From the Ground Up: Pass Christian, Miss., rebuilds after Hurricane Katrina
By: Ben Brown Source: AARP Bulletin Today Date Posted: September 2006
A year after the most costly natural disaster in American history, just about everything you need to know about the challenges and opportunities facing the post-Katrina Gulf Coast—especially for its older residents—can be found in Pass Christian, Miss.
In destroying as much as 90 percent of the town and requiring a total rethinking of where and how to rebuild, Hurricane Katrina may have simply delivered Pass Christian (pronounced Pass Kris-chee-ANN and known locally as "the Pass") to the future. Not that it will be free of struggle.
There's no better symbol of renewal than Trinity Episcopal Church, a Gulf-front landmark built in 1851. Destroyed by Hurricane Camille in 1969, it was rebuilt 14 feet above sea level—still not high enough to elude Katrina's 36-foot surge. So it's being rebuilt again.
Today, says the Rev. Christopher Colby, less than 20 percent of Trinity's families have moved back to their homes; most parishioners are living with friends and relatives in other towns and states.
"One of the most difficult things for me," Colby says, "is dealing with the idea of a town erased. I walked out on our grounds on Christmas Eve and suddenly realized that none of the land to the west of us for four miles was inhabited.
"There is this recognition that we can't return to exactly where we were before the storm. But there is a very intense desire in this community to build back and to restore at least the atmosphere the town once had."
The Pass that residents once had was a historic town of 6,500 people, many of them descended from 18th-century French settlers. Named for the deepwater channel that aided ship navigation between coastal Mississippi ports and New Orleans 60 miles to the west, "it's always been a nice quiet little town," says John Dubuisson, 56, police chief for the last 21 years. "That's what everybody likes about it. Everybody knows everybody."
In the last U.S. Census, 19 percent of the town's population was 65-plus, compared with a state and national average of 12 percent. "Our retired population pretty well runs the town," says Dayton Robinson, 70, a former bank employee and the longtime chairman of the town planning commission.
The trouble is, what most people remember as the town has been permanently altered. On one side of scenic Highway 90 connecting Pass Christian with Gulfport and Biloxi lies the Gulf; on the other, set among the oaks, were some of the region's most admired 19th-century houses. The Gulf is still there. But most of the homes are not: in total, the Pass lost some 2,000 houses.
One belonged to Etta Dubuisson, 84, the police chief's mother. Twelve feet of water destroyed her 100-year-old house on East Second Street and those of most of her neighbors. Still, "You couldn't move her out of here with a stick of dynamite," says her son.
Since the storm, Etta Dubuisson has been more fortunate than most: she expects to move into a new house in the next month or so. It will be something of a showpiece, designed at reduced cost by a sympathetic architect who usually designs second homes for wealthy clients in the coastal Carolinas and Florida. And it's being built with help from a coalition of volunteers that includes Rotary Clubs and the Mennonite Disaster Services.
"Thank God for all that," she says.
It's a pattern repeated all along the coast, with volunteers filling gaps while direct federal and state aid is just beginning to reach property owners. But despite the help, the lack of labor and materials has slowed the pace of building.
It has also added to the cost. As qualified crews spread themselves thin, not-so-qualified workers are over-promising, under-delivering and charging top dollar. "The honest ones are kind of stuck, and all these vultures have come in," says Carter Hillyer, 57, who left his job as a university professor to rebuild his 92-year-old mother's house with his son, Charles.
After staying with her daughter in Louisiana, Hillyer's mother moved to her rebuilt four-bedroom rambler in January, though living there was still something like camping out. "We had some of the furniture back in place and a roaring fire in the fireplace," Hillyer recalls. "We put a blanket around Mother in her chair, and a big smile came over her face. 'It sure is good to be back home,' she said."
New building rules also complicate matters. Etta Dubuisson's thoughtfully designed new house is three feet higher off the ground than her old house was—which, now at the height recommended in new flood insurance maps from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), presents a challenge for Etta's getting in and out. "We've decided we'll have to build a ramp for her," says John Dubuisson.
The height requirements further increase the already escalating construction costs. Add to that the rising insurance premiums on coastal homes and speculator-driven prices for property, and new housing costs soar beyond the reach of many low-income residents who lived here. Soon affordability may exceed the means of even middle-class residents.
"If you make all the people who aren't rich move out of town," says Robinson, "you won't have people to open businesses, and you won't have people to be their customers."
As the population ages and income gaps widen, many communities across the nation share the problem of affordability. Katrina forced the Pass to face the issue now—and the solution may be a return to the more compact and accessible town of half a century ago.
"Up until the 1950s, this was a pretty lively place," says building contractor Jim Schmitt, 59. "We had three bakeries here 20 years ago. But then the same thing happened to us that happened to other small towns. All the business was sucked out by the malls. We lost the critical mass to make a viable downtown work."
The effort to recapture the town's vitality began barely a month after Katrina when, at the invitation of Gov. Haley Barbour, R, 200 international planners, architects and regional experts met in Biloxi to come up with plans to rebuild three counties and 11 towns. California urban planner Laura Hall led the team assigned to the Pass.
"While in some places after the hurricane the planning was imposed from the top down, in Pass Christian it came from the opposite direction," Hall says. "The citizens educated themselves about the intricacies of zoning codes and other urban planning tools, and they let their leaders know exactly what they expect."
Citizens like Jim Schmitt and his wife, Gayla, whose home was severely damaged in the storm. The Schmitts also lost two rental properties, derailing their well-laid retirement income strategy. They got involved in the post-Katrina planning process after making "a conscious decision to work for the greater good," says Gayla, 61. "Our own financial problems are bigger than we can handle by ourselves. We're not going to recover very well if the town doesn't recover."
Gayla became president of Mercy Housing and Human Development, a regional nonprofit group working on projects that affordably house older people and others. Jim has become a leader at public planning hearings, which routinely draw more than 200 people. He advocates a zoning approach that integrates building uses—housing, offices, retail, recreation—rather than segregating them, and he prescribes design details like building heights and sidewalk widths. The town can re-emerge, he says, with a viable center where almost anything residents need is within walking distance.
One proposal would create a secondary center around Wal-Mart three miles from the historic center. "There's no reason Wal-Mart has to pull people away from a town center," says Robin Riley, the architect-developer who proposed the project. "People—especially seniors in our area who need safe rental housing—should be living next to Wal-Mart, where they have 24-hour access to so much of what they need without having to drive anywhere."
Pass Christian "is going to take us at least three years to build back," says Chipper McDermott, who was elected mayor in August.
In a town accustomed to processing perhaps 100 building permits a year, more than 1,000 were issued between October 2005 and August 2006. That represents at least $70 million in projected construction. Though hopeful that new revenues will offset losses in property and sales taxes since Katrina, McDermott and other town officials may also face an avalanche of speculative investment. "There could be a fistfight over development on the fringes" of town, says McDermott.
Still, slow is not acceptable, in building new houses or planning the new town. If communities in the path of Katrina gained anything from the storm, it was a sense of urgency. "The longer it takes for us to decide what to do, the longer it will take to get anything done," Dayton Robinson says. "If we can't get people back, we can't get businesses back. And if we can't get businesses back, we can't have the community we once had."
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