Texas Grow Home

I woke up this morning and realized that we needed help.

It is not that I think we are not managing this project well but the need to get this right, the design of the houses, the fabrication approaches, the design of the program to meet the needs of really poor families all demand that we have some more folks joining us to make sure we have though through the best solutions.

For the better part of a year a small handful of us have been on a mission to make sure that the next time disaster strikes a low-income community as did Hurricanes Katrina and Rita we will be better prepared to help low-income people recover their homes.  That is the purpose of this project.

Over the course of the past year I have learned just how unprepared we as a society, and in particular our government is to deal with the needs of the poor in a disaster.  The news in the days following Hurricane Katrina showed us all this, but for those of us who have followed and been involved in the rebuilding effort for what is now almost three years we know that little has been done to make sure this does not happen again.

The heros of the rebuilding efforts are the faith based organizations and volunteers who have not waited for a governmental response but have rolled up their sleeves and help people patch up and rebuild.  But the immensity of the Katrina and Rita disasters have meant that even this heroic effort has fallen far short of meeting the needs.

Our Texas Grow Home Project is not a solution to the past disasters but is our effort to design a better future response to make sure this never happens again.  You can click on the “About” tab in the header and read about the project.

I remember following a blog in the New York Times where some people were designing and building their dream vacation house in Florida.  Thousands wrote comments advising about design, contracting and construction.

This may well be naive but I am starting this blog to share our experience with this project publicly in the hopes that other folks will see the value of the idea behind this project and will offer their advice, wisdom and support as we work through the construction of the prototype homes and move on to refine the prototypes and design a better disaster response next time low-income folks are impacted by natural disaster.

Please post your comments under any of the entries.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 6th, 2008 at 7:08 pm and is filed under Overall project. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.