Model cottage project moving forward at last

Ocean Springs development runs counter to a spate of bad development in Mississippi.

Cottage Square, a model cluster of new urbanist cottages that was planned more than two years ago for Ocean Springs, Mississippi, as a response to Hurricane Katrina, is finally making rapid progress toward completion.
The Gulf Coast city’s Board of Aldermen voted July 30 to allow a mix of residential and commercial uses on the two-acre site that was chosen by the developers — the Katrina Cottage Group, led by architect Bruce Tolar. The approval paved the way for the developers to erect eight 400-square-foot “Mississippi Cottages” for residential use.
Since announcing the project in 2006, the group had erected four Katrina Cottages on the property, using one of them as a display model and filling the others with commercial uses — hair-cutting, real estate, and contracting businesses, plus Tolar’s architectural practice. The July approval authorized the developers to add cottages that people will live in.
“This is something we have looked forward to since the governor’s Renewal Forums in 2005,” Ben Brown of PlaceMakers planning consultants told the Sun Herald, noting that it will provide the first opportunity for people to see Mississippi Cottages “in a real neighborhood setting.”

Missed opportunities
Progress toward constructing new urbanist neighborhoods and mixed-use centers on the Gulf Coast has been much slower than was anticipated when Governor Haley Barbour welcomed dozens of new urbanist planners and designers to the Renewal Forum in Biloxi in the fall of 2005. At that time, Barbour made a point of promising that decisions about how to build would be made at the local level, not imposed upon communities by the state.
Perhaps partly as a consequence of the lack of state (or regional) direction, most of what’s been built on the Coast since the hurricane has been a continuation of sprawl — disappointing many new urbanists who tried to steer communities onto a different path. Some municipalities have adopted the SmartCode, but what has predominated has been single-use, automobile-dependent development.
Mississippians remain as reliant as ever on driving to jobs, stores, and other destinations — even though a sizable proportion of the residents of America’s poorest state (where 19.3 percent of the population is reported to be in poverty) cannot afford such a petroleum-consuming way of life.
A national survey in May by the Oil Price Information Service found Mississippians suffering disproportionately from the past year’s run-up in gasoline prices. The survey disclosed that in 13 counties across the US, people spent 13 percent or more of their family income on gasoline. Five of those counties were in Mississippi. “People are giving up meat so they can buy fuel,” The New York Times reported in a story on the privations being visited especially upon the Mississippi Delta.
The Coast is more prosperous than the Delta, but the coastal communities contain many economically stressed households, which have a hard time coping with the expense of disconnected, automobile-dependent development. New urbanists working on the Coast have recently complained on the Gulf-Urb listserv about the preponderance of bad decisions on how and where to build.
Cottage Square, on Government Street (old US 90) in Ocean Springs, just east of Biloxi, is an attempt to demonstrate the potential of small, walkable, mixed-use developments and of diminutive cottages that can withstand winds up to 150 mph.
“Adding the full-time residential component means this will probably be the first post-Katrina infill, mixed-use cottage cluster neighborhood in the storm zone,” says Brown. “It’s on a bus line in Ocean Springs, a few minutes from the historic downtown, and within walking distance of a full-service grocery store, a YMCA that offers daycare, and other commercial services.”
The eight one-bedroom residential cottages being added to the compound are part of the Mississippi Alternative Housing program, intended for people who have been displaced by Katrina. “We are asking for at least a 24-month rental period, but residents can live there indefinitely,” Ken McCool of PBS&J, a liaison for the housing program, told the Sun Herald.
Compensating for the small interiors are sizable front porches. In addition to the eight new units, two cottages designed by Steve Mouzon are expected to be built. A modular two-story cottage is also under consideration.
Brown acknowledges that “there’s been considerable resistance on the Coast to permitting small-scale units on small lots in existing neighborhoods.” Nonetheless, he and others hope that Cottage Square will spur more infill projects using dwellings of this sort, creating mixed-use neighborhoods.