As floodwaters subside, housing woes swell up
Still living in soaked apartments, Greenspoint residents look for help
Rosa Ruiz and her five children had been living for a week in an apartment with half walls.
Crews had knocked out the drywall and insulation from the chest down at her two-bedroom home in Greenspoint, to prevent mold from growing after the deadly April 18 flood. Clothing was piled high on her remaining furniture.
Ruiz, 42, surveyed what was left of her apartment — $595 per month — and worried her children would get sick by continuing to sleep here. But she saw no other option.
“I don’t have anywhere to go,” she said in Spanish. “There’s no money to look for another apartment.”
Of the more than 1,900 Greenspoint-area families whose apartments took on water during last week’s deluge, hundreds have moved in with relatives or sought shelter from the Red Cross, ultimately receiving temporary hotel rooms from the city. In the storm’s immediate aftermath, these residents who took refuge elsewhere received most of the public’s attention.
Overshadowed were victims like Ruiz, who have stayed in soaked units with nowhere to turn. Now, with the due date looming for May rent, these families
“They feel like our apartments are still livable, which I don’t understand, because there’s no way that somebody with kids can be in that apartment like that.”
Joyce Taylor, a resident of a flooded Greenspoint-area apartment
— thought to be in the hundreds — are facing smaller paychecks and cars that still don’t start, as a dank odor sets in.
Nestled just south of Bush Intercontinental Airport, Greenspoint sits at the intersection of Interstate 45 and Beltway 8, anchored by the dilapidated mall for which it is named. The area has one of the highest concentrations of multi-family housing in the city and a median household income of $27,000 as of 2012, nearly $18,000 below the city average.
Greenspoint did not suffer substantial flood damage in past rains, meaning much of the city’s concern about storm preparedness was focused on other floodprone areas, such as Meyerland. Yet 72 percent of Greenspoint’s apartments are located in a flood zone, said Susan Rogers, director of the University of Houston’s Community Design Resource Center.
Roughly 17 of the 70 complexes located within the boundaries of the management group, the Greenspoint District, flooded April 18, with 210 of the 1,943 inundated units taking on over 6 feet of water.
Cannot find help
More than 125 families staying at the nearby M.O. Campbell shelter were relocated to area hotels last Friday, at a cost of about $1,000 per family per week, funded by the nonprofit Greater Houston Storm Relief Fund.
That figure climbed to 151 on Thursday. Mayor Sylvester Turner said the city was prepared to keep them in hotels for several weeks before moving them into available housing.
Meanwhile, many of those who chose not to go to a shelter have continued to struggle on their own.
Turner spokeswoman Janice Evans said the city does not know how many flood victims are living in their damaged apartments but is working to determine that figure.
“It’s an issue, and we’re aware of it,” Evans said. “In some instances, yes, they should not be there.”
A dehumidifier hummed as Jorrick Banks, 28, stood in the living room of his family’s unit at Durham apartments.
“The living conditions — you might want to say it’s horrible,” Banks said, as his girlfriend tried to peel apart the pages of medical textbooks she had set out to dry.
Banks and his family had stayed at the M.O. Campbell shelter for three nights last week, but he said the Red Cross told them they had to leave after 72 hours.
He, his girlfriend and her mother returned to their apartment, where speckled green mold already had begun to creep up the wall of the porch closet.
Banks heard that President Barack Obama issued a disaster declaration for Harris County on Monday, allowing flood victims to apply for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but he said he didn’t know what that meant for him.
“It’s my first time being in this situation,” he said.
Red Cross officials said Thursday they could not think of an instance in which they informed someone at M.O. Campbell that they would only have 72 hours in the shelter.
Despite city, nonprofit and Red Cross efforts to communicate available resources to victims through door-to-door canvassing and Turner’s community meeting in Greenspoint, many echoed Banks in feeling in the dark about how to access services.
‘No place to go’
“I already called too many places. They gave me numbers and numbers and numbers and that’s it,” said Zulema López, Ruiz’s neighbor at Maison de Ville apartments.
López, 44, said she was told Tuesday morning that she had four days to vacate her flooded apartment.
López’s pet goldfish swam in a white bucket, their makeshift bowl, a few paces from the musty bathroom. A mattress leaned against the wall in the dark, amid heaps of belongings.
“We’re living like that right now,” López said, walking through. “We don’t have no place to go. We don’t have no money to rent another apartment. We already asked for all these apartments, they don’t have nothing.”
Maison de Ville’s manager Irma Cortez confirmed that tenants of all 61 flooded units had been asked to move out but said there was no specific deadline.
“I mean, do you want to sleep in here?” Cortez asked, pointing to office walls that had been torn out at the bottom, revealing insulation.
Cortez said she would have liked to put all of the complex’s flood victims upstairs, but there was no space. Instead, management provided residents with contact information for the Red Cross and other area apartments.
Asked what would happen if residents were unable to find alternate housing, Cortez said, “Well, they’re going to be sick if they stay inside.”
Robert Fiederlein of the Greenspoint District estimated that rental occupancy in the area neared 100 percent in the last week, up from 93 percent as of late March, according to Houston-based Apartment Data Services.
Average rent in the Greenspoint area was $654 per month as of March, according to Apartment Data Services, compared with $968 in greater Houston.
“We were tight, and then of course after the storm it got tighter,” Fiederlein said. “Some of them may have to move farther afield just to find space.”
Turner said Wednesday the city had identified just 90 available units in the Greenspoint area.
Facing limited housing alternatives, the city’s Public Works and Engineering Department has determined that residents may stay in their damaged units during the repair process, as long as outlets are covered by electrical plates, light fixture switches have covers, and wires are positioned behind the studs.
“It’s not ideal, but in this case … we don’t have a lot of options,” said Nancy Brewer, manager of the department’s habitability division.
Public works inspectors visited each of the 17 flooded complexes at the end of last week, Brewer said, assessing water damage in at least one unit in every building.
The goal is for owners to finish repairs on 15 of the 17 apartment complexes by the end of May, Brewer said, though the complexes hit hardest — Arbor Court and the Royal Phoenician — likely will take longer to bring back online.
Brewer said she expects all of the complexes to be rebuilt, noting that the damage appears to be less than 50 percent of the property values. If the damage were to hit that threshold, owners would be required to raise the apartments above “base flood elevation,” a costly undertaking.
Making ends meet
Already, the city has partnered with organizations like Neighborhood Centers, the Texas Organizing Project and Catholic Charities to canvass the Greenspoint area. It also is set to deploy 80 health department officials Friday morning to knock on doors and determine the needs of residents still living in their apartments.
“We’ll continue to assess the need, because there are others who are trying to stay in their apartments or in their homes, and it may be conditions that are not safe for them, so it remains a dynamic and fluid situation, and we’ll continue to work with all Houstonians that continue to find themselves in a very stressful and dramatic situation,” Turner told City Council on Wednesday.
Even for those able to move in with friends or family temporarily, however, making ends meet has been difficult.
Joyce Taylor, a 30-yearold certified nurse assistant and mother of two, has been staying with her mother-in-law in northeast Houston since the flood but still must figure out how to pay May rent.
Taylor heard she might get a 25 percent discount on her $650 bill, but she wasn’t sure. To her, it didn’t make sense to pay for an apartment she views as uninhabitable.
“I guess more people are just focused on the apartments that are down the street from us, Arbor Court, and they’re not realizing that people like the Durham got flooded real bad,” Taylor said, adding that Red Cross officials told her she could continue living in her apartment.
Steve Moore, who owns Durham and nine other flooded Greenspoint-area apartments, confirmed that tenants whose units flooded are slated to receive 25 percent off their May rent. They are required to pay, even if they have chosen to stay elsewhere temporarily.
“We think it is livable,” Moore said. “If we start telling people they can live here rent-free, this place is going to get shut down.”
For Taylor and her husband, who each missed two days of work unpaid last week, coming up with that money will be difficult.
“They feel like our apartments are still livable, which I don’t understand, because there’s no way that somebody with kids can be in that apartment like that,” she said.