Harvey tips families on edge out of middle class
Tears were in Patricia Noren’s voice when she finally made the call late Monday, Aug. 28. Leaving a message for her landlord, she said the little brick house at 5651 Ludington Drive, the one she had fussed over and adored for 12 years, was now in ruins.
He called back and said she and her family were, in effect, evicted.
The house in the up-and-coming Westbury neighborhood will no doubt be repaired in the march of time and relief money after Hurricane Harvey. But it was understood that night, even if unspoken, the new version likely will be unaffordable for her and someone else will get it.
“Patricia,” he told her, not unkindly, “I’m sorry this happened to you. But this is the end of the road.”
In that moment, the 51-year-old, her newly retired longtime boyfriend and their 19-year-old daughter, Krista, all still numb from a storm that already had taken so much, felt their middle-class life slipping away.
Economists and sociologists who
study downward mobility say the research is usually discussed in terms of job loss or medical crisis as the triggers. It is far less frequent to include natural disasters in the conversation.
“It takes all of those people living on the edge and gives them a shove,” said Elizabeth Fussell, associate professor of population studies and environment studies at Brown University who saw the phenomenon after Hurricane Katrina. “If one piece falls out, the whole thing falls apart and people begin to fall out of the middle class.”
In Houston, even before Harvey swallowed wide swaths of the city, the fragility was in place.
More than half, 52 percent, of the population in the nation’s fourth-largest city don’t have enough savings to live above the poverty line for more than three months if their lives and earnings are upended, said Bradley Hardy, an associate professor of public policy at American University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute who analyzed the city’s economic stability based on U.S. census figures.
“This isn’t just an issue of the city’s poor,” he said. “This is also the moderate- and middle-income people in Houston.”
Roughly a third of Houstonians making between $75,000 to $100,000 do not have three months’ worth of living expenses in savings to fall back on, Hardy said.
The ripple effect for those people, especially for renters like Noren who make considerably less, will be felt in ways large and small.
Even if they don’t lose jobs after a disaster, they may be forced to relocate away from the neighborhoods they know well, the ones they picked for schools to give their children an edge or because of their nearness to work, doctors, baby sitters or family.
The intangible quilt of stitchedtogether social currency and familiarity is a loss rarely counted in storm tallies.
“We make a lot of assumptions based on our houses and the neighborhoods we live in,” said Shannon Van Zandt, professor of landscape architecture and urban planning at Texas A&M University, who studied the disruption and economic slippage people faced after Hurricane Ike. “It is a terrible loss,” she said. One week after Noren heard back from her landlord she wrote a Facebook post to a private neighborhood group:
“I am looking for an apt, but I want to say how much I have loved saying that I am from Westbury. I am sad and sometimes hysterical, but I know things will work out. Somehow. Please keep your eye out for 5651 Ludington … Goodbye ladies, goodbye Westbury.” ‘I loved that house’
In 2005, Noren became a firsttime homeowner at age 39. Her boyfriend, Ahmad Dawoodi, a chef, had just gotten a raise, and she was working part time for $10 per hour as a driver for a community center. A mortgage instead of rent suddenly felt doable if they were careful.
She remembers how proud she felt, how she was sure she had made a good choice, paying $128,900 for the three-bedroom, two-bath house in a neighborhood everyone said was poised to grow in value. She was told the house had never flooded.
She painted walls and haunted thrift stores to assemble the decor, snagging a Pottery Barn sofa and a 1908 cherry dining set for a song. Then in 2011 Dawoodi had a mild stroke and they had no health insurance. He couldn’t work during recovery and the bills began to pile up. Before long they were in foreclosure.
Then the couple was offered the chance to rent the house for $1,000 a month from the investor who held the mortgage, roughly what they were already paying. All they would lose is any claim of ownership and the equity they had earned.
“I was relieved I could stay,” Noren remembers thinking. “I could pretend I still owned the house. I loved that house.”
(Noren declined to name her landlord on the record for fear it might jeopardize her chances of getting another rental. She said he told her that he did not have flood insurance.)
For years the family limited any requests to the owner, trying to fly under the radar because they knew they had a great deal. When the water heater needed replacing, they bought it themselves. When the house took on about 6 inches of water after the Memorial Day flood in 2015, Noren and her family did the cleanup, ripping out carpet and scrubbing walls with bleach. When the Tax Day flood swamped the garage last year they repaired that, too.
Then the rains of Harvey came. Desperate for rescue
From midnight until 4 a.m. on Sunday, Aug. 27, the water began to rise. First it was in the garage, then the kitchen, then everywhere.
Krista Noren said she had thought the days of warnings about a looming catastrophe had been overblown. But then, as she watched water gurgling up through the cracks in the hardwood floors, she got scared.
“It looked like it was boiling,” she said.
Outside, the churning water was mostly clear. Inside, it was the color and smell of raw sewage. At 5 a.m. they began calling 911 and kept calling for the next seven hours.
“We can’t get out!” they took turns yelling into the phone.
“We’ll put you on the list,” was the reply, when they got one at all.
They heard helicopters overhead. Krista called, texted and tweeted everyone she could think of. At one point she sent a message to Mayor Sylvester Turner’s Twitter account. Dawoodi waded through filthy waist-deep water to look for rescuers and had to force the front door open against the current of water keeping it shut. They perched on the highest furniture they could and waited.
Just after noon a boat came by, part of a makeshift neighborhood armada that had formed, plucking people from homes and taking them to Anderson Elementary. Earlier in the day, a high school teacher, Jorge Rodriguez, another Westbury evacuee, had found an open door to a portable classroom at the school, and before long dozens of people began streaming in. The family spent the night on the floor at the school.
By Monday, they were able to wade back to their house. Stumbling from room to room, they grabbed what they could carry and anything that occurred to them in the fog of dismay. A previously packed suitcase. Dawoodi’s green card.
They left food for the cats on a counter, hoping to find a rescue for them later.
The family went to the George R. Brown Convention Center, crammed into a truck like the refugees they were. Krista began to panic when they saw how many others were streaming in. She called her grandfather in California: “Grandpa, you’ve got to get us out of here.”
He found a vacancy at Aloft Houston Downtown about a halfmile from the convention center, and they set off by foot. The wind had turned the rain sideways. The skeleton staff at the hotel had been unable to go home, so everyone was pulling double and triple duty. The desk clerk was doing the cooking but food was running short.
A few days later, sun made a reappearance in Houston. Noren tried to get a rental car, but the only thing she could snag was a U-Haul van. She and her brotherin-law drove to their house with plans to salvage as much as they could. In the end, though, the van pulled away with little inside. A scrapbook. Krista’s baby book. A laptop. A handful of video games. A bicycle since they had no car. Some bowls. A porcelain poodle figurine.
Some people who worked for their landlord were there, too.
“You can’t just leave all of this stuff,” someone said, incredulous they would not take more.
Noren got back in the nearly empty van.
Last week, the state released updated numbers for Harris County: At least 113,000 homes were damaged or destroyed by floodwaters. Many who lived in them are now searching for temporary housing.
Noren and her family are among them.
Lower- to moderate-income renters are the most vulnerable as many recovery resources are geared to homeowners, said Van Zandt at Texas A&M.
As they become priced out of rebuilt neighborhoods, they often end up in less desirable ones.
“Disasters exacerbate pre-existing inequities,” she said, worrying that the income divide in Houston will stretch wider after the storm. It happened after Ike.
After the 2008 storm, Van Zandt said it took lower-value neighborhoods two to four times longer to regain their value than the more affluent ones where houses often actually rose in price.
“Renters are at the will of the market. Landlords can be more choosy,” added Melissa Beeler, a community planner in Houston for the Texas Low Income Housing Information Service. Searching for a new home
Four weeks after Harvey, Noren and her family still do not have a place to live. They moved from the downtown hotel to a Residence Inn not far from Patricia’s job. The room is being paid for with FEMA money, but that will not last forever.
The Transitional Sheltering Assistance was supposed to end Tuesday, but FEMA says it will be extended two more weeks.
Noren guesses she has called on 30 rental properties since the flood. She has had a few nibbles, but most offerings, in areas she wants to live, those that will accept pets, something not too far from her work at a community center in West University, are out of reach.
They can swing $1,225 per month, maybe stretch to $1,300. Lately, she has widened her search into areas she might not have considered before for fear of crime. She has mostly resigned herself that a house is out of the question. Maybe a two-bedroom apartment or duplex.
“For 12 years, I got to live the dream,” she said. “It’s going to take me forever to crawl back up.”
“For 12 years, I got to live the dream. It’s going to take me forever to crawl back up.” Patricia Noren