Duany is sometimes (and unfairly) likened to a monk laboriously transcribing the texts of the ancients without contributing new ideas for a new time. But style wasn’t what irked him when I brought up the Make It Right project. It was the whole way New Orleans was approaching rebuilding.

“When I originally thought of New Orleans, I was conditioned by the press to think of it as an extremely ill-governed city, full of ill-educated people, with a great deal of crime, a great deal of dirt, a great deal of poverty,” said Duany, who grew up in Cuba. “And when I arrived, I did indeed find it to be all those things. Then one day I was walking down the street and I had this kind of brain thing, and I thought I was in Cuba. Weird! And then I realized at that moment that New Orleans was not an American city, it was a Caribbean city. Once you recalibrate, it becomes the best-governed, cleanest, most efficient, and best-educated city in the Caribbean. New Orleans is actually the Geneva of the Caribbean.”

Duany said that many of the shotgun houses in New Orleans were built by the fathers and grandfathers of people living in them today, and few of them meet building codes. But no one worries about paying mortgages or insurance. “The situation is that the housing is essentially paid off, and it allows people to accumulate leisure,” he said. “What’s special about New Orleans is that it’s the only place in the United States where you can have a first-rate urban life for very little money.” What happened after Katrina, Duany said, was that FEMA and others came to town with detailed requirements for record-keeping and property titles, then insisted on stringent building codes that would make all the houses hurricane-proof. This might seem like common sense, he said, but it’s “essentially unworkable for a Caribbean city.”

So the central problem, according to Duany: “All the do-goody people attempting to preserve the culture are the same do-gooders who are raising the standards for the building of houses, and are the same do-gooders who are giving people partial mortgages and putting them in debt,” he said. “They have such a profound misunderstanding of the culture of the Caribbean that they’re destroying it. The heart of the tragedy is that New Orleans is not being measured by Caribbean standards. It’s being measured by Minnesota standards.”

As an alternative, Duany argues for “opt-out zones” for some of the hardest-hit areas, including the Lower Ninth. Within these zones, residents could rebuild their homes the way the city was originally constructed: by hand, incrementally, and unencumbered by what Duany calls “gold-plated” building regulations or bank requirements. Such zones exist in rural areas, he says, but haven’t been tested in an urban context. He suggested that the money spent on the Better Living Through Modern Green Design homes would be far better spent on a widespread, low-cost self-building program. “The deal is, you can hammer something together any old way, but you won’t have debt. That should be an option. Carrying debt requires a great deal of employment, which undermines a culture of leisure. The key is self-building,” he told me, and added that it might arise somewhere else in the city, perhaps among the Latino construction workers who arrived on the heels of the storm. “It always emerges.”

3105 Law Street

From his front porch, Mingko Aba can look across the street to the house where he was born 59 years ago. Actually, he’s looking slightly downward at it, because his new house is built about five feet up, on piers. He also has a pretty good vantage point for seeing the progress in his Upper Ninth Ward neighborhood, which flooded but was spared the tsunami that swept homes off their foundations across the canal in the Lower Ninth after the levee broke.