Brian Opert of Trumbull has a difficult time describing what he sees in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
“The enormity of it is something you can”™t comprehend. If you take a video or a photograph, you still don”™t get the impact. When you”™re standing there, it”™s jaw dropping. You drive over a bridge into a neighborhood of 10,000 houses, and they”™re gone. You can”™t express that in English, and video doesn”™t do it.”
The devastation, he said, “just can”™t be believed. In St. Bernard Parish, 30,000 houses were wrecked. They”™re gone, destroyed. Westport has 30,000 people. Think of the whole town of Westport gone. How would you begin to rebuild it? Where do you begin?”
Opert, at least, sees a beginning in New Orleans, where he and a Canadian partner formed a company to build concrete houses that can withstand high winds, high water, termites, rodents and ”“ “because this is New Orleans” ”“ bullets. Opert and his partner, John Polsoni, are about ready to unveil the first of what they hope will be 400 concrete houses a year into the foreseeable future to help rebuild the devastated city.
“The first one is in the 9th Ward, the politically famous area where mostly poor people have lived for generations,” Opert said. “Our project is not affordable housing, that”™s not our focus. Our focus is a family with two people working with a couple of kids who have been living in a trailer for a couple of years. There”™s been a lot of worry and upset about the poor people, but not a lot for the working couple living in a 380-square-foot trailer with their kids.”
What Opert hopes to provide through his New Orleans-based Precast Building Solutions company are “safe structures at a good price” ”“ $200,000 or so for a 1,300-square-foot, three-bedroom, two-bath house. Based on current real estate values of comparable homes, the price is reasonable for the size, safety and speedy construction of the house, he said. And once the production of the precast homes begins in earnest, the company should be able to complete a house and put it on the market in just 21 days. “We can move very quickly once we have the engineering down.”
Best decision
Opert”™s path to building homes to replace Katrina-wrecked dwellings actually began in the mid-1990s when he was with First Connecticut in Norwalk, a small mortgage company that focused on helping borrowers who had their mortgages foreclosed by the Resolution Trust Corp. ”“ which was formed to clean up the nationwide failure of banks and the upheaval of foreclosed properties.
A group of Canadians, including Polsoni, was seeking financing from First Connecticut to develop housing in Jamaica, Opert said. The idea was to build 700-square-foot precast concrete houses that were basically four walls and two slabs for a roof with a skylight for cool air. The Jamaican government had agreed to buy the houses and resell them to families in the poverty-stricken country. The government had a program to lend $60,000 to families to buy the houses, but because of “unbelievable incompetence and corruption,” the project fell through, Opert said. “There was demand and money for the houses (but) the Canadians didn”™t want to pay bribes.”
The idea of building the Jamaican concrete houses, however, was right up Opert”™s alley. He started his professional career in the early 1970s as a community organizer, “working with neighborhoods and communities to help make change.” He earned a master”™s degree in community organization from the University of Maryland, then moved to Boston to work with the Boston Housing Authority as a community organizer. “It was during the (President Lyndon) Johnson era, and there was a great deal of money available to upgrade and modernize public housing,” he said. “One of the requirements was that residents had to be participants in how the money was spent, so the Housing Authority had to get tenants organized to participate in spending housing funds.”
He was with the city for three years, then was loaned to the state”™s housing program, where he administered funds that were given back to Boston. He left in 1976 when Michael Dukakis became governor “and hired incredibly incompetent people.” Opert was tenured and “they couldn”™t fire me, but I was young and pretty radical,” and he left government to form his own business in Boston managing troubled subsidized public housing.
Before long “I was managing 43,000 apartments in 216 communities across the state” through his Opert Housing Enterprises, which eventually morphed into managing commercial space. “I had a full-scale property management company with $110,000 a-month payroll,” he said. He became a certified property manager in 1975, and his company “moved from public housing to dealing with blue chip, top-quality commercial tenants.”
In 1983, “I became a single dad with two sons,” he said. “I had been living the life of Riley in Boston, and decided it was not the place to raise kids.” He “literally closed up shop” and moved back home to Westport, where his parents agreed to look after his children during the day, taking them to school and picking them up. “My oldest son is 33, the youngest is 29, and looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made,” he said.
A real challenge
Opert joined a Stamford real estate firm in its property management department and stayed for three years before joining a Manhattan firm that developed and managed medical office buildings in metropolitan New York, commuting to Manhattan until the real estate market tanked, taking the company he was working for with it. He joined First Connecticut, then in 1998 started his own lending company, Sterling Commercial Capital in Fairfield, which he downsized this past June from five people to “just me and my wife” in their Trumbull home so he could concentrate on the New Orleans project.
Over the past year Opert and Polsoni evolved the 700-square-foot Jamaican houses into 1,300- and 1,400-square-foot two- and three-bedroom homes that will be built on 58 30-foot pilings driven into what is “essentially mud,” he said. “If you put up a little outbuilding for your lawnmower, the next summer it will have sunk 3 inches. We really had no idea of the soil conditions when we started.”
And on the drawing boards are 2,000-square-foot, two-story townhouse modules that can be grouped in six, eight or 10 units. “We can put in a row house community or build 400 units to make a little village. They”™re all precast and will go up very quickly and cost effectively. We”™re looking at 78,000 apartments that were wrecked by Katrina, so rebuilding is a real challenge.”
First, however, is dealing with the reality of New Orleans. “Imagine the Post Road in Westport with no gasoline stations, no electricity, no hardware stores. Imagine driving 10 miles down the Main Street and it”™s just devastation; you can”™t even get a cup of coffee. There”™s no water, no sewer, the leadership is living in trailers surrounding the town hall. Imagine Westport”™s town hall with 60 trailers around it, that there”™s no place for police and firemen to live.”
Katrina destroyed more than 245,000 houses in an area that would stretch along the Connecticut shore line all the way into part of Massachusetts, he said. “We want to build 400 houses a year. We”™ll build a half-dozen spec houses and then build to suit. We”™re already starting to take orders.”
And if all goes well, Opert and Polsoni could begin licensing the construction techniques to other builders in the New Orleans area and around the country and even globally ”“ “in any country that”™s impacted by difficult weather.”
But first the challenge is New Orleans. “We”™ve got 245,000 units to replace. We”™ll keep going as long as there”™s a demand.”
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