News Tulane University receives $300,000 HUD Grant
Tulane University’s School of Architecture received a $300,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on Monday to help rebuild New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The HUD funding was distributed through the Universities Rebuilding America Partnership Community Design program, which provides funds to schools in communities affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Tulane plans to use the funding to develop the Tulane URBANbuild Program. URBANbuild, to be located in the new Tulane City Center, is an outreach community design and construction program for post-Katrina reconstruction efforts in the Greater New Orleans area. The program will provide quality affordable housing to traditionally underserved communities, by providing urban planning, neighborhood design and innovative sustainable prototypical housing solutions to rehabilitate and revitalize areas of the city historically dominated by blight and abandonment. During the two-year grant period, URBANbuild proposes to create 12 urban neighborhood plans for four target areas among the 72 identified pre-Katrina neighborhoods in New Orleans, design 16 multi-family housing prototypes, and design and build four new homes for the city. Ila Berman, Associate Dean of the School of Architecture, grant writer and principal investigator on the project, will be co-directing the URBANbuild program with Byron Mouton, a Tulane Clinical Professor of Architecture. Other partners in the Tulane URBANbuild program include Neighborhood Housing Services, Inc. (NHS) of New Orleans, Public Architecture of San Francisco, and the Tulane Center for Bioenvironmental Research (CBR). The program plans to publish the results of its activities in both web-based and print media formats for free distribution to neighborhood and governmental agencies throughout the city. See the Tulane City Center page for more information.
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