On the Home Front

Dana Jones is a native Houstonian and life-long activist. In 1992, she moved into a home in northwest Houston that provided a safe haven for her and her family. However, over the years, the house faced disaster after disaster, and the systems meant to help homeowners recover from such devastation failed her due to bureaucratic barriers and political partisanship.

Dana’s neighborhood was originally part of unincorporated Harris County, and county departments maintained the ditches and tributaries and an easement located behind her property. The City of Houston annexed her neighborhood in 1984, but little to no improvements were made. Instead, the city tried to offload maintenance to residents, informing the neighborhood that the easement would be residents’ responsibility.

Dana recalls encountering some drainage issues in the front of the house at the time, though the problems were nowhere near as severe as they were to become. Concerned about her home, she reached out to government representatives to ask for help with the drainage problems. The Department of Public Works did as much as it could to address the open ditches in front of the house, but she was told that any sewage issues were a separate department’s responsibility. “City departments work as an individual entity, which is ludicrous, and no one is talking to no one,” Dana explains.

She has always liked her neighborhood. “It’s safe,” she says. “There are no break-ins, no robberies. It’s quiet.” But soon enough, the challenges with flooding began to worsen and were complicated by problems with home financing. Originally, Dana had purchased her home with owner-financing, and she did not finish paying off the house until 2014. After that, there were further complications with the sale, so she didn’t receive a clear title until 2019. As a result, she faced serious barriers repairing damages to her housing caused by disasters. After Hurricane Ike in 2008, the home was flooded, and unfortunately she could not apply for assistance. She recalls having to pay out of pocket for repairs. She didn’t get assistance for the Memorial Day (2015) or Tax Day (2016) floods, either.

Things got dramatically worse in 2017, however, when Hurricane Harvey devastated all of Houston, including Dana’s home, which took on water up to the windowsills. She remembers losing everything except her hardwood furniture. She applied for assistance from FEMA, but it declared her “non-compliant” due to her ownership being in litigation, and she received no help.

She also applied for assistance through the Homeowners Assistance Program (HoAP), which is funded by HUD’s Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) program and was administered by the City of Houston. The CDBG-DR program provides flexible grants to help address unmet financial needs in presidentially declared disaster areas to rebuild damaged single-family homes, replace affordable housing stock, and repair infrastructure. Disaster recovery programs like the CDBG-DR program are necessary to ensure an efficient and equitable disaster recovery. Yet because the CGDB-DR program isn’t permanently authorized, beneficiaries must wait for Congress to assess disaster damages and pass disaster aid packages – an extremely lengthy process with no regular timeframe for getting recovery money to families in need.

Moreover, the requirements of the program are constantly changing because HUD has to re-write the program’s regulations every year. For this reason, critical aid doesn’t reach those who most need it in a timely manner. As a result, homeowners and renters often rely on states to administer programs and minimize bureaucratic processes – often not very effectively.

Under the program, Dana eventually received a permit for construction to repair her home. But then, in October 2020, the Texas General Land Office (GLO) ended Houston’s program and started a different one. Applicants for assistance were forced to restart the recovery process from the beginning. In consequence, many of the homeowners in the program – including Dana – never got assistance from the GLO.

Finally, Dana received help from a non-profit organization. During the process, the organization took her home down to the studs, and she was shocked to see what was uncovered. “Harvey was a blessing,” she says, “because they had to do a complete gut and they found black mold in the walls.” Once repairs were completed, she moved home.

However, her safety was short-lived. Tropical Storm Imelda had struck the area in 2019, causing her home to flood again. This time, FEMA and her insurance company asserted that the house had sustained no damage, and she was denied assistance by both entities. Dana then applied to the GLO’s CDBG-DR-funded Homeowner Assistance and Reimbursement Program (HARP) but was placed on the waitlist due to oversubscription. In light of her experience, Dana is firm in her conviction that “we need MITIGATION efforts, not patch jobs so my house keeps flooding and I keep [having to fix] it.”

After Tropical Storm Imelda, she learned that there was a sewage manhole in her neighbor’s yard that had been emptying sewage during the floods, leaving wastewater, feces, and toilet paper in her yard after every flood. The problem was exacerbated when her house was flooded three more times in 2022 following unnamed storms. “I used to clean with straight bleach in the house and put sulfur and lime in my backyard,” she says, but the corrosive chemicals caused her to develop asthma and led her health to deteriorate.

Dana remembers going to a meeting about a local buyout program after Imelda. She asked about participating in the program but was denied the opportunity because her home was not located in the areas deemed eligible for this government program. She believes that her community will likely be gentrified into a boardwalk area in the future, and that the city is waiting for residents to leave due to the devastation caused by flooding instead of buying them out now.

Dana knows from personal experience how the current disaster recovery system turns already existing inequities into even larger issues. The perpetual delays and administrative barriers hurt everyone, but they hit Black, Latino, and Indigenous people, disabled folks, and immigrants – who often make up a majority of residents in low-income communities – the hardest.

And the flooding kept coming. During Winter Storm Uri (2021), pipes in Dana’s home burst and flooded her home. She applied for and received an insurance claim, which was used to pay the contractor directly for the repairs. But after she received a call from the CDBG-DR HARP program asking for a statement of insurance, the GLO deemed her ineligible for coverage, citing issues with payments made by insurance companies after Uri. City council members were also involved in the dispute, but there was no resolution, and Dana was once again passed by for coverage under the CDBG-DR home repair program. “Every program and every time I apply, something occurs,” she explains. “It doesn’t mean the house gets better; it just gets worse. It’s no longer a home or a house. It’s just the place where I store my stuff until they come to see about it. I can’t take a shower. I don’t have a place to wash dishes. The toilets are practically unusable.”

Now, Dana is part of the Northeast Action Collective (NAC), and she has united with her community to fight for a reformed recovery system and better local infrastructure to protect community members. She continues pushing for local accountability and resilience measures while learning about larger challenges with state and federal disaster recovery policies.

Yet the problems continue: after a May 16 derecho, Dana’s home took on water and sustained damages, and it did so again following Hurricane Beryl in July.

Given the increasing frequency of hurricanes, flooding, and other natural hazards, Congress must establish better ways for communities to access the funding they need in the wake of disasters. One such solution is the bipartisan “Reforming Disaster Recovery Act”(S.1686/H.R.5940), which would permanently authorize HUD’s CDBG-DR program. For Dana, and for all residents of disaster-prone areas, this could offer a real chance for recovery.

To help generate momentum to pass the RDRA, NLIHC has created a national support letter to convince congressional leadership to move the bill forward as part of any upcoming bipartisan legislative packages.

We are aiming to persuade at least 500 organizations to sign on to the letter – and 270 organizations already have! Take action today by signing on and sharing the letter with your networks!

Stand with disaster-impacted communities and urge your elected officials to pass the “Reforming Disaster Recovery Act” by signing on at: https://p2a.co/vj1mkot

Contact Meghan Mertyris, NLIHC’s disaster housing recovery analyst, with any questions at: mmertyris@nlihc.org