[StBernard] Home-raising requests raise ire in St. Bernard

[Westley Annis]

Home-raising requests raise ire in St. Bernard
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
By Karen Turni Bazile
St. Bernard/Plaquemines bureau 

To elevate or not to elevate? 
To enclose or not to enclose? 

A debate is raging in St. Bernard Parish over how thousands of flooded homes
should be rebuilt, with questions of aesthetics, cost and safety at issue. 

Parish officials say they want to make homes less prone to flooding, but
they also want to maintain the integrity of neighborhoods that before
Hurricane Katrina consisted mostly of slab homes. They don't want the parish
to become an expanse of raised camp-style homes on exposed wooden piers. 

After officials issued about a half-dozen permits that called for homes to
be elevated more than 8 feet on exposed pilings, Chalmette attorney V.J.
Dauterive filed a lawsuit in state court. At his request, District Judge
Manny Fernandez issued a restraining order May 12 stopping the parish from
issuing any more permits for elevated homes until the Parish Council spells
out requirements for such homes. 

Now some residents in St. Bernard, where all but five homes were flooded
last year by Hurricane Katrina's massive surge, are complaining that the
requirements under discussion could make rebuilding too expensive for those
wishing to come back in new elevated homes. 


Developer against plan 

And local developer Terry Tedesco opposes Dauterive's suit, which Tedesco
said could make the parish require homeowners, at considerable cost, to
close in the empty spaces under elevated homes so the houses would look like
solid buildings from the ground up. 

At Councilman Craig Taffaro's suggestion, the council last fall amended the
parish's building code to say houses had to be rebuilt to at least
pre-Katrina standards and had to maintain the neighborhood's integrity. But
the change laid out no specific guidelines. 

Council members are preparing to modify the code again in the wake of the
temporary restraining order Dauterive won after a home on Center Street was
erected on exposed wooden pilings. 

"The goal of the code is to provide a balance between what is reasonable and
affordable for the residents and still maintain the continuity of design and
expectations of what people knew when they were investing in their homes,"
Taffaro said. 

Since Katrina, many St. Bernard residents have become interested in modular
homes that are quick to assemble and can easily be elevated, usually either
3 feet or 8 feet off the ground. Tedesco said such homes can be built in as
little as seven or eight weeks. 

At a recent hearing before the council, Tedesco said officials should keep
standards affordable so people can repopulate the parish. Many residents
need to buy cars and furniture more than they need to be burdened with the
cost of extra features designed only to make the outside of their homes look
better, he said. 


'We have to get back first' 

However, Dauterive, a member of the parish Citizens Recovery Committee, said
it's critical to hold builders to standards that won't hurt homeowners who
are only renovating their houses, not demolishing them and building new ones
raised several feet higher than their neighbors. 

"We are at a crossroads and I think it's important to have standards in
place now, rather than later on," Dauterive said. 

Tedesco said the elevated homes are not hurting property values in
flood-damaged neighborhoods in St. Bernard. 

"I don't think it's fair to tell anybody what to do on their own property,"
Tedesco said at the public hearing. "They are building very nice houses.
It's just that they are elevated, and I'm sure they will put lattice work
and garage doors." 

Lee St. Phillip, who began crying as she spoke before the council, said she
badly wants to return to St. Bernard, where she is a longtime teacher. "My
husband said I couldn't come back until he saw an ad in the paper" for
elevated homes that would be higher than the floodwaters, she said. 

St. Phillip said she and her husband plan eventually to close in the open
first floor of the elevated house Tedesco is going to build for them on
their Lloyds Avenue lot in Chalmette, but that they can't afford the added
expense of enclosing the bottom floor right now. "We will eventually want to
close it in and make it look good," she said. "We have to get back first." 

Alice Perniciaro, who works as a deputy clerk in the St. Bernard clerk of
court's office, said her house on Center Street near the Mississippi River
flooded several times before recent drainage improvements in the area. 

After the massive flooding caused by Katrina, she wanted to elevate it and
rebuild it as quickly and as affordably as possible because she didn't
qualify for any federal government loans, she said. 

"This is the only way I could afford to do this," Perniciaro said. "I have
worked for St. Bernard Parish for 20 years, and I'm tired of commuting"
since the storm. 

Taffaro said the modified measure he hopes the council will pass at its June
6 meeting is meant to preserve property values and maintain neighborhood
integrity as the parish rebuilds. 


Covered pilings 

Michael Moolekamp, a St. Bernard Parish firefighter whose new house on
Community Street in Arabi will be raised on pilings this week, said he hopes
the council carefully crafts the final law with input from housing
designers. He said he wants to use lattice work to cover the open space
between the pilings, rather than be forced to build a cement block wall or
install garage doors, which he said would clash with the design of his new
home. 

"It is going to cost us more money to do it (enclosed). I presently don't
have the money," Moolekamp said. 

"I want to put a staircase in front of my building and flowers on lattice
work." 

Taffaro said he thinks the parish is leaning toward allowing options such as
lattice work but that the new law probably will still require that pilings
be covered. 

Moolekamp and Taffaro said they both like a home on Riverland Drive in
Chalmette that was elevated more than 8 feet when it was built years ago,
with brick-covered pilings and lattice work enclosing the open ground-level
floor. 

Taffaro said it's important "to have an appearance code to address a new
building era in St. Bernard. . . . We shouldn't lower the bar at this point.


"We should raise the bar or at least maintain the bar in terms of standards.
. . . We are trying to close the loopholes that obviously have been exposed.
The intent was to prevent unrestricted redesigning of neighborhoods." 

. . . . . . . 

Karen Turni Bazile can be reached at kturni at timespicayune or (504) 826-3335.