Recovery slows to a trickle
Months after flood, residents of Greenspoint still struggling
Suvella Garza sometimes found it difficult to breathe in her water-scarred living room, where the air was thick and dank.
Mold test kits were set out on her child’s plastic table, the family’s latest effort to assess the health risks of continuing to live in an apartment where Garza felt, for now, stuck.
“We can’t find an apartment in our price range. We can’t move into a house. Where else are we going to live?” Garza asked as her 4-year-old son slept in the next room.
Despite early projections of speedy repairs, recovery remains sluggish and uneven in the Greenspoint neighborhood nearly four months after Houston’s Tax Day storm.
The low-income area near Bush Intercontinental Airport became the face of the city’s April flooding after water sloshed into more than 1,900 apartments, forcing residents to evacuate on air mattresses, boats and dump trucks.
Months later, neighbors have disappeared and few-
er children play on the parched courtyard grass, long ago dried of floodwater. Curtainless windows offer glimpses into vacant units. As of late July, piles of debris still were ubiquitous at some complexes.
Greenspoint is one of the city’s most affordable neighborhoods, offering a high concentration of privately owned multi-family housing. The area was two-thirds Hispanic and nearly one-third black as of 2012, according to the city’s most recent neighborhood demographic data. Its median household income at the time was $27,000.
Most of Greenspoint’s apartment developments are prone to flooding, and all 17 complexes inundated in April are located within the 100-year flood plain — deemed to have a 1 percent chance of flooding in any given year — or the higher-risk floodway.
Data comprehensively tracking the thousands of Greenspoint residents impacted on Tax Day was not available, but site visits and interviews with residents at most of the area’s 17 flooded complexes reveal a neighborhood still hobbled by the stormwater.
Some of Greenspoint’s affected families have secured new accommodations, while others try to adjust to life in flood-damaged quarters while grappling with seemingly inconsistent policies.
‘We can’t really do anything’
Garza, 36, padded barefoot across her concrete floors, lamenting the flooded wall that was never removed and the insulation still poking out from one that was.
She started buying mold test kits from Home Depot months ago, after her husband went to the hospital in May with respiratory issues his doctor said likely were due to black mold. It was difficult for Garza’s family to scrape together the money to get the kits tested for $40 apiece, but they recently sent two out for analysis. Garza said it would take several weeks to get the results.
“We are extremely concerned about health issues for our son and ourselves, but the problem is we can’t really do anything. We have no funds to go somewhere else,” said Garza, who pays $525 per month for her one-bedroom. “Even the apartments that are affordable to us, they’re at capacity right now, because everybody needed a place to go, you know?”
Average rent in Greenspoint was $654 per month just before the flood, roughly $300 less than it was in greater Houston, according to Houston-based Apartment Data Services.
Across the street from Garza, Elizabeth sat on a plastic chair outside the first-floor apartment she has slept in since the flood.
Back in May, when repairs were progressing slowly and mold had begun to grow, the 56-year-old disabled woman sought advice from Legal Aid.
Elizabeth, who declined to give her last name due to concern about retribution from her landlord, said Legal Aid urged her to write a letter asking management to repair her unit or let her out of the lease. She ultimately decided to ask in person and recalled being told she could not break her lease without a penalty but could move to a sister property, which she was not interested in.
“I don’t know if I wasn’t persistent enough or raised hell enough, because I’m sure that’s how some people got out of their leases — telling them, ‘You’re not providing me a fully functioning or habitable apartment, so why can’t you let me out of my lease?’” said Elizabeth. “I was kind of disappointed in that.”
Steve Moore — part-owner of 10 of Greenspoint’s flooded complexes, including Garza’s and Elizabeth’s — said nearly 1,400 of his units were affected in April. Approximately 600 of those families left, he said.
Asked about his policies for those who stayed, Moore said he reduced rent immediately after the flood and allowed all residents who wished to leave to break their lease without penalty.
“We have to have consistency,” he said.
Moore backtracked, however, when subsequently asked about cases like Elizabeth’s.
“We have let hundreds of people out of their lease,” Moore said. “Have we let everybody out of their lease? No.”
Moore did not recall how much he discounted rent, but several residents reported receiving about 25 percent off one month’s rent before being asked to pay in full again, despite stalled repairs.
As for removing flooded walls, Moore said sheetrock that bordered another person’s apartment was not always removed, for privacy concerns. Instead, construction crews tore out the bottom of one tenant’s wall and insulation and dried out the other tenant’s sheetrock before rebuilding.
Moore added that he tested air samples from several flood-damaged apartments about a month ago. Results were roughly consistent with those from samples taken in units that did not flood, he said.
City pitched in at first
Mayor Sylvester Turner said last week that he had not heard complaints recently from Greenspoint tenants.
“If there are people that have concerns, I would encourage them to alert us, and then we’ll do everything that we can to assist,” he said.
City 311 data shows municipal service requests for the 77060 ZIP code of Greenspoint fell to 172 in June from 616 in April. The average for the year preceding Tax Day’s flood was 142 requests per month.
The mayor in April established a nonprofit relief fund for flood victims, boosted trash pickups and urged apartment owners to reduce rent on flooded apartments.
The city also knocked on upward of 1,700 doors to conduct needs assessments, secured three weeks of hotel rooms for roughly 150 families and, later, coordinated with nonprofit agencies to find them permanent housing.
“I’ve never seen the city be that involved and be that concerned about individual clients,” said Marla Turner, who coordinates disaster response for Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston.
That involvement faded in late May, however, after the city transitioned most families out of hotel rooms and the public works department cleared nearly all of the complexes for occupancy. Nonprofit groups have been tasked with providing ongoing services.
Turner spokeswoman Janice Evans said the city is only allowed to inspect units during the permitting process or when it receives a tenant complaint. She added that the area’s management group, the Greenspoint District, told the city last Friday that owners were arranging to hire the city’s debris removal contractor to dispose of debris.
Municipal and nonprofit assistance aside, the Federal Emergency Management Agency authorized more than $9 million in individual assistance to Greenspoint’s 77060 ZIP code as of late July. Upward of 1,800 families in the ZIP code have been approved for aid.
“They performed incredibly,” Yamile Miranda said in Spanish, citing the $1,500 she received in rental assistance from FEMA, among other support.
Faced after the flood with an inoperable car, Miranda, 31, would have needed to take four buses to work. Instead, she joined a cleaning crew at a neighboring complex where she makes $12 an hour.
Slower pace of repairs
Not all management officials responded to requests for comment about repair costs, but several estimated a price tag of more than $1 million per development. At least 12 of the complexes did not have flood insurance, according to management.
Narinder Nagra, who owns a complex he said only received 3 to 5 inches of floodwater, said in late July that contractors were conducting final inspections of repaired units. Properties that sustained more severe damage were moving at a slower pace.
“Our recovery started quickly,” said Jeff Lowry, president of operations for Madera Companies, which owns one of the flooded developments.
But, he added, “we underestimated our abilities and our resources ... we thought we would be through by the end of June, but we’re not. We weren’t.”
Multi-year Greenspoint resident Hope Pollard was among those who decided not to wait for her damaged unit to be mended.
After staying in a Red Cross shelter and a hotel paid for by the city’s flood relief fund, the nonprofit Northwest Assistance Ministries helped Pollard’s family secure a three-bedroom just north of Greenspoint.
It is bigger and cheaper, and there is free child care downstairs for Pollard’s three daughters.
In the quiet, however, Pollard finds her thoughts wandering to her life before the storm, her stay at the shelter, the families she met there.
“I find myself getting a little depressed sometimes,” Pollard said. “It’s quite a bit that I do think about the flood.”