Pitt: NOLA eco-friendly homes exceed expectations

Pitt: NOLA eco-friendly homes 'exceeded my expectations' by Tom Foreman, CNN 28 Aug 2010

In New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward, where Katrina did much damage, Brad Pitt's Make It Right nonprofit build eco-friendly homes.

"The actor targeted this area some years ago with his Make It Right Foundation -- an ambitious plan to build up the shattered neighborhood with new, ecologically friendly, affordable houses, and then fill them with residents who had been driven out by Katrina..."

 "These houses here have exceeded my expectations," he says, looking across the neighborhood. "The goal here was how do you build affordable housing that's high-performance, and that is going to be strong enough to withstand the kind of weather that we're seeing down here. Things that drive the price up, we've got to get down."

..Mindful of how such plans often go, I [Tom] say, "I'm guessing your first units here cost a lot more than your later ones."

[Pitt:] "Sure, but now we're down to dollar-for-dollar what it costs to build anything else here," Pitt says.

When asked how he did that, Pitt replies, "We had to start over. We thought we could do it better. We thought we could build a house with light and high-performance technology, that we could bring bills down and give the families who live here a better life, and we wanted to prove it at the low income level..."

"..And now every house you see here, last month, every one but one was producing more energy than it was consuming. That's big news. That's a game-changer. And there is no reason to build any other way now," Pitt says.
--Brad Pitt

 complete interview and video at: http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/08/27/katrina.pitt.interview/index.html  

Make It Right NOLA project at: http://www.makeitrightnola.org/