NEW BERN, N.C. — Before the river rose and the water trespassed into her little public housing unit, ruining her black sectional sofa and her children’s clothes, leaving her walls moist to the touch — indeed, before she even knew that the river could be her enemy — Keisha Monk thought she had found something better than basic shelter at Trent Court.

“Trust me,” she said this week, as one of the last rain bands of the storm called Florence fell all around her, “when I first came here, I thought it was heaven.”

It was January when Ms. Monk and her four small children moved to this historic pearl of a Southern city and to Trent Court, a downtown cluster of red brick public housing right on the banks of the Trent River. Ms. Monk had been in a family shelter in Columbia, S.C., that ground down her soul, she said. At Trent Court, she could gaze out her front door onto the wide, rippling river. She could take in its breeze, its smell, its changing colors and moods.

This week, after a brief evacuation, she returned to Trent Court to find that flooding from Florence had turned her place into a sodden wreck. She also realized that she was now a player in the kind of redevelopment drama that tends to swamp storm-battered places like this — a story of race, class, gentrification and safety fears, and questions without easy answers about who gets to live on often alluring, sometimes treacherous, waterside real estate.