MIDDLE TENNESSEE STATE UNIVERSITY Temporary Housing and Katrina Cottages How the government’s response to disasters has shaped America’s architectural landscape. Kelsey Fields 4/18/2012 Fields 1 In 2005, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita pounded the Gulf Coast. Wind, waves, and floodwaters destroyed homes and hotels. Unlike most disasters that the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) responds to, such as ice storm, fire, and earthquake, the 2005 hurricane season left unprecedented numbers of Americans without housing. In response, FEMA responded as the federal government had since World War I, with temporary shelter. It was logical for FEMA to respond the same way to the 2005 disaster on the coast; however, this drew the nation’s ire, especially when the temporary shelters were found to have high levels of carcinogens like formaldehyde. Years later, protest has not died down, but continues from the fact that many of the temporary shelters issued in 2005 are still in use nearly seven years later. In reaction to the flaws found with FEMA’s temporary shelter response, the Alternative Housing Pilot Program (AHPP) was initiated for the development of mobile and pre-fabricated affordable shelters without the inherent flaws and social stigma of recreational vehicles (RVs) and mobile homes. Thus, “Katrina Cottages” were developed and a new type of regional architecture was born. However, such change is nothing new. Rather, such change follows a pattern of architectural development that has occurred in America for nearly a century. These “temporary” structures often last years beyond their projected usefulness, serving as a reminder of historic events. Although the new Katrina Cottage style is based on regional vernacular styles like the development of many temporary housing solutions before it, the cottages will transform the built environment. For this reason, it is necessary to establish a history of the use of temporary shelter in America to provide a framework for analysis of these remaining structures. Prior to World War I, the federal government did not directly provide housing for those in need. Following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, and estimated 200,000 residents Fields 2 were left homeless. Congress responded by appropriating one time only emergency funds for local government to use on tents, as well as food, water, and medical supplies (see photograph one).1 However, Congress did not provide for more than temporary shelter. The City of San Francisco’s Lands and Buildings Committee “eventually settled on a plan to build [three different styles of] mass-produced cabins” that served as temporary housing. The city produced approximately 5,600 of these cabins that they used in eleven camps.2 One such camp is shown in photographs 2-3. Direct federal involvement in temporary housing appears during the Great War. During World War I, the country faced shortages in building materials. The same materials needed for family homes were also needed for and thus redirected to the defense industry. This problem was compounded by the migration of workers to the sites of new military bases and defense industries. Furthermore, mortgage companies found their capital tied up in liberty bonds, making mortgages for home building scarce. The problem was especially noticeable in the shipbuilding industry. In 1917, Congress signed the Emergency Deficiencies Act, which established a fund for the creation of a new fleet of ships. Soon after, the Shipping Board, established to oversee the fund, created the Emergency Fleet Corporation (EFC). The EFC in turn, oversaw the construction of housing for workers.3 However, this in-migration of workers and shortage of housing was so widespread that it led Congress to create the United States Housing Corporation in 1918.4 The corporation was responsible for building housing projects for the in-migrant workers and set the foundation for governmental provisioning of housing. While these housing projects were created to fulfill a specific wartime need and were not aimed at providing housing for the low-income public, it did set the precedent for federal housing response in the 1930s and 1940s. Fields 3 Ironically, the federal government did not provide temporary shelter for those made homeless by the 1927 Mississippi River flood. Instead, the government supported the Red Cross in its mission to help victims of the disaster by encouraging Americans to donate money to the cause, but offered no direct assistance to victims or responders. This flood covered parts of Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Tennessee, for months. The Mississippi River was at flood stage for 153 days. At the height of the flood, the river was sixty miles wide in places and caused flooding up to thirty-feet deep. These conditions left many Americans without shelter. In response, the Red Cross established 154 camps for the displaced, housing them in large canvas tents from approximately April until September of 1927.5 Other factors were at work changing American society at this time and would influence American response to housing and job shortages. Beginning in the decades after World War I, the nation experienced an increase in automobile tourism that greatly affected the mobility of Americans. During the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century, getting back to nature was touted as necessary for “character-building.” It was further deemed essential to restoring white “manliness” in the face of urban life, which was contrary to America’s frontier roots. This led to the development of wilderness vacations for the wealthy.6 The advent of the Ford Model T assembly line stunningly increased the ability of the general public to leave their urban homes. This allowed them to “go even further afield in their search for recreation and readily travel long distances during weekends and vacations to places of scenic interest where their favorite forms of outdoor life may be enjoyed.”7 However enjoyable and character building these vacations might be, it was difficult to pack necessary supplies and small comforts into the automobile with the rest of one’s family. Those with ingenuity simply attached modified horse carts to their Fields 4 vehicles for extra storage, while those who had money to spare on luxuries had trailers built with tents attached. Eventually the trend grew and many people made their own tent trailers or had them built by local handy men and carriage makers.8 What started as a trend for those who could spend a little extra on travel, morphed into a solution for housing shortages. The stock market crash of 1929 and the following depression slowed down the manufacturing of those camping “house trailers,” but much less than some industries as “homeowners who lost their houses were forced into an itinerate lifestyle by economic conditions.”9 “By 1937…trailer production had become the ‘fastest growing U.S. industry,’ with factory produced trailers supplanting homemade versions. By the late 1930s approximately 400 companies were making almost 100,000 trailers a year,” making this temporary housing option widely available.10 According to journalist Samuel Grafton, the mobility of the Model T and the trailer resulted in the automobile becoming home to many Americans. This situation continued into the early 1940s, where it was exacerbated by wartime shortages in building materials, defense migrations, and a moratorium of non-defense construction. This resulted in an "important social phenomenon" where “the American spirit" was adapted to "the demands of a rootless nomadic life." Nevertheless, the housing solution thus derived from the earlier vacationing trend came with misperceptions and negative connotations. Grafton points out that none of those that he knew of living in trailer camps were not "depressed or unhappy," but he held that: "Families on wheels, harassed by the uncertainties of the future, spending as little as they can , consciously avoiding the letting down of roots, cannot and will not take any responsible role in local life; they cannot and will not support local institutions; nor can they feel any sense of participation in local problems. They do not vote. They are Fields 5 connected solely by the payroll to the town in which, by accident, they find themselves to be. "11 This temporary housing solution came at a price for the mobile families and later the federal government. Many residents and local governments held the belief that mobile families have no connection to the communities they lived in. These communities often failed to support the migrant workers by failing to build roads or provide sanitary water and sewage for the trailer camps, leaving that responsibility to the government and defense contractors. This policy further cost defense contractors and the government, as they also had to provide for the removal of trailers and other temporary housing following the war, so as not to lower the area’s property values. Of course, improvements to infrastructure remained. On March 1, 1941, Congress passed Public Law Nine on Defense Housing and Temporary Shelter. This law gave the President the power to assign government agencies to “provide temporary shelter, either by the construction of buildings or otherwise…in localities where by reason of national defense activities a shortage of housing exists.”12 Therefore, government agencies constructed trailer parks, as seen in photograph four, to house the workers. One such agency was the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The FSA was responsible for ordering at least 4,000 trailers for defense purposes. The Palace Travel Coach Corporation of Williamston, Michigan and Newport, Arkansas built some of these homes. Palace was one of the companies to receive a contract with the FSA to create deployable temporary housing for emergency response—that is to provide housing for refugees in case of the destruction of American cities by Axis powers. These mobile homes, marketed later as the 1942 Palace “Expando,” were built on their own chassis and designed to be towed by a civilian’s personally owned vehicle.