Sabrina LaFaye is effusive in her praise for UrbanBuild, a class at the Tulane University School of Architecture and the Built Environment in New Orleans that offers hands-on experience in homebuilding.
“I joined for the practical skills and exited with new perspectives, relationships and self-confidence,” the Nashville native told Homes.com. Now working on her master’s degree in industrial design at Auburn University in Alabama, LaFaye, 25, is still pursuing a way to help bring what she learned at Tulane to more people.
Begun 20 years ago, UrbanBuild produces one house — or, in one instance, a public market — per year. Until four years ago, the program was dedicated to aiding in the region’s recovery from Hurricane Katrina. For the most recent builds, the goal has been to add to the affordable housing inventory.
For organizations fighting to house people, the work of programs such as UrbanBuild is indispensable.
“It gives us an opportunity to build sustainably and take advantage of all the research this program provides,” said Lou Anne White, executive director of nonprofit Louvis Services, for which UrbanBuild has built a home and a duplex.
As vital as building low-cost housing is, programs that provide students with hands-on experience in construction can produce something equally crucial to addressing the U.S. housing crisis: capable builders with a passion for the work ahead.
“The best gift ever is to be able to work on something and be excited the whole time to see it come together,” LaFaye said. “At the end, I was just like, I want more.”
Katrina shaped the program
UrbanBuild began conceptually in the summer of 2005. “Some faculty and graduate students had this idea to start their own design-build program,” said Byron Mouton, who is the program's director and an architect. “And then Katrina hit.”
The powerful Category 4 hurricane made landfall in August that year. Katrina is estimated to have destroyed more than 134,000 homes in New Orleans alone and over a million in the wider Gulf region, according to research by The Data Center, a southeastern Louisiana foundation.
After the devastation, Mouton and colleagues saw a “greater mission” for their program, he said. The school applied for and received a $400,000 grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, committing to build four houses within four years.
“And that grant allowed us to get the ball rolling,” Mouton said.
After satisfying its agreement with HUD, the program turned to the larger community for organizations looking for housing. “We’re always looking for people to work with,” Mouton said. “And money, of course.”
UrbanBuild worked with a variety of nonprofits, churches and NGOs, including building a home for Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation. “We had a great experience. I wanted to be on the record with that,” Mouton said.
For the first 16 years of the program, the built homes were sold with subsidies to struggling buyers. In 2021, the Bethlehem Lutheran Church of New Orleans started a model of buying and managing the homes as affordable rental properties, which is also the model that Louvis uses.
Years of watching the process of getting people homes taught Mouton that the trials of housing people didn’t stop once they owned the house. “Too many people bought too much house,” he said. “People who have never had a house before pursue the American dream and then get overwhelmed by the responsibility of owning a house.”
Solving problems by thinking small
The program is a yearlong course. In the fall semester, students work on the design and find a site for the project. A small group of students is usually assigned the task of writing code-compliant legal documents to apply for the building permits from the relevant municipalities.
But going into fall 2023, UrbanBuild had yet to land a partner, which meant there was no site for a home. So, instead, Mouton and the students decided to produce a tiny home, one that could be constructed in a warehouse space the program had and then transported when a partner was identified.
“We designed the project inside in a way that it could be dismantled,” Mouton said.
Mouton saw this model as a first step toward a larger goal of creating multifamily housing. “We’ve been wanting to tackle multifamily housing for a long time, but the scale was challenging,” he said. “However, the scale of tiny houses made it possible."
Multiple homes can fit on a lot or be joined together to make larger units, he explained. "Because they’re tiny, we can do them one at a time, and we can do them with better quality.”
The final design for what became known as Build 19 (the 19th project from UrbanBuild) was a one-bedroom, one-bathroom home of roughly 500 square feet. The hundreds of individual components could be flat-packed and transported in about three trips using only a standard pickup truck and two-axle trailer.
LaFaye leads
In spring, UrbanBuild becomes the students’ entire course load. “We meet every morning at 8 a.m., and we work until sunset six days a week,” Mouton said.
Build 19 was LaFaye’s class. “I had never worked on a project that large with that many tools,” she said. “It felt like I learned a new tool every day or a new use for tools like the triangle, which I did not realize had infinite uses.”
LaFaye said her confidence grew daily, and she saw the same change in many of her classmates. At one point, the students decided the home could use a partition wall between the kitchen and the bedroom. “The designing doesn’t stop” during the building process, LaFaye said.
Mouton selected LaFaye to lead a team of students on the wall project. There, she learned how to use a biscuit joiner, direct and delegate tasks and work with contractors. The students weren’t allowed to handle tasks that required licensed professionals, such as plumbing, heating, ventilation, air conditioning and electrical work.
“This is one of my favorite memories,” LaFaye said. “It is a reassuring feeling as an undergrad to prove your competence in all these skills you have been accumulating and lead your peers.”
She also made a connection with a metal supplier they needed to make aluminum shutters. “These [jobs] may seem small, but for someone who has never done it before, autonomy is a confidence booster that makes a difference,” she said.
Working inside admittedly cut down on some of the less predictable elements of building outside. “To prefabricate in a warehouse gives you time because you don’t have to worry about the weather,” LaFaye said.
Still, the amount of work was eye-opening. “It is a labor of love,” she said. “You are challenged by sometimes rigorous days of construction. I have so much respect for people who make this their whole career.”
Louvis steps in
During the build, Mouton connected with Louvis Services. White, of Louvis, was interested but wanted to make sure that a home constructed off-site and by students would be of high enough quality for her needs.
“They would visit us weekly while fabricating the home and were repeatedly impressed by the students,” Mouton said. “I think [the students’] commitment and enthusiasm won the respect of Louvis.”
“They bring all of this creativity and energy,” White said.
Louvis agreed to buy the home. In the transaction, Tulane acts as a mortgager, loaning money from the program’s endowment to let the organization purchase the house. Tulane loaned $150,000 to Louvis, which it then repaid by the end of the year.
The house was eventually delivered to 2228 Flood St. in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward to house a formerly homeless man. White said the residents are allowed to stay as long as they would like.
Because it was being given to someone who was formerly homeless, the students added a screen and securely locking door to the porch. People who have been sleeping on the street often feel most comfortable on the porch for the first couple of nights.
LaFaye got to meet the recipient of the home. “I didn’t have words. We were just in awe of our ability to give this to him,” she said. “You can feel how much this can really change someone’s perspective of hope.”
Louvis agreed to another home the following year. “They have a very tight timeline,” White said. “There are not going to be a bunch of construction delays because they’ve got to graduate in May.”
In 2025, UrbanBuild built a tiny-house duplex, this time on-site. “They’re designed in such a way that if the family grows, they can knock out a wall between them,” Mouton said.
'Find yourself in serving others'
The experience stayed with LaFaye after she graduated in 2024. While driving to Auburn, she was recording voice notes on her phone about how to bring a program like this to more people, either as a business or as a nonprofit.
“I realized, there is a fire,” she said.
On the one hand, programs like this are a practical measure to increase the affordable housing inventory. “As a model, it significantly reduces the cost of labor,” LaFaye said. “And in return, we get a lot of education. So it really helps everyone involved.”
But she sees the primary benefit as social, almost spiritual.
“When you’re in service of other people, that does something profound. You can find yourself in serving others,” LaFaye said. “[The students] come from different backgrounds, different beliefs, different interests. That is the amazing part, that we’re working together for a common goal. It has nothing to do with yourself and is all about another person.”
LaFaye would like to see similar programs expanded to other kinds of educational disciplines. “Maybe it doesn’t just have to be architecture students. So many people are eager to do more.”
White, from Louvis, said the interest in such programs is definitely there. After Louvis got their homes, White said a representative from a nearby Native American reservation called her.
“She loved the idea of working with the university,” White said. “It definitely can work in other places.”
For LaFaye, that first home was only the beginning. “It was a tiny home, but to us, it’s big.”
This story was updated on Nov. 13 to correct Byron Mouton's name.