The following article appeared in the Inside/Out section of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, October 25th, 2008



With the plumbing work wrapping up thanks to help from lowernine.org, Greta Gladney hopes to be back in her Jourdan Avenue home by the end of the year.
Danny Bourque / The Times-Picayune Archive


NOTE: Greta Gladney's home-repair project was stalled while she waited for a plumber to give her a bid and get to work. Then, one day, help arrived out of the blue.

Back in August, Greta Gladney thought it would be no more than two weeks before the plumber recommended by a friend would give her a contract to sign and then begin working in her Holy Cross home.

But one delay led to another, and weeks turned into months as she waited and prodded. Then she received a phone call that changed everything and super-charged her languishing renovation.

"I got a call from lowernine.org telling me they finally had a licensed plumber available to work on my house," she said. "All I would have to do is pay for materials."

The nonprofit was founded in early 2007 to help residents of the Lower 9th Ward get back into their homes. It began as an all-volunteer initiative but has since branched out into providing skilled, licensed labor for needs like electrical, plumbing and heating and air conditioning installation. Labor is free, and residents buy the necessary materials.

"Sometime, maybe eight or nine months ago, I was talking to a lowernine.org staff member at the St. Claude Farmers Market one Saturday. She was interested in community-supported agriculture, just like I am, but one thing led to another and soon we were talking about my house," Gladney said. "She told me about the resident services program and said I should come by their office and file an application for assistance."

The nonprofit operates out of a house it refurbished on El Dorado Street in Holy Cross, not far from Gladney's Jourdan Avenue home. She found the office, submitted an application and then forgot about it.

"To be honest, I just didn't think about it much after that, because I knew they had a long waiting list of people needing help. So I just moved forward on my own," she said.

Gladney gutted her house, painted the outside, reframed areas of the interior that she wanted to reconfigure and installed new wiring. But the project stalled when she had trouble connecting with her preferred plumber. As it turns out, maybe the delay wasn't so bad after all.

"I was aggravated at the time, but now I am really glad the original plumber kept delaying, or the work would have already been done by the time I got the call," she said. "Cyril knocked it out in just 10 days for a tiny fraction of what I would have spent."

Cyril Mungal of Semper Fi Plumbing -- a former Marine -- was dispatched by lowernine.org to work with Gladney.

"They called on a Wednesday, and by Friday I had met with Cyril and signed a contract," she said. "The very first time we met, he showed me his license and insurance, something I usually have had to ask for from other people over and over."

Mungal started work three days after the contract was signed. In just eight working days, Gladney said, he replaced the cracked cast-iron drain pipe, ran new water lines for the shower and moved the toilet and the sink upstairs.

"Downstairs, he roughed in for the walk-in shower in the rear room and everything in the kitchen," she said. "He even ran the gas line for the stove."

By the end of this week, Gladney expected to have had Mungal's work inspected so that she could move on to the next step of installing the heating and air conditioning system, something else lowernine.org has offered to help with.

"We were supposed to talk it over this week, but I don't expect any hold-ups. Everything has gone so smoothly with them," she said. Gladney said the staff at the nonprofit is still accepting assistance applications from those who lived in the Lower 9th Ward before Katrina, and she has been spreading word to neighbors who need help.

"A lot of folks aren't aware, but they need to be, because it will help them get back home," she said.

Not all work was suspended on Jourdan Avenue while the plumber drama played out. In fact, Gladney's friend and adviser, James Williams, made sure that key framing and carpentry items were complete, so that there would be no delays in closing the walls once all rough-ins are complete.

"When James and I met over there in August, we agreed that the closet and the study off of my bedroom upstairs really needed to be reconfigured," she said. "The framer who had done the work had framed it so that the window let light into the closet rather than the study. James switched things around for me, and he also leveled the floor downstairs in the rear room off the kitchen, the one that sloped because it used to be an outdoor porch."

Gladney said her dream is to be back home by the end of the year. It would be an ambitious timetable, but she said she thinks it's doable. Whatever the outcome, Gladney said recent developments have left her musing over life's ironies.

"I pushed and pushed and pushed to get that original plumber to the house," Gladney said. "Yet it was when I stopped pushing that what I needed fell into my lap. It seems that's the way a lot of things have gone on this project."

For more information or assistance from Lowernine.org, call 504.278.1240 or visit www.lowernine.org.

Stephanie Bruno can be reached at housewatcher@hotmail.com.

lowernine.org volunteers at work, featuring jenga, darren and antoine turner!

a picture is worth...

1.1M Americans volunteer to work on N.O. recovery

Posted: 8/20/07


VIOLET (AP) - More than 1.1 million Americans have volunteered to help the Gulf Coast recover from Hurricane Katrina, President Bush's recovery chief said Monday.

"As the rebuilding effort continues, volunteers will remain a critical source of hope and help in the Gulf, and I encourage more Americans to get involved, because the government cannot bring these communities back alone," Donald Powell said at a ribbon-cutting for the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity's Camp Hope, a shelter providing housing for visiting volunteers.

Data on volunteers was released at the ceremony in the suburban New Orleans community of Violet.

The Corporation for National and Community Service said that in the first year after the storm, more than 550,000 Americans participated in the volunteer effort. The number has continued to rise, hitting 600,000 in the second year, despite less news media coverage of the area, the organization said.

The increase in volunteers the second year after the storm, which hit Aug. 29, 2005, shows the determination to rebuild the region, said David Eisner, CEO of National and Community Service. He, like Powell, expects the trend of volunteering in Katrina-ravaged areas to continue to rise.

"Particularly in New Orleans we should see a dramatic increase," Eisner said. "We're beginning to see housing become available and that will help draw volunteers."

Volunteers will be needed for the better part of the next decade as the recovery continues, said Jim Pate, executive director of the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity.

Powell and Eisner were here for the opening of a volunteer shelter that house up to 500 volunteers at a time. The shelter, in St. Bernard Parish, will house mainly volunteers constructing new houses.•

Katrina anniversary is good time to set the facts straight

Posted by neworleanscitybusiness on August 20th, 2007
By Deon Roberts, Online Editor

By the time the storm’s anniversary rolled around last year, Katrina fatigue was alive and well.

Many in America were sick of hearing about the Gulf Coast’s struggles. They had heard for 12 months about FEMA trailers, destroyed homes and sluggish federal aid.

As Katrina’s second anniversary approaches, it’s a given that there will be a boost in national media coverage. Some Americans will no doubt roll their eyes, groan and grumble as the national media presents stories of hurricane victims who are still without homes.

Some Americans will wonder why they should feel sorry for people who have had two years to rebuild. Katrina’s second anniversary is a good opportunity for America to understand why we haven’t fully recovered.

There’s good reason why St. Bernard Parish, eastern New Orleans and other portions of the metro area are still wastelands of empty, ramshackle houses where floodwaters reached as high as the roof.

The media should remind America that The Road Home is the reason why many Louisiana homes are not rebuilt. The federally funded program was meant to provide hurricane-affected homeowners with rebuilding grants of up to $150,000.

ICF International of Fairfax, Va., is heading up the program for Louisiana. To date, 184,189 people have applied to the program but only 42,340 or 23 percent of applicants have received funding. The point is more homes would be rebuilt if The Road Home would get money in the hands of homeowners quicker.

Streets and public buildings have not been rebuilt because federal recovery dollars are tied up in bureaucracy. This is not the fault of ordinary citizens. Rather, it’s owed to the way the federal Stafford Act controls how recovery funds can be spent.

Communities must begin repair work before they are reimbursed but must fill out onerous paperwork to access the funds. In some cases, the state does not have permission from the federal government to spend recovery dollars.

The media should remind America that there is still life in New Orleans. As one person commented on abcnews.com in May, “N.O. is dead. Fill it with water and make a state park out of it.”

But New Orleans is not dead. Residents have returned and rebuilt or are rebuilding. One recent report says the city’s population is about 273,600, 60 percent of its pre-Katrina figure.

The media should also use the anniversary to remind America how New Orleans got into this mess: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers levees failed and led to the destruction of New Orleans. Katrina was a Category 3 hurricane that did not hit the city directly; it passed to the east of us with Mississippi taking the brunt of the storm. The point is our levees should have held up.

If the poorly built levees and floodwalls had not ruptured, New Orleans would not have flooded and the city today would look pretty much like it did pre-Katrina.

The national media are notoriously unsophisticated, although there are some exceptions. When the reporters descend on New Orleans for Katrina’s second anniversary, they need to explain why New Orleans still struggles.
The disaster wasn’t the fault of the residents and neither is the slow pace of the recovery.

Evangelical, Mainline Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim Leaders Call for Moral Response to Hurricanes

108 diverse leading religious officials - including, Rev. Dr. Michael Kinnamon, National Council of Churches; Rev. Richard Cizik, National Association of Evangelicals; Richard Stearns, President, World Vision; Rabbi Steve Gutow, Jewish Council for Public Affairs; Dr. Ingrid Matterson, Islamic Society of North America; Fr. Larry Snyder, Catholic Charities USA; Rev. David Beckmann, Bread for the World; and Rev. Jim Wallis, Sojourners - signed an interfaith statement calling for not just a charitable response but for justice through long-term human rights-based recovery policy to help Gulf Coast families. Three years after the current administration's first major speech promising to rebuild the region devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the slow pace of recovery, the collapse of local institutions, homelessness, internal displacement, poverty, abusive labor practices and environmental degradation have created a moral crisis in the Gulf Coast. In recent weeks, hurricanes Gustav and Ike have added to the devastation in the Gulf Coast demanding a powerful response from people of faith. The statement urges national leaders to make enacting bi-partisan resident-led federal solutions, including the Gulf Coast Civic Works Act, helping families return and participate in rebuilding their communities, creating living wage jobs, restoring the coastal wetland and ensuring human rights along the Gulf Coast a national moral priority.

affirmation!

the following is from the new orleans times-picayune of this past friday.

Sturdy old homes ideal for renewal
Posted by Jack Davis, Guest Columnist, The Times-Picayune September 12, 2008 3:31PM

The Lower 9th Ward neighborhood of Holy Cross, which three years ago had water in its living rooms, still shows the pain of bringing New Orleans back from Katrina's flooding.

But with strengthened levees that stood up to Gustav's recent test, Holy Cross also shows the hope and success that are redeeming not only this historic neighborhood but others across the city as we enter this fourth year of slow and steady recovery.

Preservationists saw Holy Cross as an important place to concentrate their efforts, to bring back a working-class, mostly African-American community of homeowners. And its century-old, well built and slightly elevated houses were the kind that could be rehabilitated more easily than replaced.

While serving the immediate need of providing housing, preservationists also wanted to prove that historic preservation is a key strategy for any stricken city's response to catastrophe -- especially for a city whose architectural character and neighborhood fabric make it unique in the world.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation and its partners -- especially the Preservation Resource Center and its local chapter of Rebuilding Together -- have brought 125 houses back to life in this compact area.

Today, Holy Cross is approaching the time when the preservationists can step aside and let revitalization take its own course.

The National Trust is prepared to help as long as it takes, says its president, Richard Moe.

That's why it opened a field office here right after the storm, brought in architects and other skilled volunteers, lobbied Congress for restoration grants and tax credits to spur preservation-based economic development -- accounting for $70 million available to help rebuild New Orleans.

The organization, with the state of Louisiana, expanded its Main Street program, which promotes vitality in neighborhood retail districts, to the commercial corridors on Oak Street, Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard, St. Claude Avenue and North Rampart Street. In any given week, one or two National Trust for Historic Preservation staff members from Washington are in New Orleans working with neighborhoods, developers and preservation groups.

The National Trust has stepped up advocacy efforts to remind public officials that preservation of our heritage has made New Orleans a world cultural treasure, a standing that drives the tourism economy.

The National Trust put Charity Hospital on its list of America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places this spring, along with the historic Mid-City neighborhoods that could be razed for the LSU and VA hospitals, because keeping both assets will make the medical district grow stronger. Working with residents, we believe that plans can be achieved which advance the goals of a medical district and retain historic neighborhoods.

The recent report by RMJM Hillier that Big Charity could be rehabilitated into a modern hospital at lower cost than new construction is another reminder that solid old buildings will help us save energy and make the new New Orleans more sustainable.

Preservation saves money and allows a city's scarce resources to be used wisely.

New Orleans' architectural heritage is one of the things that makes New Orleans special. The steady rebirth of Holy Cross testifies to the power of that vision.

But Mid-City, where the wrecking ball looms over hundreds of historic homes, reminds us that preservationists' work is not done, and that is why we're going to stay until the job is finished.

. . . . . . .

Jack Davis, who lives in New Orleans and Chicago, is a trustee of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.