When Brad Pitt Tried To Save The Lower Ninth Ward

His Make It Right Foundation built 109 homes in New Orleans, but critics say many are badly flawed.

- Rob Walker

In the months that followed Hurricane Katrina in 2005, there was much discussion about how to rebuild the New Orleans neighborhoods devastated by flooding. Some even questioned whether certain areas should be rebuilt at all: The city’s population would likely be smaller; perhaps its footprint should be revised? The Lower Ninth Ward, for instance—a working-class black neighborhood ravaged when a floodwall failed—might be a lost cause, some said, because it was so severely damaged.

Neighborhood residents and activists pushed back, insisting the Lower Nine deserved rebuilding. One of the most high-profile efforts to do so came from an unlikely figure: Brad Pitt. In 2007 the actor founded the Make It Right Foundation, a nonprofit whose mission was to build affordable housing to help Lower Nine residents come home. Attracting designs from prize-winning architects and committing to the highest energy-efficiency standards, Make It Right pledged to build 150 residences. As Pitt later wrote, the organization aimed to make “a human success story of how we can build in the future, how we can build with equality, how we can build for families.”

Over seven years, 106 houses were completed (three were duplexes, making the total number of residences 109). But somewhere around late 2015, new construction came to a standstill. Since then, little by little, the story of the project has changed. Residents have complained about flaws in design, construction, and materials; last summer a house had to be demolished. “Make It Right seems to have made it blight,” a local investigative publication, the Lens, sneered. Even