HOUSTON — Nine months after Hurricane Harvey dumped more than 50 inches of rain on the Gulf Coast, green grass has returned to plush Houston developments and the city’s downtown hums with millennial workers choosing a favorite food truck. But just a short drive away, Kashmere Gardens has not recovered.

Nearly every street of the 10,000-person neighborhood has homes that are gutted. Empty window panes reveal sparse interiors without walls, doors or carpets. Doors hang ajar and mold consumes living rooms and kitchens. Signs dot the lawns, promising homeowners that they can quickly sell out and avoid the messy process of rebuilding. One family lives in a tent in their driveway where mangy dogs circle around, shedding fur and leaving a rotten stench hanging in the air. Inside their wrecked home, two 4-year-old children sleep just feet away from open electric wires.


The challenges in Kashmere Gardens — where two-thirds of the residents are black and the median income is $23,000 per year — are not the result of any one policy or agency. They’re the consequence of a complicated, bureaucratic disaster-response system built up over decades that experts nearly universally agree is failing to provide critical support to low-income, minority communities when catastrophe strikes.

“People just give up,” said Keith Downey, president of a local organization called Kashmere Gardens Super Neighborhood, which has been helping local residents recover.

A POLITICO investigation found that numerous low-income families were denied funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency because much of Kashmere Gardens was in a flood zone, and homeowners were thus required to carry flood insurance — a law that many of them were unaware of. Other families, struggling with language issues and inexperienced with the federal bureaucracy, simply couldn’t cope with a system that even FEMA officials agree is too complicated. Still others fell victim to shoddy contractors who took their money and failed to make repairs.

Those who were lucky enough to navigate the bureaucracy got an average payout from FEMA of $4,300 — too little for some to make even the minimal repairs necessary to make their house habitable. And while more federal money is on the way to Texas, it may take a year or more after Harvey to reach communities like Kashmere Gardens, which are desperately trying to rebuild.

The problems in Houston aren’t surprising to FEMA experts and others familiar with the complicated quilt of programs designed to help those in need of disaster assistance.

“This is a recurring and systemic problem that we find with the delivery of federal recovery dollars,” said Fred Tombar, the senior adviser for disaster recovery at the Department of Housing and Urban Development from 2009 to 2013.

FEMA officials acknowledged that some relief applications took longer to process because of high demand, and some pointed the finger at Congress, suggesting the agency is hemmed in by a baroque series of rules.

Indeed, even Administrator Brock Long has said that policymakers need to re-examine the system.

“We’ve got to streamline a very fragmented recovery process,” he said at a congressional hearing on April 11. “Recovery funding comes from 17 different federal government agencies and it's too difficult to understand what you’re entitled to and how to put it to work.”

But now, as much of the South and Southwest begin preparing for a 2018 hurricane season that’s predicted to be even worse than 2017, there’s no sense that anything will change to protect politically powerless neighborhoods like Kashmere Gardens — or, for that matter, the many Puerto Rican neighborhoods still reeling after Hurricane Maria, or low-income areas in the path of some as-yet-unnamed storm.

Aaron Wright, 55, said his rental home in the Kashmere Gardens neighborhood of Houston suffered catastrophic damage during Harvey. Nearly every street of the 10,000-person community has gutted homes. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO

“No one inside of the government has taken the time to really sit down long-term and say what is the permanent solution to the challenges we are facing,” said Marion McFadden, vice president for policy at Enterprise Community Partners, an affordable-housing nonprofit.

Experts are increasingly aware that the current system, designed with conflicting goals and often under-funded, is failing those who need the most help after a disaster.

“It’s not a safety net,” said Craig Fugate, who served as the head of FEMA for all eight years of the Obama administration and, like other FEMA veterans, believes the current system is too confusing. “The system is really designed for the middle class. It’s not designed to take care of the pre-existing conditions.”



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Kimberly Williams, 49, knows the Kashmere Gardens area well. She grew up in the same house in which she currently lives. When Harvey struck, she waited indoors for more than two days until she was finally rescued via helicopter.

Things haven’t gotten much better in the months since.

She applied to FEMA for assistance, hoping to jump-start her repairs, and received a response by the end of September: Denied.

Williams was rejected for help under FEMA’s individual assistance program for a familiar reason: She lived in a flood zone but never purchased flood insurance. Under the law, any homeowner who lives in a flood zone and previously received FEMA assistance must purchase insurance in order to be eligible for FEMA assistance in the future. Her dad received aid from FEMA after Hurricane Ike struck their property in 2008. But flood insurance was expensive — for families in a flood zone, the average annual cost is nearly $1,100 — and Williams, who was working as a contract bus driver at a nearby chemical plant, couldn’t afford it. When Harvey hit, FEMA denied her aid.

“It’s all a bunch of smoke and mirrors,” she said.

Gloria Doby, 67, faced a similar problem. Doby’s mother, who had lived in the house since 1957, received FEMA aid after Hurricane Allison struck the region in 2001. When her mom was moved to a nursing home in 2011, Doby moved into the house — but she didn’t know she lived in a flood zone or that she had to purchase insurance.

“I had no idea,” she said.

After Harvey pushed her entire house off its 3-foot-tall blocks, Doby, a police-department retiree on a fixed income, applied to FEMA but received the same response as Williams: denial because she hadn’t purchased flood insurance.

Citing federal privacy law, FEMA declined to discuss the details of Williams’ or Doby’s cases, or those of any other Houston residents.

But more than a half-year after Harvey, Doby remains furious over the denial of benefits.

“The government doesn’t care about you at all, especially in a black neighborhood, especially in a poor neighborhood,” she said, standing outside the entrance to her home on a Tuesday evening in mid-April.

After Harvey pushed her entire house off its 3-foot-tall blocks, Gloria Doby, 67, applied for FEMA aid but was denied. She was told that homeowners who live in flood zones and previously received FEMA assistance must buy insurance in order to be eligible for aid in the future. It turned out her mother, who moved out of the house in 2011, had received aid in 2001. “I had no idea,” Doby said. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO

Downey, the neighborhood leader, said in extremely poor neighborhoods like Kashmere Gardens, few residents purchase insurance, which costs more than 5 percent of the average family’s budget. Houston was hit hard by the drop in the price of oil, which led mining firms to close rigs and cut nearly 100,000 jobs. The Houston economy has rebounded in recent months, but many families remain in a precarious financial position. Purchasing flood insurance, even for those who are far from the bottom of the ladder, simply isn’t a priority.

“If you are worried about feeding your kids every week, buying flood insurance is not on your radar,” acknowledged Fugate, the former FEMA administrator.

A first-of-its-kind study, released by FEMA in mid-April, found that low-income homeowners are disproportionately likely to live in flood-prone areas but that those who purchase flood insurance have a median income of $82,000, compared with $55,000 for non-policyholders, suggesting that lower-income families simply choose to do without it.

Roy Wright, director of the National Flood Insurance Program, told reporters that the results were “startling.”

In Texas, the numbers are even starker. Texas homeowners with flood insurance have a median income of $94,049, compared with $54,085 for those without insurance. Looking just within flood zones in Texas, the median income of families with flood insurance is $82,184, while families without insurance have a median income of just $36,056.

Moreover, flood insurance is projected to become more expensive as climate change increases the frequency of catastrophic storms. Houston, for instance, has been hit by three 500-year floods in the past three years.

In its study, FEMA offered four proposals to make flood insurance more affordable by subsidizing the premiums of low-income homeowners. The changes all require legislative action. But while Congress has expressed concern about the affordability of the flood insurance program, lawmakers have not proposed specific legislation to fix the issue.

“Congress gave FEMA the authority to study the program but not address it,” said McFadden of Enterprise Community Partners. “Congress needs to do something so homeowners can afford to stay in their homes.”

Meanwhile, FEMA’s study also touched on a tension at the heart of the federal disaster recovery framework: Larger flood insurance subsidies encourage people to live in flood zones, exacerbating the financial challenges within the National Flood Insurance Program, which is $20 billion in debt, even after Congress wiped away $16 billion of its debt last fall. Any new subsidies for low-income households, the agency noted, would “work against creating a sound financial framework for the NFIP.”

Lawmakers are considering making more changes to put the federal flood insurance program on better financial footing, but that would likely mean shifting to a more risk-based approach, which would further raise premiums and make it that much harder for poor residents to afford insurance.



***

To many families in Kashmere Gardens, one of the worst nightmares of Hurricane Harvey came after the waters receded. Inspectors showed up at their homes, tablets in hand, and spent a half-hour asking questions and collecting documents on the damage to their homes.

Soon after came the bad news: A letter explaining how much assistance, if any, FEMA would give to the homeowner or renter. In most cases, residents found the amounts shockingly low.

“Those who have received something from FEMA, it wasn’t enough,” said Downey.

Pamela Warren, 56, was one such resident. Warren, who is disabled and uses a wheelchair, was forced to ride out Harvey with her husband, who is blind, in the house they had rented for the past eight years. They stayed in their bedroom, away from their porch where the water was quickly rising. But rain began to come through their roof, so the disabled couple struggled to pull their mattress into the dining room to avoid the waters.

“I’ve never been as scared of anything before,” she said.

Shortly after Harvey passed, Warren applied for FEMA aid. As renters, Warren and her husband weren’t eligible for damage to the home. But she and her husband could receive compensation for their personal belongings. The total was $900, which Warren thought was far below the actual cost of her lost furniture, clothes and other household items.

Pamela Warren, 56, said she still has nightmares and gets anxious when hearing rain after she and her blind husband were forced to ride out Harvey in their rented home. “I’ve never been as scared of anything before,” said Warren, who uses a wheelchair. They received $900 from FEMA for all their lost personal belongings – furniture, clothes and other household items. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO

Lawyers for local residents said Warren is not alone in her dismay. FEMA’s individual assistance program is something of a “black box,” they said, and rarely gives applicants what they need to repair their homes or replace their belongings. The process of determining how much each victim receives is built around the in-person inspection, in which a federal contractor spends roughly 30 minutes documenting the damage and reviewing paperwork. (When a home is difficult to reach or unsafe to visit, FEMA relies on satellite photos and other information to conduct a geospatial inspection.)

Denials are fast and furious: In Texas, roughly half of the 741,000 applicants were rejected for any aid at all. The most common reason is that the “home is habitable,” according to FEMA data.

Asked how FEMA decides how much money each family will get, Jenny Burke, FEMA’s press secretary, directed POLITICO to the agency’s 144-page guidebook on its individual assistance program, which provides details on everything from the requirements for receiving aid to the appeals process to how FEMA will recoup overpayments. Yet it says little about how FEMA determines a monetary figure.

Burke, in an email, explained that FEMA maintains a database of prices for damaged property — from common household goods to structural components of the home — which determines how much a family receives for its losses. The prices are updated quarterly but FEMA does not publish them “because they can be vastly different for each county/state.”

Often, residents come away with little or nothing. That’s because Congress never intended for FEMA to make people whole after a disaster. In fact, the underlying law — the Stafford Act — allows FEMA to provide assistance to restore a house only to “a safe and sanitary living or functioning condition.” In its guidance document, FEMA explains that assistance is available only for certain repairs, including structural components of the home, critical utilities and other hazards, such as wet or moldy drywall and carpet. “It is not intended to return the home to its pre-disaster conditions,” the document says.

As a result, even heavily damaged households usually don’t receive anything close to the maximum FEMA assistance of $34,000. In Houston, the average grant is roughly $4,300.

“Congress wants to have their cake and eat it too,” said a former FEMA official. “They want to help everyone after a disaster — but not too much.”

These limitations frustrate advocates for the poor, who argue that, unlike the middle and upper classes, low-income homeowners don’t have the savings to make repairs not covered by FEMA. And while middle- and upper-class neighborhoods tend to rebound quickly after disasters — helped along by flood insurance that can restore homes to mint condition — lower-income neighborhoods can be scarred for decades.

“When it comes to some of the most challenging needs, it’s like no one wants to be stuck holding the hot potato,” said Diane Yentel, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition. “Congress says its FEMA’s job. And FEMA says it a state’s job. And states are often now saying it’s the local government’s job. No one wants to be left saying we hold the responsibility for making sure the lowest-income people are at least made whole after a disaster.”

Yentel and other advocates say FEMA’s appeals process is particularly difficult for low-income residents. On the surface, it seems straightforward: Applicants who believe they were wrongly denied assistance may submit a form explaining their dispute and providing supporting documentation. But applicants often do not know the reason behind their rejection, making it difficult to know what information to include. Rejection letters typically provide very brief explanations that can be interpreted in multiple ways.

Tracy Figueroa, a lawyer at Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, said that when FEMA rejects applicants because of insufficient damage, it could mean any of three things: that the inspector determined that the home wasn’t damaged by the disaster; that the home was damaged but is safe to live in; or that the home is unsafe to live in but the applicant can afford to fix it.

“There’s three separate concepts and that cryptic notice doesn’t tell you which of the three,” said Figueroa. “You have to basically respond to each of those three concepts to cover your bases.”

To improve their clients’ chances, lawyers often request the full inspection files from FEMA, allowing them to better target their appeal. After Harvey, however, an overburdened FEMA was slow to deliver the inspection files, delaying the appeals.

In any case, most poor households don’t have access to lawyers like Figueroa to assist with their appeals. As a result, many don’t appeal their rejections at all.

Greg Holden, 52, is shown April 18 outside his Houston home, which was heavily damaged following Hurricane Harvey. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO

“When there is so much burden on the homeowner to collect everything that might possibly be an obstacle to getting assistance, it just discourages them from appealing altogether,” Figueroa said. “It’s a lot of work. … All those things pick away at somebody’s persistence.”

Burke, the FEMA press secretary, said the agency held focus groups with disaster survivors to “provide feedback on their clarity” and revised the letters in 2016 and 2017. The agency plans to “further refine” the letters in late 2018, she added.

“FEMA is committed to making communications with survivors as clear and concise as possible,” she said.

Burke also acknowledged that the agency faced challenges responding quickly to requests for inspection files last fall. “Due to the historic nature of the 2017 disaster season, FEMA experienced a backlog of over 5,000 requests from survivors to receive their inspection files,” she said. “Additional staff was allocated to this area and the backlog was completed in early April.”

At a congressional hearing in April, FEMA Administrator Long said the agency is considering whether to speed up the assistance process by reducing the number of in-person inspections and replacing them with geospatial inspections.

“[An in-home inspection] is an arduous bureaucratic process when we have technology that can say ‘Yes, it’s damaged,’” Long said. “But it puts me in a tough spot because we have to protect the taxpaying dollar against fraud but we also have to move at lightning speed.”



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For much of America’s history, Congress funded disasters individually, creating an inconsistent, ad-hoc system that angered victims of those catastrophes that failed to evoke congressional action. In 1950, Congress decided to formalize the system, giving the president broad authority to respond to disasters. Over the next few decades, lawmakers slowly expanded those powers, giving numerous agencies a role in disaster recovery.

With no lead agency coordinating those efforts, state officials grew frustrated at overlapping duties and worried that resources were being misused. To address those concerns, President Jimmy Carter signed an executive order on March 31, 1979, that officially established FEMA as the lead agency coordinating federal response and preparedness efforts. Soon afterward, Congress undertook its own study and passed the Stafford Act in 1988 to further empower FEMA.

The law was meant to simplify the system, but many agencies continue to have roles in responding to emergencies, from the Department of Labor to the Department of Agriculture.

And the Stafford Act itself is a study in contradictions. Lawmakers wanted to help communities recover, minimize fraud and preserve incentives for households to prepare for future disasters. But those goals are in tension: The more money FEMA provides disaster victims, the less incentive they have to prepare for a storm, and the faster FEMA doles out that money, the greater risk that some of it will fall into fraudulent hands.

As a result, 30 years after President Ronald Reagan signed the Stafford Act into law, the disaster recovery system is anything but simple, with overlapping funding schemes and an alphabet soup of federal agencies involved in any response. The result, according to current and former officials, community advocates, and other disaster recovery experts, is a bureaucracy that is tough for even seasoned experts to follow, much less people with language problems or without access to computers. For them, the system can be almost entirely unnavigable.

“Inequities and problems, particularly for low-income people, and especially for low-income people of color, are built inherently into each stage of the disaster recovery process,” said John Henneberger, co-director of Texas Housers, a nonprofit focused on low-income housing issues in Texas.

In Texas, homeowners theoretically have many options. They can apply for FEMA’s individual assistance program as well as for federal loans — up to $200,000 for home repairs and an additional $40,000 for personal property damage — from the Small Business Administration. Unemployed workers can apply to the Department of Labor for disaster unemployment insurance while farmers can request disaster assistance from the USDA. Congress has also funded a disaster grant program at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, although that money takes months to become available.

Then there are the state-level options: Texas has established two main programs to help homeowners recover. The Partial Repairs and Essential Power for Sheltering (PREPS) program is available only to homeowners with less than $17,000 in damage and will only fund temporary repairs. It is designed to get homeowners quickly back to functioning, if not exactly comfortable, homes.

The second program, Direct Assistance for Limited Home Repair (DALHR), provides permanent repairs to homes with more than $17,000 in damage. However, repairs cannot exceed either $60,000 or 50 percent of the home’s value.

The range of options — and the rules and requirements that come with each of them — leaves low-income victims confused and frustrated at some of the most challenging moments of their lives. Unlike middle- and upper-income homeowners, they often have little experience with government bureaucracy and don’t have the resources or capacity to figure it out.

“My impression is that low-income homeowners in Northeast Houston really have no idea what the hell is going on at all. They are very confused,” said Ben Hirsch, a relief worker with West Street Recovery. “There’s your FEMA grant and your SBA loan, and PREPS and DALHR.”

There are also myriad charitable groups, Hirsch added. “Then, there are also a bunch of scams.”

Even taken together, the programs represent something of a Swiss cheese approach to disaster recovery, providing some support but leaving big holes. FEMA, for instance, offers a moderate amount of assistance to qualified applicants but relies on other programs, which are often underfunded and slow to launch, to fill in the cracks.

“People who qualify for FEMA grant dollars are not in good financial situations in the first place,” said Fugate, the former FEMA administrator. “It’s a bridge, but sometimes it’s a bridge to nowhere if you aren’t able to find other programs to meet your needs.”

After flood insurance and FEMA assistance, the next tier of federal disaster assistance comes from SBA, which offers low-rate loans to disaster victims. Despite its name, SBA lends out far more money to individuals after a disaster than to businesses. In fact, as of early January, SBA had lent more than $3 billion to Harvey victims— and 90 percent of that had gone to residents.

For many middle- and high-income families without flood insurance, an SBA loan is attractive because the terms are better than those from private lenders. But many low-income families do not have enough income to qualify for an SBA loan; if they do, many are unable to take on the debt.

The state-level programs help some homeowners but are available only for specific people. Homeowners with more than $17,000 in damage are ineligible for PREPS, for instance, while DALHR has such specific guidelines that, according to data released by the Texas government, repairs had been completed on just 214 homes as of May 4.



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GUTTED: Holden‘s Houston home is shown seven months after Hurricane Harvey hit. In Texas, roughly half of the 741,000 FEMA applicants were rejected for any aid at all. The most common reason is that the “home is habitable,” according to FEMA data. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO

For low-income disaster victims, the final and most important pot of money comes from HUD in the form of its Community Development Block Grant program.

The CDBG program typically funds local projects for a variety of reasons, from retaining businesses to increasing the supply of affordable housing. When a disaster hits, the program also, sometimes, provides disaster grants to states, cities and local governments, which then can distribute that money to their residents.

Most importantly, the money is earmarked for the poor. As a rule, at least 70 percent of the money must principally help low- and middle-income homeowners.

But the CDBG disaster recovery program has major problems as well. Grants often take more than a year to reach disaster victims. Unlike FEMA, HUD doesn’t have an existing fund to make grants when a disaster strikes. Instead, Congress must approve additional spending, a process that sometimes takes months. Smaller disasters rarely receive CDBG disaster grants. Once Congress passes new funding, HUD must issue new rules in the Federal Register for how a state can use the grants. The state must then draft and seek public comment on a spending plan before submitting it to HUD for approval.

“It’s a challenge,” said Yentel. “Every disaster, the rules are reconsidered and sometimes rewritten. That certainly slows things down.”

Tombar, the former HUD official, put it this way: “[The process] takes a whole lot of time and effort. Unfortunately, on the back end of all that, you have more human suffering and misery because people who have the greatest need are waiting for those resources.”

In early September, after Hurricane Harvey struck the Gulf Coast, Congress quickly passed a $15 billion disaster spending bill, including $7.4 billion for CDBG disaster grants. In February, lawmakers approved an additional $28 billion in CDBG disaster grants. Community advocates are eager to put that money to use. Huey Wilson, the president of a local community organization near Kashmere Gardens called Trinity Gardens Super Neighborhood, said nonprofit groups desperately need new resources to continue repairing people’s homes.

“Donations for supplies are drying up,” she said.

But Wilson doesn’t expect that money to reach communities like hers until August or September.

In early February, HUD announced that just over $5 billion of the first bloc of CDBG money was earmarked for Texas, which quickly began working on its state plan. That plan, unveiled in mid-April, was available for comment until May 1. The state’s General Land Office submitted its final plan to HUD for approval on May 8.

That money is more than three times the $1.6 billion that FEMA has distributed to Harvey victims through its individual assistance program. But on the ground in Houston, few residents are even aware of it.

“The homeowners we work with have never even heard of CDBG money,” said Hirsch, the relief worker.

Even when the HUD dollars begin flowing, though, they are all but guaranteed to fall short.

For one, Congress almost always underfunds the program. In Texas, the General Land Office, which is responsible for drafting its action plan, estimates that even after the $5 billion in CDBG money, the state will still need roughly $100 billion to rebuild, including more than $10 billion in housing assistance.

“There’s never enough money,” said Pete Phillips, the staff lead on the program in Texas. He added that a permanent CDBG disaster grant program “would be beneficial across the board.”

Meanwhile, advocates for the poor say Texas has chosen to use a faulty formula to allocate the CDBG money among different priorities, such as housing, infrastructure and other state goals, and among different counties. According to the formula, which was developed by HUD to determine “serious unmet needs” after a disaster, homeowners with less than $8,000 in damage or whose home had less than 1 foot of flooding do not have a “serious unmet need.” Renters with less than $2,000 in property damage are also excluded.

Many low-income homeowners fall beneath those thresholds, simply because their homes or belongings aren’t worth much on the open market. Charlie Duncan, research director at Texas Housers, said Texas’ decision to use the formula causes money to be disproportionately shifted from poor, minority neighborhoods like Kashmere Gardens to more affluent areas.

“About two-thirds of very low-income households are being cut out of ‘unmet needs,’” said Duncan. “You have entire communities across the state who are at or below 30 percent of the median income. These entire communities stand to not receive what they can to recover. This is a major problem.”

MOTEL LIVING: Displaced by Harvey, Jacqueline Pope stays in a one-bedroom motel room with her husband and three kids. To pay for expenses, Pope said she had to pawn her wedding ring. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO

Duncan recommends that Texas adopt a different formula, assessing damages relative to a resident’s income level. Under such a system, the unmet needs of low and moderate-income homeowners would increase by more than $1 billion when compared to the formula Texas is using. Low-income areas like Kashmere Gardens would be a major beneficiary.

“We [would be] providing a proportional recovery,” he said, “and making sure that everyone at these income levels is being assisted as fairly as possible.”

Phillips, the state official, disputed Duncan’s comment, saying the state agency must use the HUD formula. “We’re limited by the data that HUD provides us,” he said. Texas did include additional factors to account for certain neighborhood challenges, like an inability to raise funds, he said. Still, Phillips said, he wouldn’t object to an HUD formula that better estimated unmet needs.

“More accurate data is always a good thing,” he said. “If they want to provide us with more granularity, we aren’t going to complain.”

However, Duncan, in an official comment submitted to the state land office, pointed to language in the Federal Register notice directing the state to “develop a needs assessment” without requiring the state to adopt HUD’s specific formula.

Asked about the formula, a HUD spokesperson declined to comment.



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Petra Cervantes, a Mexican emigrant, lives in northeast Houston with her husband, Raul, who doesn’t speak English, and their two kids and two grandkids. FEMA gave the family a grant of $25,000 after the storm to help with repairs. The money covered less than half the total damages, which exceeded $50,000. But by spring, Cervantes said, nearly 80 percent of their home had been rebuilt.

Soon after, a member of Pastor’s Army, an informal group founded after Harvey to assist families in rebuilding, visited their home, telling Cervantes that it still had mold and recommending that they start the rebuilding from scratch. The pastor, Cervantes recalled, said the family would be able to move back in within weeks, telling her, “We are professionals and know what we are doing.” She agreed to have her nearly rebuilt house gutted.

NEARBY DANGERS: At left, Aaron Cervantes, 4, sleeps inside his grandparents’ house. At their highest point, Harvey’s floodwaters reached just below the electrical box, at right. More than eight months after the storm, the Cervantes family has made little progress rebuilding their home. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO

“I believed him because that’s a church,” Cervantes said.

Nearly a month-and-a-half later, that rebuilding hadn’t begun. The house has no walls inside, so the family is living in a large tent in their driveway. On a recent visit, Cervantes’ two 4-year-old grandchildren were asleep on cots inside the hollowed-out home, lying just feet away from exposed electrical wires. Flies buzzed around the backyard where the family keeps chickens and rabbits. More than a dozen dogs, many unkempt with a powerful odor, ran around the home.

Navigating a web of nonprofit organizations, private companies and home-repair contractors is yet another challenge facing low-income disaster victims. Often, these groups are well-intentioned, but they may lack the knowledge or experience to help with rebuilding, potentially providing bad advice or raising expectations about how quickly a family can move back into their home.

Sometimes, these groups have more malicious motives, seeking to rip off homeowners. Scams proliferate widely in the aftermath of a disaster, experts said, and low-income disaster victims, particularly people of color and immigrants, might have more trouble distinguishing credible organizations from fraudulent ones, making them easy marks. Stories abound of people impersonating FEMA inspectors, looking to steal a disaster victim’s personal information, or fake contractors taking payment for a proposed job and never performing the work.

In Cervantes’ case, she said that Pastor’s Army abandoned the project.

Rick Aldridge, who founded Pastor’s Army and worked on emergency management issues for the Air Force, disputed Cervantes’ story, saying that he never gave her a timeline for completing the project. He also said he offered her the option of either gutting the house or making a less-extensive repair that risked leaving some mold. She chose to rebuild the whole house, he said.

Pastor’s Army worked on the home until Cervantes said a relative would replace the electrical wiring. The project, Aldridge said, is now paused until Cervantes completes the rewiring and obtains a permit for further work. Once that happens, he said, Pastor’s Army will be happy to finish rebuilding her home.

“We have offered to go back and finish her home, but she hasn’t called us,” he said.

In fact, Aldridge said, the real problem stems from the initial work that was done on Cervantes’ home, which he called “not very good” and left considerable amounts of mold. That wasn’t a huge surprise. Subpar work is often a problem after disasters. Aldridge explained that volunteer contractors are desperately needed but often have little experience rebuilding homes. Even well-intentioned groups make mistakes that have serious consequences for homeowners.

“We know [young volunteers] probably aren’t very experienced at rebuilding, but they do bring adult supervision and leadership that know how to do it. And we tend to supervise each of the houses,” he said. “Not every group has that ability. They go in, they literally watch a video about how to gut a house out and go do it. It may not necessarily be right.”

Aldridge acknowledged, “There is some shoddy work, unfortunately. We may even do some shoddy work ourselves once in a while because there are so many homes and it goes so fast. We try not to. That’s why our group is slower than most.”

The job of policing these organizations falls largely to state and local governments, but they rarely have the resources or manpower necessary to oversee the thousands of contractors that flood into a state seeking work after a disaster.

Heather Way, a law professor at the University of Texas, released a report recently finding that the city of Houston had more than 420,000 rental units before Harvey but just two inspectors to check for problems like mold and sewage leaks. The city has recently hired a few more, but that still makes it nearly impossible to police housing-code violations.

“With Harvey hitting and damaging thousands of units, the problems are only amplified,” said Way.

A similar lack of oversight exists for homeowners. Mary Benton, the press secretary for Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, wrote in an email that the city “does not investigate potential scams.” She added, “We do not have oversight over nonprofits not funded by us, private foundations, other governmental entities (unless they are funded by us), or private homeowner investments.”

Victor Senties, a spokesman for the Houston Police Department, said the department has a special unit called the “swindle squad” to investigate scams like impersonating a government official, but the squad is not focused solely on disaster-related incidents.

The Texas attorney general has been more active policing such scams, setting up a toll-free line for residents to report such activities and providing advice for dealing with door-to-door salespeople. A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office said the agency has received 181 complaints related to contractor fraud after Harvey.

At the federal level, FEMA works with the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, an umbrella organization of private and nonprofit groups that help disaster victims. But the agency has no role regulating or overseeing groups that contact homeowners.

The Justice Department also seeks to protect victims from fraud. In September, it issued departmentwide guidance to coordinate investigations and prosecutions for disaster-related fraud. DOJ’s National Center for Disaster Fraud also operates a call center to receive complaints and directs callers to the proper jurisdiction. However, it’s unclear whether homeowners use the agency to report potential fraudulent contractors and other malicious salespeople.

Nicole Navas, a DOJ spokeswoman, said, “The vast majority of Harvey complaints to the NCDF relate to alleged identity theft affecting FEMA and Red Cross disbursements and alleged false information submitted by applicants in their FEMA assistance applications.”

Nonetheless, more than eight months after Harvey, the Cervantes family has made little progress rebuilding their home. The $25,000 FEMA grant has all been spent.

And the 2018 hurricane season begins on June 1.



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SAVINGS HIT: Angie Boykin, 83, and her husband, Ray, who has early-stage dementia, paid $27,000 of their own money to cover home repairs after using up the funds from their flood insurance policy | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO

In northeast Houston, residents and community leaders alike know that they aren’t ready for another Hurricane Harvey, or even a smaller storm.

Angie Boykin, 83, recently moved back into her home with her husband, Ray, who suffers from early-stage dementia. The Boykins used $40,000 from their flood-insurance policy and $27,000 of their own money to cover repairs. Her walls and floors have been fixed, unlike those of many of her neighbors. She’s waiting on a contractor to finish up a few stray items, but the rebuilding is nearly complete.

If another storm strikes, she could be back to square one.

At the end of her driveway, crucial drainage ditches dug before Harvey remain filled with debris, trash and other objects, blocking the path for water to escape to a nearby bayou. Downey and Wilson, the local community leaders, implore residents to remove the debris but progress is slow — and the negligence of even a few could result in another disaster for many.

“We’re very, very concerned about the next storm season,” Downey said. “People are so fragile from the last storm.”

In Washington, policymakers also express concern about the next hurricane season. Yet changes are coming slowly. In December, the House approved a disaster spending bill that included a requirement to begin simplifying the recovery system, but it never received a vote in the Senate. More recently, the House attached the same requirement to the reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration. It’s unclear whether the Senate will take up the changes.

While many experts support those reforms, they don’t represent a major redesign of the current system: Among other changes, the bill merely directs FEMA, HUD, SBA and other relevant agencies to submit reports to Congress within a year outlining ways to streamline the process.

“After [Superstorm] Sandy, it was incredibly complicated for victims of the storm,” Rep. Dan Donovan (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House Homeland Security subcommittee on emergency preparedness, told POLITICO. “It was very cumbersome. People didn’t know which aid they were eligible for.”

He added, “We’re hoping for one portal that people can go to in future disasters rather than having to mine the Internet to find out where they can get help.”

In Texas, Puerto Rico and other areas struck by catastrophic disasters last year, people are still trying to navigate the current system and start rebuilding their lives. In Kashmere Gardens, many have lost their jobs, homes and precious belongings. Some have lost loved ones.

Doby, the retiree who received no FEMA assistance to help rebuild her home, is in such a situation. She knows that her home is vulnerable and now understands that she’s required by FEMA to purchase flood insurance.

But the insurance could cost her more than $800 a year, she said, so she’s unsure whether if she’s going to buy it — even as the 2018 hurricane season fast approaches.