This is free access at AFR: (Mares wrote that housing report for Grattan Institute.)

(afr.com/p/opinion/the_houses_we_want_aren_built_IfWw58NSUJ4KMgYyUPLDvI)
The houses we want aren’t built
PETER MARES, 25 June, 2012.
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At face value this appears to confirm the popular view that we are wedded to the suburban block; we are willing to pay almost anything, and move almost anywhere, to live in a house that we can walk all the way around.
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But Grattan Institute research points to a different conclusion: current urban policy fails to offer sufficient choice in housing type.

So it goes with urban design. And of course Australia is little better.

AD, do you know there is a Town of Seaside on the Sunshine Coast; but it is just a few streets/small development to the north of Marcoola before Coolum. And somehow I doubt they banned garages!

Michael: Thanks, I had no idea. It’s more interesting than most of the housing estates I recall on the Sunshine Coast. Looks like they’ve sought to put the garages on the side of the houses rather than have them face the street. AD

Kurt Andersen (the book’s co-editor) writes:

It's amazing that the premise of Seaside--that America's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century towns remain great models of urban coherence and felicity--is so simple, even obvious, and yet was so willfully neglected for fifty years. It is as if, around 1945, Americans had given up something as fundamental and wholesome as bread, deciding the stuff was too old-fashioned, too complicated and time-consuming to bake--and then, suddenly, several decades later, came to realize that they loved bread and still had the recipe on file. Yet in an era mad for recycling bits of the past, Duany and Plater-Zyberk were among the few revivalists who looked beyond the superficial. True, residents and visitors are fond of Seaside partly (maybe largely) for the reproductions of the fifty- and one-hundred-year-old styles, but it is the master planner's subtler urban traditionalism--the town center, the civic buildings, the street grid and narrow streets, the lot sizes, alleys and setbacks--that distinguishes Seaside from scores of instantly erected ersatz-old-fashioned places.

That’s right – the houses at Seaside are much bigger

The houses are not donated but … well, read the conditions:

To qualify, you or someone in your immediate family had to live in the Lower 9th Ward when Katrina hit. You also have to be buyer-ready, meaning you can contribute to the cost of buying your home – either through savings or financing and can afford to maintain the house, pay taxes and insurance. All housing costs are limited to no more than one third of your income.

That last bit (my bold) is reminiscent of French rules applied to home mortgages; we in the Anglo world tend to get all huffy about “nanny state” regulation but they are designed for sustainability (re finances and housing markets).

In fact the New Urbanist “Katrina Cottages” had a similar origin but slightly different objective: to serve the same function (but better visually & greener) to replace the FEMA trailer-homes that were rolled out to solve some of the Katrina homeless. Most of them are prefabricated and brought in on trucks, and most are not intended as permanent though everyone knows that many of these things end up being semi-permanent so this was an attempt to improve over the depressing FEMA efforts.

Incidentally it is not clear if those pictures of K Cottages are in New Orleans at all. Although much of the material is frustratingly vague, a lot of the pictorial material seems to be of showcase small communities such as Buena Vista, Colorado and Ocean Springs, Mississippi (this latter looks an awful lot like those pics). Katrina Cottages have become popular all over where inexpensive housing is needed (and where trailer homes are often the choice). The New Urbanist connection is of course that it was initiated by Andres Duany who with his wife (Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk) designed that cutesy town of Seaside on the Florida panhandle coast (which was used for the Truman Show movie), and in so doing defined the New Urbanist agenda. Somehow I doubt there are any Katrina Cottages in Seaside because one of its criticisms is that it is really a little privileged community for the rich.

At first I suspected that the MakeItRight houses might have been factory fabricated and hauled in on a truck. But apparently not since the site shows them at various stages of construction and they are built in pretty much standard fashion on site.

One thing seems clear about the MIR houses is that they are sitting on concrete stumps (actually poured in situ, which seems an expensive way to do it) and seems primarily designed so that the main living floor(s) are above flood level. If you look at several of those cutesy New Urbanist houses, it seems unlikely they are flood proof (again not enough info about location etc; I have a suspicion the New Urbanist houses are in the ‘Desire’ and ‘Florida’ Development which is the district on the western side of the canal/border to the Ninth, and on slightly higher ground and behind better levees. And thus more expensive district.).

When you see the style of construction employed they really NEED to be above flood level, even more so than the old houses they replaced. Because they are all built with modern industrial materials, eg. engineered-timber I-beam joists, and particle-board walls etc. None of this stuff survives water immersion as shown in the 2011 Brisbane floods: the houses don’t fall down and ostensibly recover however the I-beams lose 50% of their strength and the house becomes uninsurable and technically not fit for habitation! (Note the difference with 1974 floods which I lived through, and almost 100% of houses were intact, if needing work. Real timber survives floods.)

At any rate I trust readers realize that this is the Lower Ninth Ward, and “lower” may be intended to mean “further downstream” but it also could mean lower topography. This area was probably never originally sanctioned for housing because of its lower level and probably originally swampy/marais nature–note it has a canal thru it leading to the Main Outfall Canal (which forms the northern border of the L Ninth Ward), which looks like it might be a Sewage Treatment works. (It is, I just Googled it.)

All the fancy French stuff we see in movies–including in Pitt’s Interview with the Vampire–are in the Garden & French Quarters way upstream and beyond flooding.