Homeless after Harvey: a crisis in Texas

Port Arthur, TEXAS — Every day for the past four months, James Powell has woken up to the sound of morning traffic overhead. The 28-year-old lives in a tent under the Martin Luther King Bridge in Beaumont — about 85 miles from the city of Houston and a far cry from his old house, which was destroyed by Hurricane Harvey last August.

When the historic storm ripped through Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky last summer, it caused more than $125 billion in damage and left a death toll of 88 in its wake. Nearly 200,000 homes were damaged or flat-out destroyed, and Powell became one of the 874,500 people who are still displaced by the storm.

Some of the lucky ones have been living in hotel rooms around the region paid for through FEMA’s transitional shelter assistance program, which has provided assistance to 50,000 families since August. Currently 10,761 are still being housed by FEMA. That program was set to expire Tuesday — evicting them all at once — but on Friday FEMA extended it for a fourth time, a lifeline for people who have nowhere else to go.

But that doesn’t help Powell and the tens of thousands of others who weren’t eligible for the program or who have since been evicted from it, and have been living with relatives or sleeping on the floors of their gutted-out homes, in trailers, or in tents pitched in the yard with no money to rebuild.

Skipper Sauls, the pastor of Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church in Vidor, Texas, is currently living in a trailer beside his damaged home with his wife and four of his kids as they try and rebuild.

“Nothing is back to normal,” he said. “We’re at the point where we’re almost at sheer exhaustion. But we can’t quit. If we quit, then nothing moves forward.”

Pastor Skipper’s situation is typical in the southeast areas of Texas slammed by Harvey. In fact, one in nine Texans from the 24 hardest-hit counties were still displaced as of December, according to a study by Episcopal Health Foundation and the Kaiser Family Foundation.

That report found that nearly half of storm-affected residents said they were not getting the help they needed to repair their homes after the hurricane. Roughly a third of those living in the Golden Triangle — so-named for an oil strike in 1901 and one of the worst-hit areas adjoining the cities of Beaumont, Port Arthur, and Orange in southeast Texas — said their lives were “still very disrupted” from Harvey.

Kurt Pickering, a FEMA public information officer based in Houston, said recovery was “a long process particularly with the flood.” But longtime Texas residents say this is unprecedented.

“I’ve never faced this before, nothing like this,” said MJ Ponsegrau, an auto mechanic who has lived in Port Arthur since 1994. “Through Rita, through Ike, through Humberto, we didn’t sustain any major damage… this is the first time we've had that kind of damage.”

Ponsegrau is living in a shed next to his waterlogged house. He says he lost 90 percent of his property in the storm, and instead of choosing to crash with relatives, he wants to protect what he has left from looters, who four different times now have tried to raid his home.

“I just want what little we got left to stay with us,” said Ponsegrau. “Places are turning up for sale. People have had enough. This scared ’em.”

To some, the Sauls living in a trailer and Ponsegrau living in his shed are lucky. At least they have their homes intact in some capacity and were eligible to get approved for some financial assistance from FEMA even if it doesn’t come close to covering the damage to their property.

Then there are those who, without a lease, proper documents, or a capacity to prove the extent of the damage, were left largely on their own and reliant on private donations.

“Harvey was their catastrophe,” said Marilyn Brown, the president of the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston/Harris County told VICE News. “They first found themselves at one of the disaster shelters and then may not have been able to return to their previous living situation, because their name was not on a lease or they were ineligible for FEMA financial assistance, including hotel vouchers.”

The storm pushed the most vulnerable segment of the population into further desperation. Southeast Texas has a high rate of income inequality compared to the state average; in Jefferson County, for example, 20 percent of the population live below the poverty line, according to the Census Bureau.

“We don't have a place to live right now,” said Amos Ambrose, a father of two boys whose home in Port Arthur had up to 5 feet of water. “We got a little bit of assistance from FEMA, but for the foremost, we didn't have to do flood insurance since we’re not in a flood zone right here.”

“I don’t want to have to borrow no money,” he added.

FEMA says the situation is more complicated than just the assistance approval numbers and that it isn’t necessarily FEMA’s responsibility to get people to the exact living situation they had before. Rather, the agency’s role is to get them through the emergency period.

“That’s what insurance is for and why people should have insurance,” said Pickering. “Our role is to get them through the emergency. What the heck does that mean? That means they’re in a safe, sanitary, functional home.”

Though FEMA may argue that insurance companies should bear the long-term weight, a Washington Post review of FEMA data found that more than 80 percent of homeowners in the eight hardest-hit counties in Texas did not have flood insurance when the storm hit. Those who did not can try to collect from their insurance policies, the vast majority of homeowners have to rely on charitable donations and federal government grants.

Meanwhile, FEMA has never been more overstretched, and Congress had to scramble to appropriate funds after it nearly ran out of money in September.

“2017 was a historic year for billion-dollar weather and climate disasters,”Adam Smith, an economist for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told reporters on a call on Jan. 8. Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria have put an unprecedented pressure on the organization.

“We’re several months out now and we saw debris at the curb today and in communities. It’s a long process particularly with the flood,” said Pickering. “You know, you never want to put a date on it because you want to do everything as fast as you can and not, you know, not get hung up by, “Oh, I said August and now it’s September and we’re not done yet.”

As the winter temperatures drop and federal aid deadlines inch closer, many are starting to think it will take years before the damaged areas will go back to normal.