During the past half-century, New Orleans largely abandoned the raised architectural style that historically kept houses dry. But Katrina is putting an end to the era of slab-on-grade housing.

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

By Bruce Nolan

One weekend in the autumn of 1951, Jerry and Audrey Maumus drove to the northern outskirts of New Orleans where the future was emerging in a former pecan grove on a tract of land called the Seeger Plantation. Newly married, they, and the times, were brimming with hope and confidence.

They were looking for their first home in the new Gentilly Woods subdivision. They toured a few of 31 models, sat with a salesman to discuss price and settled on a little two-bedroom house that dazzled them at 4631 Metropolitan Drive.

It was built on a spacious lot that allowed broad lawns, front and back. The space afforded privacy. For the first time, they escaped the constraining streetscapes of their youth, where for generations narrow houses had been packed on the city's high ground.

More significantly, their house was built on a concrete slab on the ground, as was every one of more than 1,200 homes going up around them in what builder W.H. Crawford boasted was the largest new subdivision in the Southeast.

All of this was radically new.

For generations, New Orleans had battled to make its peace with water, to keep it away when possible, to accommodate it when necessary.

For most of the city's life, residents strung their neighborhoods along the shallow slope of high ground near the Mississippi River . And even there, they raised their houses on piers above mud-slick streets that frequently flooded during heavy rains.

A new vision

But the Maumuses and tens of thousands of families who would soon fill Gentilly Woods, Chalmette, the West Bank and the vast expanse of undeveloped Metairie were in the grip of a fierce new dream.

They were leaving the narrow, raised, wood-frame houses of their youth that New Orleans tradesmen had built for generations. They were embracing a new topography of living driven by interlocking revolutions in economics, municipal drainage, building technology and social psychology.

A post-World War II confidence in modern technology dropped tens of thousands of affordable houses directly on land several feet below sea level.

Builders poured concrete and pushed civilization onto freshly drained land once too wet for building. Developers and taxpayers invested in municipal pumps, canals and levees to keep them dry.

"There was this sense that drainage had finally been conquered, that we could finally live like other people lived in other parts of the United States," said John Klingman, professor of architecture at Tulane University.

In any case, traditional, raised homes like those of the Maumuses' youth were simply no longer being built. As architect Michael O'Brien of Virginia Tech's Myers-Lawson School of Construction explains, economies of scale, standardization of design and assembly-line construction techniques were applied to high-volume home-building.

"In the 1950s and 1960s, slab-at-grade ranch-style construction in the city and along the low-lying Lakefront became the norm," said Richard Campanella, a geographer at Tulane University .

Suburban New Orleans , sunken though it was, broke with its past. It became a region dominated by slab-on-grade homes.

In the ensuing decades, local government, developers and eager home buyers sought to maintain the constantly shifting equilibrium that kept drainage improvements ahead of the spreading, slab-on-grade home-building.

Weather watch

It mostly worked. But there were spectacular, and increasingly frequent, exceptions.

Time would demonstrate that the inauguration of the slab-on-grade era coincided with a relative lull in extreme rainstorms. But three decades after the slab revolution began, intense spring cloudbursts of 10 inches and more in just a few hours, storms thought to be relatively rare, came with dismaying frequency: 1978, 1980, 1989 and 1995.

Streets filled, lawns disappeared, then water rose a few inches or a foot or more into kitchens and dens.

Hundreds, sometimes thousands of homes flooded at a time, almost all of them slab-on-grade homes in new, postwar neighborhoods.

Now another revolution has appeared on the horizon.

After the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, FEMA has proposed new building rules for metropolitan New Orleans. At the Federal Emergency Management Agency's behest, New Orleans, Jefferson and St. Tammany parishes now require that except for historic properties or those on the highest ground, new or substantially rebuilt homes be raised at least 3 feet above grade, and in some neighborhoods, much higher.

Building a house 3 feet above ground, as their grandparents did, would have made no difference at all to tens of thousands of homeowners during Katrina.

Their homes, slab and raised, flooded past the eaves.

Even so, FEMA's world view embraces an old idea made new again: "What they've said is the preferable construction is pier-like construction to allow sheet-flow (flooding) coming through an area," said Mike Hunnicutt, a FEMA spokesman. The new reality, he said, is that in many cases, "building slab-on-grade is not the most economical or logical way to build."

Conversations with builders, architects, planners and federal officials make clear that no one yet has a picture of what the new New Orleans might look like from curbside.

In any case, FEMA's decree appears to mean that, except for houses on the highest ground close to the river or in upland St. Tammany Parish north of Lake Pontchartain, slab-on-grade construction will no longer dominate the area's new housing stock. If so, that would reverse 60 years of building tradition that in some ways began in a potato field on Long Island.

Frontier living

As a girl before World War II, Audrey Maumus and her family occasionally picnicked across Lake Pontchartrain. Driving out of New Orleans, the intersection of Gentilly Boulevard and Franklin Avenue was their landmark. Beyond, development thinned out.

"We knew we were on the outskirts of town," she said.

The home she and her husband would buy a few years later lay beyond that.

For generations, said Campanella, author of "Geographies of New Orleans," New Orleans confined itself along the built-up ridge along the Mississippi River, and to a lesser extent, to a narrow ridge of high ground running east-west across the city: the Metairie/Gentilly Ridge.

For almost two centuries after the establishment of New Orleans in 1718, development did not extend much beyond South Claiborne Avenue and North Rampart Street. Beyond that, the Mississippi's natural levee flattened out into boggy bottomland that collected the city's runoff.

But as geographers like Campanella and Peirce Lewis in "New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape," have noted, engineer Baldwin Wood's novel, massive pumping system rendered a revolution in New Orleans land use.

Beginning about 1915, Wood's pumps not only drained the constricted city better than ever before, but they also drained its "back-of-town" cypress swamps as well.

Campanella calls the achievement "an almost literal watershed event in the city's history" that increased sevenfold the city's available acreage.

Wood's pumps birthed neighborhoods like Broadmoor, Mid-City and the beginnings of Lakeview. Although the famously narrow post-Civil War shotgun and shotgun double provided much of the city's blue-collar housing stock well into the 20th century, families building on these larger lots in newer neighborhoods imported other American styles: Craftsman, raised bungalows and Spanish colonial revivals still visible in Broadmoor and Lakeview today, Klingman said.

Postwar exuberance

Still, Gentilly remained largely undeveloped off its natural ridge; Lakeview did not approach its current density; the West Bank and St. Bernard communities clung to the river; Metairie remained fallow west of Bonnabel Boulevard. Eastern New Orleans, some of it more than 10 feet below sea level, ringed by levees and dry, stood empty.

The Depression and World War II depressed home building. But the end of the war presented an explosive combination of circumstances for a housing renaissance that would involve new types of houses.

Around metropolitan New Orleans, thousands of acres of newly drained vacant land beckoned developers. Government policy helped millions of veterans buy homes secured by low-cost, government-backed mortgages.

And around the country, home builders learned how to produce high-quality housing on a vast scale, looking for inspiration to the potato fields around Hempstead, Long Island, where William Levitt showed them the future.

Like no one before him, Levitt systematized home building.

According to Virginia Tech's O'Brien, who described the process in a 2000 paper with colleagues Ron Wakefield and Yvan Beliveau, Levitt broke down the construction of a house into 26 industrial processes, right down to landscaping. He used just a few floor plans with few variations. His building crews moved from lot to lot, doing one thing at each site -- flooring, window installation, painting -- with ferocious efficiency. He effectively reversed the assembly line: The house stood still, the assembly line moved relentlessly past.

"What American industry learned in cranking out B-17's and Sherman tanks, they started to apply to housing," O'Brien said.

In four years beginning in 1947, Levitt produced 17,447 homes in his landmark Levittown. At its peak, O'Brien said, Levitt's teams finished 25 to 30 homes per day. Home builders around the country took note.

Moreover, a new consumer psychology was taking shape.

The new ranch-style house -- the iconic "Red Rambler" model -- became the consumer ideal, the popular symbol of progress and status.

However beautifully trimmed and painted, the drafty, damp shotguns crowded shoulder to shoulder in old New Orleans held no charm for veterans riveted by the new homes rising in Gentilly Woods, Metairie, Chalmette or Algiers.

A social revolution was under way as well. "The American dream home blew away traditional architecture. It was the day of Ozzie and Harriet, of "Leave It to Beaver," said Columbia University historian Kenneth T. Jackson, author of "Crabgrass Frontier."

These modern homes were more than homes. They were symbols of a whole new leisure lifestyle emerging in the era of postwar prosperity.

Crawford's newspaper advertising and sympathetic news coverage in The Times-Picayune of 1951 extolled the "gardenside" living available in Gentilly Woods, the beauty, spaciousness and crisp promise of life made easier by the latest appliances.

Land office business

The public voted with its feet.

On the weekend Gentilly Woods opened in late June of 1951, Crawford told The Times-Picayune his subdivision was overrun with customers. Traffic clogged the neighborhood, despite the efforts of eight police officers and several off-duty officers. A counter at one parking lot counted 3,300 cars.

Company executives were called in to assist swamped salesmen. Crawford reported selling $3.5 million in homes in five days. In three weeks he reported sales of $7 million.

Jerry and Audrey Maumus were among the buyers. They paid $8,820 for their home on Metropolitan Drive, plus a surcharge for optional wooden floors, she said. In each case, they owned a home before their parents, who were equally swept away by their children's good fortune, she said.

"My mother-in-law would write her sister and fill those letters with news about this beautiful house we were buying. She said, 'And they have a lawn. . .!' "

But in time the homes would show their limitations, chiefly their limited size and, oddly in the earliest days, their lack of central air conditioning or other amenities like porches, high ceilings or big windows to deal with the New Orleans heat. The Maumuses started with an attic fan. They would add central air conditioning later.

The limitations existed because the houses had powerful national appeal across every region, O'Brien said. Especially in the early years, builders learning mass-production techniques tended to export successful models into new climates with little or no adaptation, he said.

"People were not thinking so critically when they took designs from one part of the country and moved them to another.

"In the Northeast, a house might not be too bad. But you put it in Florida and it might not be the best thing. But the history of housing is filled with those kinds of errors," he said.

A sad first

For all its existence, New Orleans has had to protect itself against three kinds of flooding: from the Mississippi River, from hurricane surge from the Gulf of Mexico and from torrential rain threatening to fill its leveed bowl.

After generations of struggle, most recently the city's harrowing close call in 1927, flooding from the river has been controlled by the Army Corps of Engineers.

In 1965, Hurricane Betsy flooded developed areas around the Industrial Canal and in St. Bernard Parish, a first for the modern city. Betsy's damage drove the corps to erect massive hurricane protection works around the region. They failed when pushed by Katrina. An estimated 100,000 homes in the region flooded.

That included Audrey Maumus' home. She still lived on Metropolitan Drive in 2005, four years after the death of her husband, who helped her raise two children in a house they expanded, but kept much longer than they expected. That house took almost 5 feet of water.

But for 53 years before then, the Maumus home never flooded from rain. It stands at the front of their subdivision, just a few blocks off the slight rise of the Gentilly Ridge.

"They told us the ground here was high, and they were right," Maumus said. "Never in all those years did we flood."

But elsewhere around the region during the past three decades, thousands of low-lying slab-on-grade homes were flooded by heavy rains, some repeatedly.

In Jefferson Parish, early postwar governments required developers to install drainage improvements capable of handling only relatively modest two-year storms, or about 4 inches of rain in 24 hours. By 1980, the parish was preparing to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to protect residents against a 10-year storm.

The rigor was driven by repeated disaster and public outcry.

Beginning in 1978, the region, by then largely built-out, was hit by a succession of rainstorms rarely seen earlier.

In the 68 years before then, the area saw 22 storms that dropped more than 5 inches of rain in five hours, according to New Orleans' Sewerage & Water Board. In 21 years after 1978, the number of similar storms was 11, almost twice as often. The modern period also included the epochal rain-of-the-century: 20 overnight inches on May 8-9, 1995, that drowned five people and damaged 56,000 homes in 12 parishes, including 14,600 homes and apartments in Jefferson Parish.

By the 1980s, suburban homes had begun to flood. Some flooded repeatedly. In the face of public demands for rapid, large-scale drainage improvements, drainage officials struggled to comply, but also frequently observed that the task was ultimately impossible because no economically rational drainage system could protect the lowest-lying homes from occasional flooding.

Seeking solutions

By 1998, a study of national flood insurance claims by the National Wildlife Federation found that Jefferson Parish and New Orleans ranked one-two in the nation in terms of flood-damage payouts.

The study said that during 18 years ending in 1995, the insurance program paid $308 million in claims on about 9,200 properties in New Orleans and Jefferson -- many to homes that had flooded repeatedly and had collected several times their total value in flood claims.

After the 1995 flood, FEMA began a small pilot program, experimenting with the idea of raising the most flood-prone homes. In addition, the federal treasury committed more than $555 million to improve drainage in Orleans and Jefferson in the massive Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project. Much of it was in place when local drainage systems were overwhelmed by Katrina.

Last spring, FEMA, which administers the federal flood insurance program, announced that next year it would update for the first time in 23 years its calculations for the height of a one-in-a-100-year rainfall in New Orleans. In the meantime, it offered rebuilding homeowners new elevation advisories that discourage future slab-on-grade construction.

Those suggested rules have been adopted by many communities, including New Orleans and Jefferson. Homeowner compliance is also a condition of receiving state rebuilding assistance through the Road Home program.

But the new rule does not apply to homes whose damage was less than half their value. And thousands of homeowners for whom Katrina was the first and only flood have already elected to declare their homes less than half-damaged. Their goal: to avoid raising a massive slab home 3 or more feet into the air to protect from a rainwater flood never seen in their neighborhood.

That means, most experts believe, that older, pre-Katrina slab homes will continue to define most of postwar New Orleans for years to come, testament to a powerful idea that emerged in Gentilly Woods and was refined, embraced and committed to in five decades thereafter.

"It was powerful because it was economically successful," said O'Brien, of Virginia Tech. "And it represented the future, not the past. And Americans look to the future."

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