Shotgun: The Most Contested House in America

Known by a variety of names in Louisiana, the shotgun house was first formally named by Fred B. Kniffen in his 1936 article on Louisiana house types.¹ Since the pioneering work of John Michael Vlach in the 1970s, the shotgun house in New Orleans has functioned as a bellwether of political commitment to entire subcultures, including their associated social and racial predispositions. Theories of the origins of the shotgun lie deeply enmeshed in larger cultural debates on race and authority in the city. Some see the shotgun as a response to constrained urban lots while others see the building type inextricably linked to the city’s substantial nineteenth-century African American population. These biases lay relatively submerged and unstated, but with the receding flood waters of Hurricane Katrina, when roughly 40 percent of the city’s housing stock was severely damaged or destroyed, the competition between groups and classes for scarce resources and limited funding has brought these contests to the fore (Figure 1).² In New Orleans, it seems everyone has a well-defined idea about what should be preserved and what should be bulldozed. Irreconcilable theories of the origins and value of the shotgun house go to the very heart of the question of what is to be saved. Entire sections of the city are at stake (Figure 2).

Figure 1.

Shotguns destroyed by Katrina in the Ninth Ward, September 2005. FEM A photograph, courtesy CADGIS Laboratory, Louisiana State University.

In New Orleans, the fate of thousands of vernacular houses rests on decisions made by planning commissions and recovery agencies and on their conceptions of the relative value of specific historic architectural types and neighborhoods. As the nation has discovered, Katrina recovery funding has been difficult to acquire. Many thousands of homeowners who lost their homes have gone without meaningful support. Large sections of the city remain almost entirely abandoned thirty-four months after the storm (Figure 3). A sizable proportion of the abandoned and endangered houses are shotgun related, but it is other building types and older neighborhoods considered to be more viable or more culturally significant that are being given priority.

A series of professional, city-sponsored redevelopment plans have favored placing resources into the more highly elevated (and less damaged) sections of the city while transforming heavily flooded residential areas such as the Seventh and the Ninth Wards into depopulated green zones. New Urbanist planning is often touted as the best hope for salvation of the city. The Bring Back New Orleans Commission offered a decisively New Urbanist plan for the city, which included the essential elimination of the majority of the existing housing stock of the “shotgun crescent” of New Orleans.³ The more recent “Unified New Orleans Plan” suggests that those neighborhoods where a “cluster of residents” rebuild for themselves should be supported by public funds. Thinly repopulated areas (including much of the nineteenth-century shotgun crescent) would be abandoned (Figure 4). So draconian have been these plans, and so biased in the direction of removal rather than recovery, that an alternate plan, “The People’s Plan,” was sponsored by the national NGO (nongovernmental organization) Acorn, three American universities, and the National Science Foundation. It addresses the problems of recovery in Planning Districts 7 and 8 (the Seventh through the Ninth Wards), and particularly the Ninth Ward.⁴

Figure 2.

Map of flood depths in Orleans Parish after Katrina, based on Lidar data supplied by the CADGIS Laboratory, drafted by Mary Lee Eggart for the Fred B. Kniffen Cultural Resources Lab, Louisiana State University.

Figure 3.

Wrecked shotgun in the Lower Ninth Ward, December 2005. Photograph by author.

Those sections of Orleans Parish most severely affected by flood waters immediately after Katrina were also the areas where the highest percentage of African American residents lived.⁵ They are also the areas with the lowest percentages of recovery and of returned families, as measured by voter turnout in the 2006 mayoral election and by mail delivery figures. By...