During my visit this summer in the USA, I went to New Orleans for a couple of days. New Orleans has always been very well known for its lively music scene, its beautiful French (actually Spanish architecture) District, its rough harbour-image and its Cajun kitchen. Since 2005 New Orleans is well known for something else: Hurricane Katrina.

In august 2005 hurricane Katrina struck the coastline of Alabama en Louisiana. Great damage was done by the wind, but even more by the floods that were a result of the storm, and the fact that large parts of the city are below sea-level, behind the levees. 80% of New Orleans was flooded.


A lot of people left New Orleans during the evacuation and never came back. They are mostly living in Houston (TX) and other cities. Even Chicago, which is 800 miles to the north of Louisiana, gained 6000 “imigrants” because of Katrina. In total nearly 220000 people of the 4 million inhabitants of Louisiana moved somewhere else. Still the local newspaper list 2 pages a day of houses that were ruined and of whom nobody knows to whom they belonged. Whole streets and neighbourhoods are dilapidated and empty, which of course is an ideal playground for gangster-business.

For the people who came back after the storm, houses had to be rebuilt. Knowing that the levees probably still aren’t capable of resisting a storm of category 4 or higher, they know that a similar thing as what happened in August 2005 could happen again: their houses would be damaged again by the enormous amounts of water streaming through the city.

Building floating houses could be an answer to that problem. Even though many proposals have been made (The Flood-House, MVRDV with Brad Pitts “Make it Right”, Harvard Research Project, Kiduck Kim and Christian Stayner) for a floating alternative in New Orleans, most of the houses being built now are of the traditional New Orleans-types: the Shotgun, the Camelback and the Creole Cottage, only in some cases built on piles in case the water is high.

How’s that possible? Is there a lack of money? A lack of technological knowledge? Is the government really so naïve, or uninterested? Probably a combination of these, but there’s something else.

Another explanation for this could be the corruption in New Orleans. During my visit I met a CEO of Hostelling International. He told me about their plans of starting a hostel in New Orleans. They had been trying to do that for years but were continually blocked by the corruption in the city. He told me it’s very hard to start some kind of business in New Orleans, especially if you’re not from “the Big Easy” yourself.

This very same problem could be the cause of that lack of realizations of initiatives for floating housing. The local building companies are all equipped for building the regular kind of houses. They don’ t want to invest in new ways of building, and therefore use the method of corruption to make sure that no commissions are made for “irregular” ways of building.