Coming home

Ben Dupuy watched television, transfixed, as Hurricane Katrina ravaged his hometown.

All of a sudden, his work as a Capitol Hill lobbyist didn’t seem as important as making New Orleans whole again.

So Dupuy (Government ’95) quit his job to join college buddy and Baton Rouge native Pat Cave (American Studies ’93) at the Cypress Group, a consulting firm Cave founded in Georgetown. For weeks following the storm, the pair scrambled with lawmakers to help out the region, making phone calls and meeting with the Louisiana delegation in D.C.

They didn’t stop there. Just before Christmas 2006, their company — which has four Arts & Sciences graduates as its partners — landed a $74.5 million FEMA contract to help Gulf Coast residents with one of their most basic needs after Katrina: permanent housing.

The firm partnered with architects to design houses they dubbed Katrina Cottages, modest but sturdy homes that will be built in four Louisiana communities: Abbeville, Lake Charles, and the Treme and Jackson Barracks neighborhoods of New Orleans.

It was a cause that hit home for the partners at Cypress Group. Three of the four — Scott Kirkpatrick (Government ’99), along with Dupuy and Cave — are from Louisiana. Bill Smith (History ’92) is from Memphis.

“It’s fair to say that the hurricane had a tremendous impact on all of us. We felt compelled to stay involved in the hurricane relief effort,” says Dupuy.

More than 40 companies applied to work with FEMA in this endeavor. Cypress Group was one of five ultimately selected.

At the heart of the Cypress Group’s proposal was the argument that traditional posthurricane shelters — mobile homes and travel trailers — are not viable structures to live in full time.

Plus, not only are they susceptible to wear and tear, they are expensive over their life cycle. Between finding land, erecting the homes and taking them down, the cost can run between $60,000 and $90,000, the group argued in its proposal. In the months following Katrina and then Hurricane Rita, several communities even bristled at the thought of allowing these mobile homes and trailers to be built near their cities, fearing they’d turn into permanent FEMA trailer parks, Dupuy says.

By building traditional homes for about one-and-a-half times the cost of a travel trailer or double-wide, he and his partners reasoned, they could help hurricane evacuees actually come home — for good.

“The housing we’re doing now is the most tangible way that we can be involved in the recovery,” Dupuy says.

The Katrina Cottages came to the forefront last summer when an architect named Marianne Cusato debuted the design at a trade show in Orlando. The design, which incorporated the homey front porches so prevalent in New Orleans, generated a lot of buzz. The Cypress Group was paying attention.

Dupuy, who has no experience as an architect, got Cusato on the horn. She agreed to partner with the Cypress Group.

The group also enlisted another architectural heavyweight, Andres Duany, the architect who is considered the father of New Urbanism. New Urbanism is a movement that discourages suburban sprawl and tries to make urban areas as walkable and livable as possible — exactly what the Cypress Group
partners wanted to do to help bring Louisiana back to life.

Altogether, the group won a contract to build hundreds of homes.They expect all of the houses to be built within two years.

Says Cave, the company’s founder, “It’s been very fulfilling.”