Departing the Sensory

Pauline St., Upper Ninth Ward. (2 in 5 houses look similar)

Stencil art at The Country Club (Nola)

The whole volunteer house shakes when a loaded dump truck drives by. A few blocks from here, tucked on the corner of two residential side streets, is the home of a gentleman of considerable experience.  He was born and then raised in the Lower 9th Ward, on the same plot of family land that I stood on earlier today.  He lives there now, after a considerable hiatus, in a home (re)built in part by Common Ground Relief.   Smitty has invited a group of us into his living room.  I have no idea what his given name is.  It doesn't matter.  Or even where we were exactly, I didn't bother to look at the address.  That doesn't matter either.  We are here to talk about the history of his home.  Which has nothing to do with his house.  That's a different story. I'm told the city water in New Orleans is potable.  It doesn't taste like it. At one point I surveyed the scene, arranged around the living room.  Twenty humans present.  S...

A houselot in the Lower Ninth Ward. All that's missing is everything.

First days with Common Ground were a pretty good sample of what's to come I think.  Make It Right is just next door to us.  Literally.  That's Brad Pitt's organization. They are well funded from the look of it. They are definitely building some houses, but the word on the street is that they can be  a bit out of touch with the reality on the ground.  Make It Right builds architecturally interesting homes with odd (for the Northeast) roof styles and angles, solar panels, and on stilts.  The houses on posts are a common sight here now, an effective way of dealing with flooding problems.  As for the other aspects it seems to drive the price out of reach for the typical lower 9th Ward would-be residents.  Houses here used to cost say 20 grand.  Pitt's homes cost over 200k.  Now, to be fair, it's not a direct comparison - a new / modern house clearly costs more (and should) than some 80 year old shack.  But the barriers to ownership are...

I watched the sun rise over the Atlanta skyline not long back.  I guess I rather would have been sleeping, but a few hours were all I could steal on this Amtrak.  We stopped for a while, having arrived at the Atlanta station a bit ahead of schedule.  And by station I mean a 10-ft wide strip of concrete not wide enough for the luggage trolley and a passenger to stand abreast.  Oh, and there's a carport-style roof.  Very classy.  It's cloudy here, quite cold as well.  Hotlanta my ass. Amtrak coffee is really not good at all.  It says Green Mountain on the side, but it tastes of thinly veiled extortion.  See my earlier statement about the lack of train station slash no other option.  Some guy from Flickr thinks that it is a step up from airplane coffee.  He might be right, but I don't care.  Between junk and less worse junk I do not care to differentiate. We just passed by the site of a freight train derailment.  I happe...