Harvey’s ‘forgotten’ survivors must fight for recovery
As Hurricane Laura approached the Gulf Coast on Wednesday night, many in the Houston area hoped predictions of a near miss would come true. While the prospect of a Category 4 hurricane is worrying for anyone, for thousands of Houston residents who have yet to recover from Harvey it is terrifying.
Imagine the thicket of government agencies through which they’ve had to navigate since Hurricane Harvey. Aid for homeowners trying to recover from Harvey has come in various forms: FEMA individual assistance, Small Business Administration loans, charitable home-repair programs and the city of Houston’s Homeowner Assistance Program. The city’s program is funded by federal grants distributed to the states through Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Relief, which is in turn administered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. These funds aim to permanently repair homes damaged by the disaster, make repairs to government buildings and property, and fund planning studies and other disaster efforts. According to HUD guidelines, they are supposed to assist low-income people in particular, but many of the poor, Black and brown households still working to recover have seen no assistance at all.
After two years of waiting, and experiencing next to no recovery, a group of frustrated residents joined together this past October to form the Harvey Forgotten Survivors Caucus. They received staff support from Texas Housers, West Street Recovery and other HOME Coalition members. Although the caucus is fed up with the entire recovery system, the group is especially irked by the city’s homeowner assistance program because, despite having applied for HoAP help almost a year earlier, most of them had not heard back, and none have yet received material assistance. For some members, the lack of response was creating dangerous living situations that were only getting worse as Harvey faded from the city’s consciousness.
Juanita Hall
Nearly three years after Harvey, the lifelong home of caucus member Juanita Hall, 59, is still completely uninhabitable and a health risk to her brother who stays there to protect the property. Her home is located in the 100-year floodplain in Super-neighborhood 46: Eastex-Jensen. She lived there with her brother and mother before Hurricane Harvey. Their mother passed away three months before the storm. Juanita looks at this as a blessing; she knows her mother would have been devastated to see her home in its current condition.
During the storm, the water level rose around two feet inside the house, but Juanita and her brother did not evacuate. She slept on the couch for eight days before she started seeing mold grow up the walls and went to stay with relatives. After spending the small amount she received from FEMA to muck and gut her home and make minimal repairs, Juanita set out to find charitable assistance to help with further repairs. Doors closed everywhere she turned; nonprofit eligibility standards screened her out. Other rules presented new barriers: Because FEMA estimated her chance of flooding was at least 1 percent per year, her applications were denied. Another reason may have been new city rules requiring homes that had sustained damages of more than 50 percent of the structure’s value be elevated. This requirement pushes costs and technical expertise so high that most charitable organizations will pass, preferring to help with lots of smaller repairs over helping just a few big ones.
Luckily, Juanita is not navigating this ordeal by herself. After meetings between the caucus and the Housing Department and innumerable calls with staff at the city’s home assistance program, Juanita has had a health-and-safety escalation status placed on her file. This is good news, but it’s likely to be six months or more before contractors can get to her home. When she heard about the delay, one caucus member, Sandra Edwards, offered to have Juanita stay with her. Then, she remembered that the front room of her mostly repaired home still doesn’t have AC.
Sandra Edwards
Sandra, who lives in Super-nieghborhood 55: Greater Fifth Ward, has also been frustrated
in her attempts to fully recover. Although West Street Recovery made the home safe and livable, Sandra is still hoping the city’s program can complete her home. Because Sandra’s house is still in probate, she doesn’t yet have clear title to it. That and the associated tax debt have prevented the city from providing her with assistance. Many other Black and brown applicants are in the same situation and while the recovery funds were supposed to connect applicants like her with lawyers, help has been absurdly slow. Sandra was finally scheduled to appear in probate court on Aug. 25 with the help of Lone Star Legal Aid, but for reasons she doesn’t know, the date was delayed another month. To make matters worse, having her home in heirship means that she is not eligible for a homestead exemption. This is causing her to fall behind on taxes. Sandra feels that without the caucus supporting her, things would probably be worse. “You want to know what shows the caucus works?” she asked. “My life! That’s proof right there!” In late August, two caucus members, Mark Rubio and Lawrence Hester, proceeded to chip away at necessary repairs that had been paused at the peak of COVID-19 infection.
Doris Brown
As the third anniversary of Harvey approached, caucus members joined their weekly call to evaluate the status of the recovery process, express frustrations about the authorities that should be repairing homes and devise a plan to help each other. Lifelong activist Doris Brown, 70, who has lived in the Scenic Woods neighborhood for over 50 years, said, “The programs are no good. We’ve still got people living in mold.”
While this injustice is infuriating, it also motivates, and the caucus imagines ways the recovery system could be improved. But small changes won’t be enough. Improving the recovery and making it more equitable will require much more bravery from our political leaders and much more attention to the unjust recovery from the general public.
To win that needed attention, and to build pressure for change, the group ventures to build its own power to get its members out of application purgatory. One strategy involved a “dangerous and moldy home tour” at the house of member Lawrence Hester, 59. While the housing department was slow to react, the demonstration did gain the attention of workers with the Episcopal Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, which agreed to fund repairs on the home.
Collective strength
Overall, the group believes that the forgotten survivors are best positioned to understand the urgency and complexity of the situation and therefore should have more power to shape the execution of the city’s homeowners’ assistance program. “We have been through it all. We flooded, we have mold, we understand that the program doesn’t work,” Rubio explained.
They already feel the results of their collective effort. “If one mosquito comes at you, you just swat it away,” Sandra explains. “But when they come as a swarm, you're gonna get bit. There’s nothing you can do.
And that’s what we have to be.”
Members say that the Harvey Forgotten Survivors Caucus demonstrates that people, often portrayed as powerless or a burden, can help each other survive and navigate bureaucracy. They hope that the model of their collective advocacy and self help can spread to other cities and issue areas. In the world the caucus is fighting for, those who need the most help after storms would receive help first, and everyone would have a safe and dignified home. No neighborhoods would be left behind. This world is possible, but there is a long way to go. For now, the group will continue pushing for a just recovery from Harvey and storms that are sure to come, and keep taking care of each other like family.
Orduña is community navigator in disaster recovery with Texas Housers, a nonprofit that supports ground-level advancement of housing policy and neighborhood improvement. Hirsch is a community organizer and policy advocate for the grassroots disaster recovery organization West Street Recovery, based in Houston.