1 Year Later, Relief Stalls for Poorest in Houston

HOUSTON — Hurricane Harvey ruined the little house on Lufkin Street. And ruined it remains, one year later.

Vertical wooden beams for walls. Hard concrete for floors. Lawn mowers where furniture used to be. Holes where the ceiling used to be. Light from a lamp on a stool, and a barricaded window to keep out thieves. Even the twig-and-string angel decoration on the front door — “Home is where you rest your wings” — was askew.

Monika Houston walked around her family’s home and said nothing for a long time. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She and her relatives have been unable, in the wake of the powerful storm that drenched Texas last summer, to completely restore both their house and their lives. Houston, 43, has been living alternately in a trailer on the front lawn, at her family’s other Harvey-damaged house down the block, with friends and elsewhere. Outside the trailer were barrels for campfires, set not to stay warm but to keep the mosquitoes away.

What help Houston’s family received from the government, nonprofit groups and volunteers was not enough, and she remains in a state of quasi-homelessness. She pointed to the dusty water-cooler jug by the open front door; inside were rolls of pennies, loose change and a crumpled $2 bill.

“That’s our savings,” she said as she picked up the jug and slammed it down. “We’ve never been in a position to save. We’ve been struggling, trying to hold onto what we have. This is horrible, a year later. I’m not happy. I’m broken. I’m sad. I’m confused. I’ve lost my way. I’m just as crooked as that angel on that door.”

Houston and other Texas cities hit hard by Harvey a year ago have made significant progress recuperating from the worst rainstorm in U.S. history. The piles of debris — nearly 13 million cubic yards of it — are long gone, and many residents are back in their refurbished homes. Billions of dollars in federal aid and donations have helped Texans repair, rebuild and recover.

But this is not uniformly the case, and the exceptions trace a disturbing path of income and race across a state where those dividing lines are often easy to see.

A survey last month showed that 27 percent of Hispanic Texans whose homes were badly damaged reported that those homes remained unsafe to live in, compared to 20 percent of blacks and 11 percent of whites. There were similar disparities with income: 50 percent of lower-income respondents said they weren’t getting the help they needed, compared to 32 percent of those with higher incomes, according to the survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Episcopal Health Foundation.

In many low-income neighborhoods around Houston, it feels like Harvey struck not last year but last month. Some of Houston’s most vulnerable and impoverished residents remain in the early stages of their rebuilding effort and live in the shadows of the widespread perception that Texas has successfully rebounded from the historic flooding.

In the poorest communities, some residents are still living with relatives or friends because their homes remain under repair. Others are living in their flood-damaged or half-repaired homes, struggling in squalid and mold-infested conditions. Still others have moved into trailers and other structures on their property.

One 84-year-old veteran, Henry Heileman, lived until recently in a shipping container while his home was being worked on. The container had been transformed into a miniapartment with a bathroom, bed and lattice-lined foundation, and was roughly 42 feet long and 6 feet wide.

The recovery has been problematic for the African-American and Hispanic families who live in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods for several reasons. The scale of Harvey’s devastation and the depths of the social ills that existed in the Houston area before the storm played a role. So did a scattershot recovery that saw some people get the government aid and charity assistance they needed, when they needed it, while others had more difficulty or became entangled in disputes and complications with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“Everything always hits the poor harder than it does everybody else,” said John Sharp, head of the Governor’s Commission to Rebuild Texas, which is helping to coordinate the state response to Harvey and to assist local officials and nonprofit groups.

These residents have not struggled in isolation. They have been assisted in the last year by officials and volunteers, but their repairs and recovery stalled for different reasons. Some of them no longer seek out help and suffer privately, ashamed of their living conditions but unable to move forward with their lives. Their housing issues are one of many problems they are confronting post-Harvey. Some are disabled, ill, unemployed or caring for older relatives. Some said they or their relatives were taking medication or undergoing counseling to cope with post-Harvey stress.

“In New Orleans, you could see the remnants of Katrina by the markings of FEMA spray paint on people’s homes, and you could see those waterlines,” said Amanda K. Edwards, a Houston city councilwoman who has led an effort to identify and knock on the doors of low-income flood victims who have stopped answering phone calls from those trying to assist them. “Those types of visuals are not present here. So it is difficult for people to really appreciate how difficult of a time people are having.” Days after the anniversary of Harvey’s Texas landfall on Aug. 25, Edwards drove to the home of a victim in the Houston Gardens neighborhood. She parked in the driveway of a flood-damaged home that, from the outside, appeared in good condition. Edwards was told that the African-American man inside lives in his home without electricity. As Edwards stood on the man’s doorstep, he called out to her with the door closed, telling her he did not want any visitors.

Nearby, Edwards was given a tour of Kaverna Moore’s gutted home. Moore, 67, lived in her home for months after Harvey and finally moved in with her son in March. Her repairs stalled after she was denied disaster assistance by FEMA.

She sorted through her papers and pulled out the FEMA denial letter. It was dated Sept. 23, 2017, and stated that she was ineligible because “the damage to your essential personal property was not caused by the disaster.” The letter baffles her. She lost her furniture, her carpet, her shoes and her appliances when about 2 feet of floodwater inundated her home. A contractor’s estimate to repair the damage to the physical structure, including replacing the sheet rock and installing new doors, was $18,605. She appealed the FEMA denial but never heard back.

She said she has no idea when she will be back in her home. She was waiting for Habitat for Humanity to work on the house.

“I miss my house,” Moore said. “I miss it a whole lot. I come by every day. Check my mail. Sometimes I come and sit on the porch.”

Patricia Crawford waits, too.

Crawford’s house remains under repair while she undergoes cancer treatment. Crawford, 74, went to live with a friend after Harvey. She moved back into her house — the house she grew up in — in June, before it was ready, then moved out after a few days. Her house remains a work in progress, with unpainted walls and construction padding on the floors, the rooms strewn with power tools. Her bed is still tightly wrapped in plastic.

She received some money from FEMA but was denied other assistance. So she waits, living with another friend and counting on help from relatives and nonprofit groups like the 5th Ward Community Redevelopment Corp.

“It’s been hard,” Crawford said one afternoon as she sat on a sofa at her half-finished house. “Have you ever felt like you were just lost? Well, that’s the way I feel. I feel lost. My doctor told me that if I didn’t stop grieving, she was going to put me in the hospital. But I’m doing better.”

No local, state or federal agency has been tracking how many people remain displaced after Harvey. It is unclear how many residents are struggling to complete repairs or have had their recovery stall. In the Kashmere Gardens section of northeast Houston — the low-income, predominantly African-American neighborhood along Interstate 610 where Monika Houston and Crawford live — Keith Downey, a community leader, estimated that at least 1,500 Harvey victims in the area were not back in their homes.

In the Kaiser and Episcopal survey, based on phone interviews with more than 1,600 adults in 24 Harvey-damaged counties in June and July, 3 out of 10 residents said their lives were still “very” or “somewhat” disrupted from the storm.

The race and income disparities identified in the survey are most likely a result of what existed before the storm, said Elena Marks, president and chief executive of the Episcopal Health Foundation and a former health policy director for the city of Houston. “If you went into the storm with relatively few resources, and then you lost resources, be it income or property or car, it’s going to be harder for you to replace it,” she said. “The farther behind you were before the storm, the less likely you are to bounce back after the storm.”

Local, state and federal officials expressed concern for low-income Harvey victims, but they were unable to explain why so many of them continue to struggle. City officials say there has been no shortage of resources and services for poor residents affected by the storm, including the 14 neighborhood restoration centers the city opened, mostly in low-income areas. FEMA said it has put $4.3 billion into the hands of affected Houstonians.

“There are thousands of families who live in low-income communities, who already were operating at the margins before Harvey, and the storm pushed them down even further,” the mayor of Houston, Sylvester Turner, said in an interview. “We want to reassure them that they have not been forgotten.”

Turner, who visited Kashmere Gardens and other neighborhoods to mark the anniversary of Harvey, described the problem as a federal and state issue, citing the $5 billion in federal Community Development Block Grant disaster-recovery funds that were approved for Texas, but that Houston has yet to receive.

“We know that the city is going to receive $1.14 billion dollars in CDBG funding for housing,” Turner said. “But you can’t disperse what you don’t have.”

Kurt H. Pickering, a spokesman for FEMA in Texas, said the agency had seen no evidence that low-income areas were receiving less support from the agency. He said that federal assistance was designed not to make a person whole after a disaster, but to help start the recovery process. “FEMA does everything possible to assist every family in every way,” within the bounds of its regulations, Pickering said. In Kashmere Gardens, Houston ended the tour of her house on Lufkin Street after a few minutes.

“I can’t stay in here too long because I start coughing,” she said.

She spoke of the last 12 months as a series of disputes and broken promises. She said she felt abandoned by FEMA, contractors, reporters and celebrities who visited the neighborhood and failed to follow up on repairs. “We’re no more than 15 minutes from River Oaks,” she said, referring to one of the wealthiest areas of Houston. “It’s not just the government. Don’t nobody care.”

Houston, a former truck driver, walked to the middle of Lufkin and turned around to face the house. The yard with the trailer was cluttered, but the house appeared normal.

“When you stand here, you would never know what lies behind those walls,” she said. “Look at it. You don’t even know how broken it is. That’s the sad part.”