FEMA trailers will live in infamy.
Less notorious, but perhaps just as faulty, is much of the housing on Indian reservations in northern Wisconsin. Houses nicknamed the “chicken coops,” built in the 1970s by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), overheat in summer and freeze in winter. Split-level “matchbook houses” get moldy and have particle board siding that disintegrates. Much of the pre-fabricated housing, including trailers, went up from the 1950s through the 1970s and is seriously outdated.
“There are whole subdivisions like that, and there are long waiting lists for ‘chicken coops’ on some reservations,” said architect Lou Host-Jablonski of Madison’s Design Coalition, who has made it his mission to bring affordable, green, multi-generational housing to the reservations. And, just as importantly, he wants to teach tribal members how to build the houses themselves in order to create vocations.
Host-Jablonski was recruited for the project by Sue Thering, an assistant professor in the UW-Madison Department of Landscape Architecture who has worked in blighted communities in coal country and elsewhere, and was asked for assistance by tribal housing officials.