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Gambit Weekly 40 Under 40
By Frank Etheridge, Kandace Power Graves, Eileen Loh Harrist, David Winkler-Schmit Photos by Donn Young, Todd A. Price, Alex Rawls, Katy Reckdahl, Profiles by Shala Carlson, David Lee Simmons and Michael Tisserand


Nurhan Gokturk, 33
Architect and Partner, Hometime
It is historic or is it Hometime? If you pause to answer that in front of the house at 7937 Olive St., credit Nurhan Gokturk. Gokturk custom-designed a modular shotgun house specifically for the city of New Orleans. His company Hometime hopes to build 80 of them in the next nine months on blighted lots across the city. The goal of his ambitious Project 2020 is to build on 2,020 of the city's blighted lots within the next 10 years. Each house is designed to be different. Most are three-bedroom, two-bath. All have 9-foot ceilings, hardwood floors and traditional design elements outside -- a transom over the door, brackets in the front and a gable on the roof. With a $20,000 government subsidy, the final price tag comes to $79,000, or a monthly mortgage payment of about $490. Gokturk grew up in New York City, in the Sunnyside section of Queens. "Because my family was poor," he says, "I collected popsicle sticks." With those sticks, he would construct cottages -- "I was obsessed with that," he says. He also saved his money and bought kits for rockets and aircraft carriers that he would build -- without looking at the directions. He tested into New York's competitive Brooklyn Technical High School, where he studied architecture. He continued his studies at the Pratt Institute for Architecture and at Harvard University. Before he moved here, he was the United Nations Habitat for Humanity liaison in New York and Istanbul. Gokturk's modest roots gave him passion for affordable housing, he says, something desperately needed in New Orleans, where there's a shortfall of about 20,000 houses. "We're doing a large-scale urban intervention, one house at a time," he says.

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