Where Did Brad Pitt’s Make it Right Foundation Go Wrong?

“They gave us a tour of a house that was already built. It was going to be different,” says Alfreda Claiborne, a resident of one of the houses Brad Pitt’s nonprofit Make It Right Foundation built in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

“We were going to be saving a lot on our electricity. It was storm protected. They [were] telling us stuff,” she remembers. “The impression we were under, the way the houses were built, if a storm did come, it would float.”

Claiborne, 67, moved into a three-bedroom home on Tennessee Street with her husband, three children, and one grandchild in 2009. Situated on a corner, the house is a bleached beige rhombus with exaggerated geometric eaves, hovering on pilings high above the ground. It tapers downward in the back, where sheets of corrugated metal create a decorative checkerboard pattern around the multiple patios.

“The house was nice when [we] moved in. It was everything we wanted,” Claiborne says. “We were all excited about this house.” But within a few short years of moving in, she says their happy home began to—quite literally—crumble beneath their feet.

“Our porch, the wood is rotten. We have a hole in the porch. The railing came apart. Right now we have problems with the light switches. It’s just coming apart,” she says. The rotting, moldy stairwells and porch don’t just smell: they’re dangerous both for Claiborne’s granddaughter and for her husband, who had a stroke a few years ago.

According to Claiborne, the family has made multiple calls to Make It Right representatives, but have never heard back. “When you leave a message, they wouldn’t return your call. I just stopped calling them,” she says. The Claibornes didn’t have the money to fix the major issues themselves, as they sunk what was left of their savings into the down payment.

Thirteen years after their original home in the Lower Ninth Ward drowned and after they were displaced to Fort Worth, Texas, to wait out the recovery, the family is facing hardship once again. “Yes, I wanted to come back,” Claiborne says of her return to New Orleans. “But if I knew how we would be treated and taken advantage of, I wouldn’t have come.”

Hurricane Katrina flooded 80 percent of New Orleans when it hit in August 2005, killing more than 1,500 people in the state of Louisiana alone and displacing more than one million in the Gulf Coast region. While some residents could return to their homes within days, an estimated 600,000 households remained displaced a month later. The hurricane remains the largest residential disaster in American history.

The Lower Ninth Ward, a working-class, predominantly African-American neighborhood on the banks of the Mississippi River, was completely submerged by the hurricane. When actor Brad Pitt visited the area two years after the storm, he was alarmed by how little had been done to rebuild. Putting to use his considerable power and wealth, he pulled together 21 of the world’s most famous architects, as well as homeowners and community organizers in the Ward, and launched a project to build houses that were affordable, environmentally friendly, and aesthetically pleasing.