The tornado wiped out Greensburg, a town about a mile wide. Residents lived in FEMA trailers meant for about six months, some of them for a year and a half. With TV cameras everywhere, people started to feel like celebrities and expect everything to be free, even with insurance money for their bills.
We rebuilt 13 homes, plus commercial buildings. A lot of the town never got finished, and we were working on more projects that we walked away from. We left after about a year and a half, and the GCs ended up finishing them.
Free materials don't make a project that nobody will pay to finish. And the off-gassing FEMA trailer was the least green thing in the whole program.
Some common spaces were completed. It turned out to be kind of a disaster at the end.
Attention changes behavior. A rebuild that runs on donated materials and cameras still needs clients who pay their bills.