HOUSTON—Deborah Horace sobbed as she pulled the pictures off her living room wall and piled them onto a chair stained by floodwaters.
“I mean, everything is ruined,” she said.
She spent her day salvaging anything she could from her apartment, one week to the day after heavy rains brought floodwaters to her southeast Houston neighborhood. She packed what was left of her belongings, because the managers of her apartment complex had ordered her to move out.
Ever since the floodwaters made her apartment a moldy mess, she’s been staying with her sister. But she has no idea where she’ll end up.
“They’re not giving me no help here,” she said, as tears welled in her eyes. “They’re not. They’re just telling me to just, they’re giving me a piece of paper and telling me to go for it. And that’s wrong.”
Many of her neighbors at the Royal Palms Apartments voice the same complaint. They’re people with low incomes and few financial resources, but after losing much of their possessions in last week’s flood, they have to scrape together the cash to rent new apartments.
“Most of these people are on a very fixed income, if any income at all,” said Nekata Smith, a college student with two children who lived in the complex until last week’s flood. “That’s why we’re living over here. This is not an ideal situation from the beginning for a family.”
But Royal Palms is now far from an ideal situation for anybody, a fact tacitly acknowledged by the apartment complex’s management in a letter sent to residents. One week after floodwaters more than a foot deep destroyed furniture and made first floor apartments all but uninhabitable, some people still lived in their damaged apartments.
The management note taped onto the doors of uninhabited apartments -- where flood victims who’ve moved out left their furniture—apologized for the problems caused by the flood. But the notice pointedly emphasized that residents of flooded apartments needed to get out and take their belongings with them. Only then, the management said, can repairs begin.
The management said it set no deadlines, but a number of residents say they’ve been ordered out of their apartments by Tuesday, eight days after the flood. Many of the residents complained they had just paid their rent along with all of their other monthly bills, so they didn’t have the money to pay deposits and new rent checks.
The apartment managers said they were working with HUD officials to find alternative housing, but the process was slowed by the holiday weekend. And the management said it would refund the residents’ deposits, but it offered no timetable on when the money would be turned over to the residents.
Frustrated residents of flooded circulated petitions asking for help, but they weren’t sure who they should petition. Some of them talked about complaining to City Hall, others griped about HUD officials and others obsessed over the fact that the management note bore no signature. To many of them, it seemed there was no one to blame.
Deborah Horace was still crying as he complained about the fact that no one was helping her. She had paid for renter’s insurance, she said, but an insurance adjuster told her the policy didn’t cover rising floodwaters.
“I don’t have nothing else left,” she said. “All of my furniture is destroyed.”
