By Lena Babaeva Coradini

There has been a lot of press about New Orleans on the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.  In one interview about the Make it Right Foundation, Brad Pitt, who is involved with the foundation, provided a couple of great quotes about the value of green building for disaster victims that I think are worth noting:

“Too often we give disaster victims cheap building products, slipshod materials, and then put on top of them the burden of energy bills and medical bills. You know it’s the badly built levees that destroyed these people’s lives. We needed, as a country, to do something right for them. A new paradigm was needed.”

"These people are pioneers. They're pioneers, and this is now the greenest neighborhood in the world. That's not bad. I want to tell you, these homes — last, last month, these homes, every one of them but one was producing more energy than they were — than they were eating. So families were getting bills that were $8, $12, just processing fees to tell them they didn't owe anything for utilities. That's an amazing story. And there's no reason now to build any other way. There's just no reason. So I see this place as a template for the future."