Essay by Eric Worrall
Who is going to pay? Hurricane Katrina victims are still suffering the consequences of Brad Pitt’s catastrophic attempt to turn the rebuild into a showpiece for eco-friendly construction.
Charity that agreed to bail out Brad Pitt’s foundation for $20.5million owed to Hurricane Katrina victims STILL hasn’t paid up after new homes backed by the actor fell into ruins
- Global Green has been ordered to secure $10million in two months after it agreed to pay $20.5million in August 2022 to bail out Brad Pitt’s foundation
- Pitt’s foundation Make It Right built more than 100 homes for Hurricane Katrina victims in New Orleans that were allegedly poorly built after falling into disrepair
- Global Green agreed to pay for the repairs without having the money and blamed Pitt’s troubled past as reason why it struggled to come up with the sum
By ALYSSA GUZMAN FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 04:04 AEST, 14 April 2023 | UPDATED: 04:44 AEST, 14 April 2023
The nonprofit that bailed out Brad Pitt‘s foundation for more than $20million owed to Hurricane Katrina victims still hasn’t paid up after new homes backed by the actor fell into ruins.
The 59-year-old actor’s organization Make It Right built more than 100 homes in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. But the victims sued, alleging that the homes were poorly built after giving way to rot, mold and structural defects.
Global Green, who previously worked with Pitt, agreed to pay $20.5million in an August 2022 settlement with the Bullet Train actor’s foundation. However, CEO Bill Bridges claimed the nonprofit was told it would not have to follow the tight 10-day deadline.
When Global Green was unable to come up with funds, it attempted to back out of the agreement, blaming Pitt’s ex-wife Angelina Jolie‘s abuse lawsuit against him as reason why it was unable to raise funds. However, the company was unsuccessful and has been ordered to pay back $10million in two months and the other $10.5million will be re-evaluated.
Global Green also faces a contempt hearing on October 2 after the judge lost confidence in the organization’s intervention, according to the Hollywood Reporter
…
Read more: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11969835/Charity-agreed-bail-Brad-Pitts-foundation-20-5M-paid.html
A key point to note, these eco-homes were subsidised, but they weren’t gifts. Poor people whose homes were devastated still had to borrow substantial sums of money and help pay for construction. But the price of accepting that charitable help, the homes apparently had to be eco-homes.
From Hollywood Reporter;
… “I just saw what needed to be done,” Pitt told Architectural Digest in 2009, two years after Make It Right began, “and I said, ‘Why not?’ ” Pitt, who broke ground on the project alongside former President Bill Clinton, enlisted a roster of Pritzker Prize-winning architects, including Frank Gehry, Shigeru Ban and Thom Mayne.
In time, though, Make It Right’s beneficence encountered stark reality, both for the new homeowners — these weren’t gifts; the residents had taken out mortgages — as well as for Pitt. “We went into it incredibly naive,” he explained to New Orleans paper The Times-Picayune in 2015. “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.” …
Read more: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/brad-pitt-charity-mess-katrina-victims-stranded-1235371222/
Perhaps if the focus had been on building good homes rather than building eco-friendly homes, Katrina victims who bought into the scheme would have had a happier outcome.
Where does Mikhail Gorbachev, the last dictator of the Soviet Union, fit into this mess?
Mikhail Gorbachev founded Green Cross International in 1993, and along with Diane Meyer-Simon went on to found the US affiliate, Global Green – the organisation which Hollywood Reporter claims faces a contempt of court hearing in October. Gorbachev was a busy man after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he worked hard to advance the green movement.
I hope Katrina victims find a speedy resolution, they have certainly been waiting long enough. Who knows, maybe the parent charity Gorbachev founded can help make good the Global Green shortfall, by locating some of the 2-3000 metric tons of gold which allegedly went missing in the wake of the Soviet collapse.
As Tim Blair observed quite a few years ago –
“nothing ‘green’ ever works properly”
And there is no such thing as a “green job.” There are just jobs. Those that produce or provide something useful, and those that don’t.
You thought “green job” meant environmentally friendly? Rookie mistake.
“Green jobs” refers to the color of the money going into the pockets of all of the participants in the grift.***
(***At least in the U.S. If we switched to multi-colored money like other countries, could we waste fewer greenbacks on these scams?)
Green jobs destroy real jobs usually on a ratio 1:3.
What progress! Hurricane Katrina was in 2005.
Can’t wait for the entire electrical generation system to be replaced.
Green = unripe…not fit for consumption…gives you a bellyache
Ah, I get it–‘Eco-Friendly’ means they decompose quickly, like treated plastic.
Who will pay? The owners who did not run away from “green” and “eco-friendly”.
Perhaps shaming Pitt publicly to fulfill his pledge to these people might spur him to make a further effort to put his money (and those of his green pals) where his mouth is.
Btw, Gorbachev became a member of the Club of Rome, the instigator behind much of the concocted misinformation on climate.
Construction is harder than it looks on TV home improvement shows, or artists and activists think. I do not know what the construction defects were in these houses, but trying to be green and building a good house would seem incompatible goals.
Is this them….
We’re to presume that ‘Modern’,’Eco’,’Right’ means making them entirely out of wood, with no windows and more money spent on gaudy coloured paint than actual substance.
Especially that the wood used is cheap softwood and not given effective protection against incessant high humidity and the resulting damp.
We can only guess.
What certainly is more wrong than a wrong thing, (assuming that that part of the world gets a bit windy now and again), is the very shallow roof angle
Those nearly flat roofs wont drain and shed water very effectively, depending on wind direction (is that why they suffered damp and mould) but especially that even in a brisk breeze, they will behave like aircraft wings = they will have immense ‘lift’
If you want the roof of any house to be strong against the wind, you need a steeply angled roof.
(Yes it seems crazy but its true)
Then when a strong wind blows up, the airflow over the roof ‘stalls’ – doesn’t give ‘lift’ and thus the roof stays where it should.
i.e. On your house and NOT in the neighbour’s garden
(Boeing Aircraft Co will tell you all about ‘stalling’ if you ask nicely and they’ve got over their embarrassment of a few years ago)
Looking at the homes in the picture, the charity would have done far better by the affected people if they had simply gotten modular pre-fab homes (the kind that come on a couple of flat bed trucks) and put those in. But I guess those wouldn’t have been “green”….
You could always repaint them GREEN of course you could then be called out for Green Washing
Pitt: “… Just thinking we can build homes — how hard is that?” And still believing we can fundamentally remake an industrial society in a couple of decades. The fact that we have a majority of ‘leaders’ in the West believing that is mind bogging. This is not ending well.
All they really know how to do is projectile vomit money by the tens-of-millions. The rest is supposed tobe magic.
“Just thinking we can build homes – how hard is that?”
We now have an elite political class with next to zero real world experience in building anything that thinks exactly like this. Just dispense a bunch of money and stuff gets built. How hard can it possibly be?
Clearly it is a lot harder than he thinks. But the rest of us already knew that.
It’s on par with their knowledge of agriculture. “How hard can it be? Just stick some seeds in the ground and wait!”
“Gorbachev was a busy man after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he worked hard to advance the green movement.”
The head commie is a greenie. No wonder the greenies are called watermelons: green on the outside; red on the inside. (Cue Gomer Pyle.)
What the heck is an “eco home”? Wikipedia has the usual — insulation, triple-paned windows, composting toilets, grey water, yada yada yada — but nothing jumps out as making them harder to build properly, only more expensive for no real gain.
It sounds mostly as if some fly-by-night builder saw an opportunity to separate some fool from his money.
No, they hauled in some world-renowned architects and designed and built wildly impractical housing that didn’t suit ordinary peoples’ lifestyles nor local environmental conditions. Did you see the silly, effete designs?
Kermit said it best….It’s not easy to be green.
I don’t get it. Whether they were built green or not wouldn’t they have to meet local building codes? The people in New Orleans/Louisiana know what is proper and what isn’t. There had to be more going on.
Brad Pitt isn’t subject to building codes, he’s a hollyweed celebrity 🙄
So long as two or three million went into the pockets of the local politicians and inspectors, there was no such thing as “building codes.”
You mean lefties cannot do anything worthwhile in the real world? Say it isn’t so.
“Green Cross International”
This was the British wing
https://youtu.be/CLeK1LKZKiI
Green Cross Man was Bristols
Dave Prowse: the Darth Vader actor.
At least the Green Cross Man had a useful purpose in life, he taught thousands of kids how to cross the road properly.
“Green” used to be a symbol for “alive and good”because it’s the color of chlorophyll essential to photosynthesis in plants.
Green has degenerated to a buzzword for crackpot limousine liberals pretending to do good, while understanding nothing. It’s become a rationale for clearcutting forests in order to pave them with dead solar panels, and to build gimcrack houses in flood zones as publicity stunts.
“…that were allegedly poorly built after falling into disrepair”
Seems like a time warp. I could imagine something being poorly built BEFORE falling into disrepair.
As much as Gorbi as admired in Europe, he was hated in Russia. He made life there even more desperate. It was the dictatorship of the proletariat and the prolétaire had no bread.
Wow. This story I didn’t know about. It’s a perfect model of the entire Green Enterprise. I believe one can use it to predict its future. It has four ‘principal components’:
1) It promises an idyllic, new, cleaner, cheaper, greener happier, ecology-friendly future.
2) It delivers a horror show of misery, double digit inflation, shuttering of major industries, decimation of avion, bat, insect, whale, dolphin… populations, sterilization of 100s of thousands of km^² of land, forest and seascape …
3) Its purpose is to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.
4) It actually doesn’t work.
Are the defects in design or construction? Slipshod construction is slipshod construction, green or otherwise. Perhaps unqualified contractors were used?