Canadaville
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Canadaville is a project by Canadian industrialist Frank Stronach to build an experimental model community for people displaced by Hurricane Katrina. It will be on 3.69 square kilometres (912 acres) of land in Simmesport, Louisiana. Rather than simply providing temporary shelter to the evacuees, a measure that often ends up as an exercise in crowd control, Canadaville aims to help its residents integrate into a long-term holistic farming community. It will raise livestock and seafood which will be served at Stronach's Gulfstream Park in Palm Beach, Florida.
The 75 mobile housing units will each be 1420 square feet (132 square meters) in size, and have three bedrooms and two bathrooms, air conditioning, washers, dryers, and other amenities. As former Canadian MP Dennis Mills described it, "this is no FEMA Village".
Residents will be able to stay rent-free for five years, with the requirement that (if able-bodied) they contribute to the community by learning new skills or using their existing skills. Since many of the Katrina evacuees were extremely poor and generally not well-educated, Canadaville's backers hope that the Canadaville experience will help the evacuees gain self-reliance that they didn't have before. Stronach explained, "we would hopefully be able to put in an infrastructure whereby you would create a new life for them, a life of hope, spirit, so that they will be self-supporting and not on welfare. That's the idea."
