'We are abandoned': How Texas failed Houston homeowners after Hurricane Harvey

Ronald Demery remembers the day in June 2019 when a city of Houston inspector said the city was going to build him a new house.

In August 2017, Hurricane Harvey’s floodwaters poured into the northeast Houston home Ronald, 62, had shared with his mother Rosa for nearly 40 years. Ronald and Rosa found themselves wading through knee-deep flood water in the aftermath, water that destroyed their furniture, rotted their sheetrock, stained their ceilings and left toxic insulation and exposed wires throughout the inside and outside of the family home. 

Two years later, neighbors told Ronald and Rosa about the city’s Homeowner Assistance Program, designed to help rebuild houses damaged by Harvey. Rosa jumped on the opportunity and filed an application in early June 2019, listing Ronald as a household member in the forms.

“The inspector came out three weeks after we applied, and me and my mother was in here waiting,” Ronald said, indicating a living room adorned with a couch, coffee table and a single folding chair.

The inspector walked through the house, observing empty rooms marked by water-stained floors, walls, ceilings. “He asked if he could go outside, then he was out there a while. When he came back in, he said, ‘Ms. Lewis, do you love this home?'” Ronald recalled.

“She said ‘yes I l love my home,’ then he said, ‘well how about we tear it down and build you a new one?'” 

The inspector brought the results of the visit back to the city, who sent a contractor. The contractor drew up blueprints for a brand-new, all-brick house. “Rosa told all her friends, ‘the lord’s blessing me with a new home, a brick home, with an extra bathroom!'” Ronald said.

When Rosa died on Dec. 5 2020, Ronald found himself living alone in a house that looked about the same as it did before the inspection three years prior. On Harvey’s sixth anniversary last week, the house still looked the same.

“The Harvey home repair program started with the city [of Houston] and [Harris County]. Then in 2020, the [Texas General Land Office], under George P. Bush fought the county and the city for control of the programs. So then it became a political fight,” said Julia Orduña, the southeast Texas regional director for Texas Housers, a nonprofit focused on housing advocacy for low-income Texans. 

By the end of 2020, the Texas General Land Office (GLO) had wrestled control of the city’s grant distribution process away from local officials. Orduña said that many Houstonians like Ronald and Rosa were denied the rebuilding assistance they needed, after some unknown number of applications were lost during data migration from the city to the GLO.

 “The city of Houston transferred between six and 10,000 files or applications. We think that they lost a lot of people in that process,” said Orduña.

Orduña and Texas Housers’ estimates appear to align with the GLO’s publicly stated figures. In February 2022, the GLO told Houston Public Media it had received 12,778 total applications—around 10,000 from the city of Houston and another 2,700-plus from Harris County. The GLO estimated in 2022 that it only had enough federal funds to help about 1,700 households—or just over 15 percent—of the 10,000 total city of Houston applicants. 

So, after initially approving the house for a complete demolition and rebuild, how did authorities end up tossing Ronald and Rosa’s application on the denied pile, along with the other 85 or so percent of households—some 8,000 plus—that sought help through the city’s homeowner assistance program?  

Records reviewed by Chron show that Rosa filed an application to the city’s Hurricane Harvey Recover Homeowner Assistance Program on June 3, 2019. Rosa listed Ronald as one of the members of the household and granted him permission to access the details of the application on multiple forms submitted to the city, records show. 

Blueprints reviewed by Chron show that a contractor drafted plans to rebuild the house with a brick exterior and two bathrooms, aligning with the specs Rosa celebrated with her neighbors. 

Rosa died on Dec. 5, 2020—around the same time the GLO had secured control of the city’s housing assistance program. Records show that exactly three months after her death, on March 5, 2021, a letter from the city of Houston’s Housing and Community Development (HCD) Department addressed to Rosa arrived at the house, informing her that “based on this review, your application to the [Homeowner Assistance Program] has been administratively withdrawn.”

Ronald said he appealed the decision by email right away in Mar. 2021, arguing that the application should remain in consideration since he was listed as a co-applicant and was still residing in the house. During a follow-up call, Ronald claims the HCD “tried to say he wasn’t on that application.”

In July 2021, a Houston Housing and Community Development official claimed in an email that they “did not locate your appeal sent on or about March of  this year” and informed Ronald that “at this point, we are closing your inquiry.”

Neither the city of Houston HCD nor the Texas GLO immediately responded to Chron’s inquiries about the reasons for denying Ronald’s application. 

Orduña of Texas Housers told Chron that Ronald’s experience was pretty much the norm after the state took over the application process. “The GLO was now saying that they were able to go through all these applications and close them out,” she said. “But was it really effective communication and outreach?  Or were they just denying applications and saying, ‘well we couldn’t connect with this person and we went through the outreach mechanisms’?”   

“They really think they’re doing them justice by offering them a possible free house,” Orduña continued. “But it’s about the way they actually treat people. They’re not treating them with dignity and respect and an understanding of what hurricane survivors are living through.”

After his and Rosa’s application was denied, Ronald became a member of a coalition borne out of the bureaucratic dysfunction and mass rejection of housing applications in the aftermath of the hurricane, a group that dubbed themselves the Harvey Forgotten Survivors Caucus. When Orduña suggested they might not want to label themselves as ‘forgotten’ survivors, their response was simple: “We are forgotten, we are abandoned.”

Reflecting on the yearslong ordeal, Ronald said, “it’s not so much about me. But they let her down. They didn’t keep their promise to build her that new house. They should’ve kept their promise.”