Williams, the New Orleans architect they hired to fulfill the plans and blueprints of their star designers. On September 18 2018, Make It Right reportedly filed a lawsuit against John C. This is the biggest purchase they’ll ever make.”
#Quickbuild bluepr stuck prision arkitect free#
“Everyone thinks that Brad Pitt swooped in with a cape on and gave everybody free houses, and now they’re ungrateful people who got something for nothing and they’re complaining. He developed the project, but residents are still on the hook for their mortgages despite the now unsafe or even unlivable conditions of many Make It Right homes. What some people fail to realize, Austin points out, is that these houses were not gifts from Pitt. “I think they were able to get away with it because of who they were, because the residents were very grateful with Make It Right stepping in and showing interest in their community.” They might come back and fix one thing, but not everything,” says attorney Ron Austin, who is representing residents Lloyd Francis and Jennifer Decuir in the lawsuit. “Make It Right was very good at pacifying people and putting them off, and pacifying people and putting them off. On September 7, 2018, two Lower Ninth Ward residents filed suit against the Make It Right Foundation, alleging that the nonprofit built and sold substandard houses with “defective” materials that caused structural issues, electrical and plumbing malfunctions, and insufficient ventilation.įurther, the suit alleges that the foundation was aware of problems as early as 2013 and that Make It Right representatives arranged inspections of the houses in 2016, 2017, and 2018, but did not share the results with residents in fact, the reps allegedly asked some residents to sign nondisclosure agreements before they would agree to make repairs, say the plaintiffs. Ten years later, only 109 of the 150 have been completed, and of those 109, many appear to be falling apart. Thousands of people still need help in order to return home.” “We are excited about today, but need to remember that our project is one small part of addressing a much larger need. “We are so appreciative of the support we have received from the Lower Ninth Ward Community, the Clinton Global Initiative, and university students from around the country at our groundbreaking today,” Pitt said at the event. Putting to use his considerable power and wealth, he pulled together 21 of the world’s most famous architects, as well as homeowners and community organizers in the Ward, and launched a project to build houses that were affordable, environmentally friendly, and aesthetically pleasing. When actor Brad Pitt visited the area two years after the storm, he was alarmed by how little had been done to rebuild. The Lower Ninth Ward, a working-class, predominantly African-American neighborhood on the banks of the Mississippi River, was completely submerged by the hurricane. The hurricane remains the largest residential disaster in American history. While some residents could return to their homes within days, an estimated 600,000 households remained displaced a month later.
Hurricane Katrina flooded 80 percent of New Orleans when it hit in August 2005, killing more than 1,500 people in the state of Louisiana alone and displacing more than one million in the Gulf Coast region. “But if I knew how we would be treated and taken advantage of, I wouldn’t have come.”
“Yes, I wanted to come back,” Claiborne says of her return to New Orleans.
Thirteen years after their original home in the Lower Ninth Ward drowned and after they were displaced to Fort Worth, Texas, to wait out the recovery, the family is facing hardship once again. The Claibornes didn’t have the money to fix the major issues themselves, as they sunk what was left of their savings into the down payment. “When you leave a message, they wouldn’t return your call. According to Claiborne, the family has made multiple calls to Make It Right representatives, but have never heard back.