Crescent City has golden opportunity: Ask Hugo

What's that old saw about making lemonade?

Really, New Orleans is now an urban planner's ultimate dream. Take an established city with its population and (most important) identity, flatten it, start over, rebuild with the city's own traditions and identity as a base.

That's what's happening in New Orleans now, four years after Hurricane Katrina's devastation. Here's an account from Time: (Watch it; there's a bothersome popup ad.)

... in the years since, the Crescent City has quietly embraced a new and unexpected role as a laboratory for green building. Sustainable development groups that range from the international nonprofit Global Green to earth-friendly celebrities like Brad Pitt descended on New Orleans, determined not just to build the city back, but to build it back green. "It's going to come back," says Matt Petersen, the president of Global Green USA. "But we want to build it better than it was before." No organization is doing more to green New Orleans than Global Green USA, the American arm of the international environmental organization that was founded by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. That begins with the Holy Cross project, an entire sustainable village being built in the city's flood-damaged Lower Ninth Ward, with the help of Home Depot's corporate foundation. Eventually the village will include five sustainable homes, along with an 18-unit green apartment building and a community center. Three homes have been completed so far, including one that is serving as a de facto visitor's center. The point of the project is not just to provide greener homes for New Orleans's returning residents, but also to provide training for the local building community in green standards."

Twenty years ago this month, Hurricane Hugo slammed into Charleston, SC. I wasn't living there at the time, but when I arrived in 1997 some rebuilding work was still going on.

By many accounts, pre-Hugo Charleston was a mess, with falling-apart neighborhoods and a who-cares attitude. But in the years since, an interesting thing happened:

The historic old town became a blank slate, and rebuilding had a great many options. To look at it 20 years later, Hugo performed a sweep-and-clear on the town, removing the old junk. That's when the rebuilders decided to play into Charleston's strength -- a historically significant city, one of the seats of the Old South.

This was also a happy coincidence in timing, as Hugo hit in the approximately 15 minutes that the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) had a clue.

In a perverse way, Hugo was the best thing to ever happen to Charleston. And, 20 years later, more people are agreeing with that.

Photo: A house under construction in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans in the "Make It Right" program is designed to be extremely eco-friendly. Charlie Varley / Sipa