Billed as flood-safe and futuristic, the Make It Right homes towered over vacant lots in pops of teal, lemon and lavender. Houses like that just didn’t exist in the working-class, mostly black section of New Orleans that Allen’s family had called home for four generations — and definitely not for $130,000.
“I called it my Mardi Gras float,” Allen says of 1826 Reynes Street, the roof deck-topped home that now sits abandoned — mushrooms growing from its split siding, wooden boards propping up its sagging roof. Allen bought the house in 2011 from the Make It Right Foundation, a charity formed by Brad Pitt to help Lower 9th Ward residents return home after the hurricane.
Make It Right’s mission was to build 150 well-designed, green, affordable homes in the Lower 9th Ward, the area hardest hit by Katrina. As of 2016, the group reported spending $26.8 million building 109 homes, fueling the most visible recovery effort in an area still reeling from the storm.
But Allen and 11 other residents who spoke to NBC News, 10 of them on the record, say that many of the Make It Right homes are rotting and dangerous. They complain of mold and collapsing structures, electrical fires and gas leaks. They say the houses were built too quickly, with low-quality materials, and that the designs didn’t take into account New Orleans’ humid, rainy climate.
Watch this video report:
It sounds like they should have concentrated less on the ‘green’ part and more on quality construction.
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