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Green Homes Falling Apart

conarb

Registered User
Joined
Oct 22, 2009
Messages
3,505
Location
California East Bay Area
Brad Pitt's green homes are falling apart:

East Bay Times said:
Post-Katrina, the humanitarian-minded Pitt and Jolie swooped in to the city and bought their own elegant French Quarter mansion, while Pitt set up the nonprofit Make it Right to help regenerate the Lower Ninth Ward.

Architectural enthusiast Pitt, 54, promised the nonprofit would build 150 new homes using cutting-edge design that would emphasize safety, safety and adherence to LEED platinum building standards.

Make it Right spent at a minimum of $25 million to build brightly painted, architecturally distinct homes that were sold to Lower Ninth Ward residents at a discount, though residents told the Daily Mail they cost around $150,000 each — or market value.

Now, residents are telling the Daily Mail that some of the homes didn’t live up to the promise offered by Pitt or by his nonprofit, saying that the homes contain structural flaws and are now falling apart.

Daily Mail published photos showing some of those homes, with roofs caving in, wood rotting and walls collapsing or falling away from the house. Some residents used their life savings, combined with federal relief funding, to buy the home
s. But some found they couldn’t keep up with the repairs and have abandoned them, the Daily Mail added.

Resident Constance Fowler told the Daily Mail that her next-door neighborhoods in a Make it Right home had to move out because the wife was getting sick from the mold. Make it Right promised to renovate the house, but workers found its roof was beyond repair, Fowler said. The house was left unoccupied and rotting away. Fowler told the Daily Mail she had to repeatedly petition Make it Right and the city to tear it down.

“Make It Right says this is the largest green community in the United States,” Fowler said to the Daily Mail. “Look how many are boarded up now or abandoned.”

“People have problems with porches, roofs, walls falling apart,” she added. “There’s six out of seven homes right next to me that have had significant repairs.”

Another resident, Doris Wyman, said she and her husband Henry are only able to stay in their Make it Right home because Henry is a skilled handyman.

“I’m concerned about neighbors’ homes,” she said. “Just because mine is holding up, I know others are falling apart, their walls, roofs and porches.”

Wyman said Make it Right may have brought people back to the Lower Ninth Ward, but ultimately failed in its mission if people can’t stay in their homes. She acknowledged that the intention probably was “beautiful” but asked, “Where did they go wrong?”

Pitt told the Times-Picayne he also had talked to residents sitting on their front porch. He asked them how their new homes were working out.

“Good,” he said they told him. “And I say what’s your utility bill? And they’ll throw something out like, ’24 bucks’ or something, and I feel fantastic.”

At the same time, Pitt admitted to the Times-Picayne that he and the organization had been “incredibly naive” in understanding what it really takes to rebuild a community.

“We went into it incredibly naive,” he told the newspaper, “just thinking we can build homes — how hard is that? — and not understanding forgivable loan structures and family financial counseling and getting the rights to lots and HUD grants and so on and so forth. So it’s been a big learning curve.”¹

Didn't take long for these sealed-up moldy Green Platinum LEED homes to fall apart. We need to get some prosecutors to start indicting these Greenies and those who have been pushing this crap. Hey, but they meet code, did they have building inspectors approving the plans and signing them off? Pitt admits he was "incredibly naive" buying into this, well he's a movie actor, what about professional builders and inspectors who bought into this fraud?


¹ https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2018/0...re-falling-apart-residents-say-in-new-report/
 
Did they determine the cause of the problems? Does anyone have access to tangible information they could share about this situation to help determine the cause and solution to their issues?
 
Pitt got conned like everyone else, the U.S.G.B.C should be brought in to analyze all of the failures, with all the fees they charge they can certainly afford it. Maybe they could hire Joe Lstiburek to come in and analyze them, he's on record knocking the "Greenie Weenies" . Then too, maybe the AHJs enforcing the Green and Energy Codes should be sued for forcing people to follow these codes? Somebody should pay for these scams.
 
Yeah. I'm sure they were "experts" in energy efficient construction.

It's kind of like hiring a kid who's never build anything before to build you a deck and being surprised when it falls down. Well, what did you think would happen? I wouldn't expect Brad Pitt's house construction charity to build good homes. He's an actor.

Dr. Lstiburek is on record for knocking green for green sake. Especially at the expense of an energy efficient building. LEED's 1 credit for increasing building ventilation by 40% over ASHRAE 62 comes to mind. You can build these buildings safe. You just can't build them the way the old guys built them. You need to understand your materials and what they do. How many builders understand the difference between a vapour barrier, air barrier, plane of air tightness, and the rain screen? If you can't tell me what each of these are and what products serve that function in each area of your building envelope, you should never construct an energy efficient building because it will be a hazard to the occupants.
 
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