Canadaville

Canadaville is a project by Canadian industrialist Frank Stronach to build an experimental model community for people displaced by Hurricane Katrina. It is situated 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 are 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, which numbered over 200 by August 2006, Katrina's first anniversary, 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."

External links

* [http://www.canadaville.org/ Magnaville Website]
* [http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2005/09/30/m1a_utopia_0930.html Palm Beach Post story "Billionaire builds evacuee enclave"]
* [http://www.dispatch.com/dispatch/content/insight/stories/2007/07/01/Katrina-Canadaville.ART_ART_07-01-07_G3_1I755HG.html Columbus Dispatch story "Rural haven"]
* [http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/forcesofnature/canadaville.html CBC News "Canadaville: Donating a village to Louisiana"]
* [http://www.sustainableinnovations.biz/magnaville.html Sustainable Innovations Inc., Magnaville Farms]
* [http://www.eastottawa.ca/article-cp55250030-Canadaville-a-haven-for-Katrina-survivors-who-can-follow-its-strict-rules.html Orleans Star, Quebec: " Canadaville a haven for Katrina survivors who can follow its strict rules"]