Many Houses Built in Areas Katrina Flooded Are Not on Raised Foundations

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 4, 2007; Page A01

NEW ORLEANS — By ones and twos, homeowners here are reinhabiting neighborhoods, even the most devastated ones, and many view their return as a triumph over adversity.

But experts involved in the rebuilding believe that the helter-skelter return of residents to this low-lying metropolis may represent another potential disaster.

After Katrina, teams of planners recommended that broad swaths of vulnerable neighborhoods be abandoned. Yet all areas of the city have at least some residents beginning to rebuild. With billions of dollars in federal relief for homeowners trickling in, more people are expected to follow.

Moreover, while new federal guidelines call for raising houses to reduce the damage of future floods, most returning homeowners do not have to comply or are finding ways around the costly requirement, according to city officials.

“It’s terrifying: We’re doing the same things we have in the past but expecting different results,” said Robert G. Bea, a professor of civil engineering at the University of California at Berkeley and a former New Orleans resident who served as a member of the National Science Foundation panel that studied the city’s levees.

“There are areas where it doesn’t make any sense to rebuild — they got 20 feet of water in Katrina,” said Tom Murphy, a former Pittsburgh mayor who served on an Urban Land Institute panel for post-Katrina planning. “In those places, nature is talking to us, and we ought to be listening. I don’t think we are.”

A map of building permits in Orleans Parish, created by GCR & Associates, a New Orleans firm involved in the rebuilding, shows renovations distributed throughout the city’s low-lying areas. A similar phenomenon is underway in neighboring St. Bernard Parish, which was even more devastated by the storm.

New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin (D) so far has favored allowing evacuees to inhabit their old neighborhoods as they wish.

Mike Centineo, the city’s building chief, said, “Legally and morally, we’re doing the right thing,” but he acknowledged that most returning homeowners are not raising their houses to meet the new flood guidelines. “You wouldn’t want to put people through more than they can endure. It’s a catastrophe that happened. No one wants it to happen again. But they’re just rebuilding as best they can.”

The chairman of the federal Gulf Coast rebuilding office, Donald E. Powell, said recently that “tough decisions” about where to repopulate this half-empty city are necessary.

“The President and I believe planning decisions should not be made in Washington, but rather at the local level,” he said in a statement. “However at some point, there needs to be strong local leadership, and that includes making tough decisions about the city’s size and the safety of her citizens. Federal tax dollars should not be used to rebuild in places that repeatedly flood or are damaged due to Mother Nature — in New Orleans or elsewhere.”

Whatever decisions are to be made, however, none is likely to come soon. And as time rolls on, and as more houses in vulnerable neighborhoods are reinhabited, it will grow more difficult, politically and financially, to lead residents to safer areas.

Ed Blakely, the city’s newly appointed recovery chief, begins work next week. He proposes that, once the Army Corps of Engineers issues reports this spring about which city neighborhoods are riskiest, some returning homeowners be offered the chance to swap their lots for others in less vulnerable locations.

“There is overwhelming evidence that people want to come back to a safer area,” Blakely said. “But right now, no one is giving them that choice. They are only acting out of their own sense that they have to be housed.”

Any drive around Orleans Parish or suburban St. Bernard Parish shows that people are coming back to even the hardest-hit neighborhoods, albeit sparsely, to renovate their flood-damaged homes.

In the Lakeview, New Orleans East and Gentilly areas of Orleans Parish and in most of St. Bernard Parish, neighborhoods are strange and desolate. Some homes and travel trailers are inhabited, but they are surrounded by empty houses and occasional debris piles. Returning residents say they wonder how long their neighborhoods will seem like ghost towns.

Rochelle Krantz, 64, and her husband are repairing their home in Chalmette. On the day before Christmas, their temporary trailer is adorned with a snowman and several Santa Clauses, but most of the surrounding houses are empty, and the post-flood gloom is pervasive.

“When we come out at night to sit, it’s like a cemetery . . . very, very dark and very, very quiet,” Krantz said. “We used to hear kids and cars going by. . . . Now, nothing.”

Sometimes complete strangers, she said, come up to ask: ” ‘You’re coming back?’ And then they say, ‘You’re nuts!’ “

But, she said, the house is paid for.

“We’ll leave it in the good Lord’s hands,” Krantz said.

A few blocks over, Vincent Gangi, 54, a real estate broker, is restoring a large brick house adorned with Greek-revival statues.

“I just don’t think it’s going to happen again — something like Katrina happens only once in a hundred years,” he said. “By that time, I’ll be dead.”

The controversy over how to rebuild the New Orleans region began almost as soon as the waters receded.

Technology is revolutionizing how furniture is made — and what pieces are headed for our living rooms. The look of the future? It’s fluid.

AS piles of sawdust collect on top of a sheet of plywood in a basement workshop, Brendan Sowersby and Will Rollins of the downtown L.A. design firm 100xbetter watch an enormous Shop Sabre 4896 cut and engrave the pieces of their DB chair. The Bauhaus-influenced seat used to take a full day to make by hand. Now their $40,000 machine can cut two chairs in an hour.

“We can be at the computer designing something else or have lunch while our robot works,” says Sowersby, 36. “It’s soothing to watch it and know we’re getting exactly what we want.”

In the world of contemporary furnishings, digital technology is radically transforming not only how pieces are made, but what kind of designs will land in our homes in the years ahead. Just as the first machine lathes of the early 19th century made it possible to carve uniform curves in wood and metal, the latest generation of routers, lasers and water-jet cutters can slice and dice wood, acrylic, even solid steel into delicate filigrees and Rococo curlicues. This new technology — called computer numerical control, or CNC — is bridging the gap between the handmade and the manufactured.

“Technology is having a huge impact on how furniture is made and marketed,” says Brooke Hodge, curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. “And people have become more comfortable with digitally designed items made from industrial materials like plastic and resin in their homes.”

Labor-intensive designs that had been sold as expensive one-offs now can be produced en masse, with more eye-catching decorative detail — and lower prices.

“Each iteration of Tord Boontje’s folk art designs gets less expensive,” Hodge says, “but the real future of this technology is that you could customize furniture like you would a car. Instead of just picking out fabric, you could change the shape of a sofa.”

Technology, Rollins says, is redefining the art of furniture design. “Machines open the door to continue to make things that are intricate and beautiful,” he says, “in a fraction of the time.”

FIRST developed after World War II to fabricate metal components, CNC systems now work in concert with the kind of computer-assisted drawing programs that architects have used for decades. Whereas 20th century Modernists such as Isamu Noguchi and Verner Panton sketched flowing curves and amorphic forms on paper, the current generation of designers draws three-dimensional objects on their laptops.

In the 2005 book “Blobjects & Beyond: The New Fluidity in Design,” authors Steven Skov Holt and Mara Holt Skov propose that these sometimes-goofy forms are the direct result of digital design and manufacturing, leading to “new creative possibilities for the look of even the most ordinary object.”

As the London-based Future Systems proves, a bench need not be a rectangle on legs. The firm’s Drift is a rounded, lacquered wood sculpture, reminiscent of a Nike swoosh or the work of artist Henry Moore.

In the case of Fold by English designer Alex Taylor, a single piece of computer-cut metal can be bent into a lamp and its shade.

Stefan Lawrence, whose Los Angeles showroom Twentieth represents Future Systems and Taylor, believes that these early explorations in digital manufacturing will become collectibles. (The Fold lamp, in fact, was just added to the Museum of Modern Art’s international contemporary design collection.) Lawrence likens the new generation of computer-generated shapes to the emergence of Cubism in the early 20th century.

“Computers are able to design curves and shapes that look like Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid buildings,” Lawrence says. “There really are no limits as to what designers can create and customize now that they have this technology.”

In the not-too-distant future, a computer will be able to carve a Louis XIV chair from a block of plywood, or use a blast of water to cut it out of solid steel. Here’s how: The computer will scan an image — say, a photograph of a chair from an auction catalog, or perhaps a period etching of one — and translate it into a three-dimensional model. With the aid of a human programmer, the computer code will then choreograph machinery to whittle away material into the chair’s final shape.

At the moment, there is just one hitch: No machines can cut the underside of a solid block of material. A process called stereo lithography, however, can build small-scale three-dimensional objects from the ground up out of resin or wax, which can then be used to create molds for manufacturing.

For Jason Miller, the Brooklyn-based designer of I Was Here, a table made of plastic, faux wood planks carved with CNC graffiti, these new technologies have some potential drawbacks.

“Saying that it can equal a wood carver or graffiti artist is dangerous,” he says. “Using technology to replicate an existing craft misses the point.”

Though he will use a computer to execute a piece, Miller does not design online.

“The blobists of recent fame always try to equate their shapes to nature or ergonomics when really they are making the most unnatural shapes possible,” he says. “They are just making easy-to-render digital shapes.”

DESPITE its inherent creative potential, digital design is most often used for inexpensive plastic products made through decades-old molding processes. Similarly, CNC machinery is more frequently employed to speed the production of low-cost items such as IKEA cabinets or the lacy silhouettes that Tord Boontje recently created for Target’s holiday decor.

In Los Angeles, however, a growing number of independent furniture makers are beginning to employ CNC machinery to become miniature factories, producing original designs in quantities that were impossible to achieve in years past.

“It’s all about CNC,” says Venice designer Ilan Dei. For the Ilan Dei Studio’s Namibia collection, he uses a computer-driven router on fine hardwood tables. The results, inspired by a visit to Africa, are tabletops whose sculpted patterns resemble topographical dunes and rippled water.

“It allows a designer so much freedom of expression,” Dei says of the technique. “In the past, if I wanted to do a sculptural, sensual, nature-oriented form, it was next to impossible to reproduce without a master carver.”

For 100xbetter, the technology allows accuracy and, says designer Rollins, “repeatability.” Chairs, shelves and pendant lights are made with interlocking pieces of precision-cut, half-inch plywood sheets that can be shipped flat in a box and assembled without nails or glue. “It’s empowering to be able to make the parts for a lamp and know that it’s going to fit together, no question marks,” he says.

The machine is also capable of imprinting assembly instructions directly into the surface of the furniture components or carving intricate relief work, such as a stand of bamboo engraved into a sheet of plywood.

“That’s something I would never have attempted by hand,” Rollins says.

If Rollins and Sowersby take a form-follows-function approach to computer furniture design, the Highland Park consortium known as MachineHistories follows a more theatrical path. Jason Pilarski, a professor of industrial and environmental design at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and his colleagues Patrick Dachtler, Steven Joyner and Clancy Pearson gained acclaim at the international Milan furniture fair last April by exhibiting an intricate, computer-carved bed made from the countertop material Corian. “CNC technology is really prevalent in manufacturing, but not in furniture design,” Pilarski says. “People have learned how to make a buck, but they haven’t learned the aesthetics of the technology and what the machines can do.”

Joyner learned firsthand when he converted a loft on the floor above MachineHistories’ industrial shop. Using computer programs, he created a living space with a built-in DJ console and a clothing closet concealed behind a wall-sized door used as a screen for a projection TV. The apartment is also filled with experiments and prototypes, including a long, undulating dining table made from laminated sheet rock.

Downstairs in the laboratory, the designers of MachineHistories are shaggy-haired mad scientists, all in their 30s, speaking jargon and using computers to create 3-D collages that superimpose imagery such as flying birds with pixel patterns. On a recent afternoon, the team used a CNC router to gouge one design into Corian, then heated the slabs and bent them around a pipe to create lighting pendants that glowed like an alabaster relief.

The group also has produced elaborately carved mirrors that took two days to design on the computer and an hour for the CNC machine to cut out.

“It would take a year to do that kind of work by hand,” Pearson says, “and you could never get such clean lines and crisp edges.”

PERFECTION is not MachineHistories’ most important product. Oftentimes, the designers will throw a tweak into a CNC program just to see what the machine will do.

“When people talk about crafts, they talk about being able to sense the hand of the artist who makes things,” Pilarski says. “This allows them to see the hand of the machine.”

Jason Miller also uses computer tools to provoke new ways of thinking about digital design. For a piece called Scotch Magic, he laminates computer-cut pieces of frosted glass onto a solid mirror. The finished piece looks as if it has been shattered and taped back together — and serves as a reminder that perfection can lie in imperfection.

“Designers need to think of CNC technology as a craft unto itself,” he says. “It has peculiarities, both good and bad, that are uniquely its own. Ideally these will be exploited on their own merits, resulting in something entirely new and honest.”

Rollins of 100xbetter agrees.

“We didn’t buy a CNC machine to see how much time we could make and money we could save,” he says.

Then why did they buy it?

Says Rollins: “We thought, ‘That’s a crazy tool that will inspire us.’ “

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david.keeps@latimes.com

TAIPEI, Taiwan, Dec. 28 — The sleek, bulbous-nosed new bullet trains here look like they are designed to whisk passengers across wide-open spaces. But on this congested island, they represent the start of a 180-mile-per-hour commuter train system.

After a quarter century of planning and construction, the system is scheduled to open on Jan. 5. It will tie together cities and towns where 94 percent of Taiwan’s population lives, offering an alternative to clogged highways and the air pollution the vehicles on them produce.

For some urban planners and environmentalists, the project is an example of how Asia may be able to control oil imports, curb fast-rising emissions of global-warming gases and bring a higher standard of living to enormous numbers of people in an environmentally sustainable way.

Passengers who travel on a fully loaded train will use only a sixth of the energy they would use if they drove alone in a car and will release only one-ninth as much carbon dioxide, the main gas linked to global warming. Compared with a bus ride, the figures are half the energy and a quarter of the carbon dioxide, train system officials said.

But the system’s enormous cost — $15 billion, or $650 for every man, woman and child on Taiwan — has made it a subject of dispute. And a series of commercial disputes since the project began in 1980 has produced a remarkable hodgepodge: French and German train drivers who are allowed to speak only English with Taiwanese traffic controllers while operating Japanese bullet trains on tracks originally designed by British and French engineers.

The system has become so complex that the leader of Taiwan’s consumer movement is calling for citizens to boycott it entirely until extensive safety data is released.

“Cherish your life, don’t be a guinea pig,” Cheng Jen-hung, the chairman of the Consumers’ Foundation, said in an interview, repeating his group’s slogan. With 900 passengers on a fully loaded train, he warned, “if there is an accident, there will be very heavy casualties.”

Arthur Chiang, the vice president for administration at Taiwan High Speed Rail, said the system was completely safe. But he acknowledged that the project had been bedeviled by opposition.

“Pandora’s box has already opened and everything has come out except hope and mutual trust,” he said during a recent test run on one of the new trains from the capital, Taipei, in the north, to the city of Taichung, in west-central Taiwan. “We just wanted to make it simple, but we failed,” he added. “Politics is one of the factors.”

Using overhead electric lines instead of diesel locomotives, the trains will run from Taipei down through western Taiwan to Kaohsiung, the main industrial city in the south. That is a distance of 215 miles, about the same as between New York and Washington.

The system will start with 19 trains in each direction daily and eventually will be able to handle 88 trains daily in each direction.

Planning started in 1980, when Taiwan was still under martial law. The route was preliminarily picked in 1991, as Taiwan was starting on the path to become the vibrant, even tempestuous, democracy that it is today. Every large city and town along the route lobbied to have its own stop and new railway station, and a succession of governments agreed.

Three trains a day will travel from Taipei to Kaohsiung in 90 minutes, with just one stop, in Taichung. But most of the trains will make six intermediate stops, lengthening travel time to two hours and seven minutes.

That is still 38 minutes faster than Amtrak’s Acela Express between New York and Washington, which also has up to six intermediate stops but a lower top speed. But flights between Taipei and Kaohsiung take just 40 minutes.

Enormous stations resembling state-of-the-art airport terminals have been built on the outskirts of each city along the route except Taipei, where the existing main rail station is being used. The new stations cannot be in most downtown areas because of the difficulty in acquiring land for tracks: the high-speed trains travel almost entirely on specially built, 60-foot-tall viaducts to avoid the need to cross roads.

Smaller trains and buses will link the new stations to downtown.

Although many urban planners see systems like this one as positive for the environment, Lee Schipper, the research director at Embarq, an environmental transport research group in Washington, said the system could eventually increase the use of energy, rather than save it, if the ease of using the trains encouraged people to move farther away from work.

The expectation in Taiwan is that the train system will attract a lot of users at first, notwithstanding Mr. Cheng’s call for a boycott; the consumer movement here is not as big or visible as it was even 10 years ago.

A French train driver sporting a magnificent handlebar mustache, who declined to give his name, sent Mr. Chiang’s train hurtling down the tracks on the recent test run. The driver said the trains were actually simpler to operate than those in France. “It’s easier, it’s all automatic,” he said in French. But the requirement that all communications take place in English is a complication, he added. The electronic displays in the cabs of each train are also in English.

The Taiwan High Speed Rail Corporation is training Taiwanese drivers to replace the European drivers and plans to switch the entire system to spoken Chinese and Chinese-language computer displays in about three years, Mr. Chiang said. The consortium had expected to hire experienced Japanese drivers, but the Japanese companies that made the trains were unable to persuade Japan’s rail system operators to transfer any of their drivers to Taiwan.

Whether the train system becomes a commercial success will partly depend on how many people use its somewhat inconveniently located stations, how quickly the land is developed around these stations and how much the tickets cost. The initial price for a one-way, coach ticket from Taipei to Kaohsiung will be $44, or two-thirds the price of a typical airline ticket.

Riding the train is much like a very low-altitude flight, and very quiet. Chen Chi-cheng, a 5-year-old invited on the test run, watched with fascination as the rooftops of houses flashed past. “It’s like a plane,” he said breathlessly.

SAN FRANCISCO An urban success story

John King, Chronicle Urban Design Writer

Wednesday, January 3, 2007

In the 15 months since it opened, San Francisco’s Octavia Boulevard has been hailed as a model for other cities. It has been honored at the local and national level, including an award last month from the American Planning Association.

But here’s the real measure of success: The thoroughfare that replaced the elevated Central Freeway feels like it belongs. It’s not perfect, but it keeps cars moving while making the neighborhood around it a better place to be.

That’s exactly what was promised on Sept. 9, 2005, when politicians and community members gathered for a ribbon-cutting ceremony where Octavia Boulevard begins on the north side of Market Street, across from broad ramps leading to and from Highway 101.

The event was the culmination of a long battle to rid Hayes Valley of the Central Freeway, a double-deck structure that opened in 1959. The freeway connected western San Francisco to the center of the city — but it split apart the neighborhood below, creating blight and a magnet for crime.

The fight began in earnest in 1996, when the freeway was closed temporarily to strengthen it against earthquakes. Three years and four competing ballot measures later, San Francisco’s government and the California Department of Transportation agreed to build a ground-level thoroughfare instead.

That campaign is what brought last month’s recognition from the American Planning Association, which gave Octavia Boulevard the group’s first “achievement award for hard-won victories.”

It also cleared the way for the roadway that now exists, a short boulevard that draws on pre-freeway-era traffic engineering.

At the most basic level, the boulevard connects the ramps that touch down at Market Street with Oak and Fell streets a few blocks to the north. Those roads serve as the main east-west link between downtown San Francisco and the neighborhoods around Golden Gate Park.

But the idea is also to make the boulevard an urbane centerpiece to the blocks around it.

Commuters use Octavia’s four central lanes, two in each direction, separated by low shrubs and elm trees. On either side of the commute lanes — buffered by poplar trees and more shrubs — is a “local lane” for neighborhood traffic, one heading north and one heading south.

The final touch, on the northern block: a neighborhood square with picnic tables and a play structure, two small lawns and a paved area reserved for temporary art installations.

Any driver who relies on the boulevard can testify it’s not a panacea. The morning commute often backs onto Oak Street; in the evenings, northbound lanes clog to the extent that impatient drivers often hop onto the local lane.

Part of the problem is unavoidable: American drivers expect throughways to be designed for convenience and speed. Octavia’s openness may invite impatient drivers to accelerate — though that openness will fade as trees mature and housing rises on empty lots created by the freeway demolition.

The confusion also results from decisions at the city level.

For starters, the local lanes are too alluring. They’re wider than what was proposed by planners Allan Jacobs and Elizabeth Macdonald, who designed the boulevard in collaboration with city staff led by the Department of Public Works; they also lack any sort of rough texture or wide bumps that would send a tactile signal to slow down. It’s a change worth making as soon as budget allows.

Another problem is unavoidable: the location. This is a short boulevard that starts at San Francisco’s central artery, Market Street. There are bans on making turns from Market onto the freeway on-ramp and from the boulevard onto Market, but logic dictates otherwise. No wonder there’s confusion and frayed tempers.

But congestion doesn’t mean the system is a failure. It means the boulevard is filling a need; a six-month study by the city’s Department of Parking and Traffic found it attracts 45,000 vehicles on a typical weekday. And for whatever reason, slow-moving traffic is more irritating when you’re on a city street than when you’re on a freeway.

A better way to gauge the boulevard’s success involves the condition of the landscaping and public spaces. In other words, are they as enticing after real-life wear as they were on opening day?

The heartening answer is yes. Shrubs are filling in. Trees are spreading out. It’s easy to imagine thick bands of greenery in five years that offer visual screens and a true sense of place.

The small park has blossomed as well. You’ll see people with dogs and people with cell phones, shoppers passing through and locals settled on a bench with coffee and friends. A street person can be napping on a bench while kids clamber on the play structure, and life goes on.

Even here, though, not everything is idyllic. The patch of green next to the play structure is a natural place for toddlers to let off steam — but some dog owners treat it as a track and bathroom for their pets.

In other words, Octavia Boulevard could be better. There’s congestion on the roadway and tension at the park. But in both cases, the problems are a result of popularity. They’re heavily used.

The larger picture is this: Things work. Hayes Valley has a gathering place. The landscape is well-maintained. Traffic continues to flow.

Octavia Boulevard began as a beguiling idea. Today, it’s a promise fulfilled. In a city like San Francisco, that’s progress — the good kind.

E-mail John King at jking@sfchronicle.com.