This story originally aired on “Marketplace” on June 12.
Gwendolyn Comeaux stood at the end of her driveway in Houston, Texas, wearing a black World Wrestling Entertainment T-shirt and matching shoes — she’s a fan. But on this day she was watching a different kind of spectacle: the gut renovation of her little beige house.
“They’re putting up a roof,” she said. “They’re trying to do the kitchen, and one of the back rooms back there that was damaged also.”
Comeaux has lived in this home, in northeast Houston’s Huntington Place neighborhood, for decades — that is, until May of last year. A derecho, basically a straight-line windstorm, tore through Houston, causing more than $1 billion in damage in the region and toppling the pecan tree in Comeaux’s neighbor’s yard.
“There was a big old tree over here, next door,” Comeaux said. “It damaged the garage and the kitchen and mostly everything else.”
Comeaux had been at home with her adult son Kevin Comeaux, who lived with her at the time.
“The wind was blowing at probably about 100 miles per hour,” he said. “I heard the noise; it was like a real loud thump, like a thundering noise, and when I walked back into the kitchen, all I could see was the tree laying into the house.”
While Texas is this country’s top producer of crude oil and natural gas, it’s also prone to the kinds of disasters climate scientists say are getting worse because of emissions from burning fossil fuels. Though it’s difficult to attribute any one storm to global warming, studies show it has created the conditions for more frequent and intense extreme weather. Meanwhile, the Trump Administration has cut disaster preparedness grants and significantly reduced staffing at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and has pledged to overhaul or even eliminate the agency.
After last year’s derecho, FEMA put Kevin Comeaux up in a hotel, and Gwendolyn went to stay with her sister. Because they had no insurance and FEMA assistance wouldn’t cover the full cost of repairs, they couldn’t afford to fix the house.
“The estimates that I received was almost like I should just tear the house down and just rebuild,” Kevin Comeaux said.
He looked around and finally linked up with a grassroots organization in Houston called West Street Recovery. The group was formed during Hurricane Harvey eight years ago, by neighbors rescuing neighbors from the floods.
Andrew Barley is now the group’s co-director of home repair. He started out with West Street doing water rescues during Harvey and then learned how to build. Since then, the group has repaired around 350 houses damaged by major storms in historically-disadvantaged communities, with funding from foundations and individual donors.
Barley, who is overseeing the renovation of the Comeauxs’ house, estimates it will cost about $65,000. The crew is doing more than just repairing the damage. They’re future-proofing it, by replacing the roof, overhauling the electrical system and trading out the PVC piping with a material that expands when it freezes. Many Texans experienced burst pipes during Winter Storm Uri, which caused widespread damage in 2021.
The group sees itself as a stopgap to help communities that have struggled through neglect or overt racism.
“Part of the ways we do that is by ensuring that we preserve what there is of community, by preserving the housing stock that are in neighborhoods like this,” Barley said. “The best way to do that is to upgrade all the materials we can as we work on the house.”
West Street Recovery has also set up eight “hub houses” around the city, where residents can take shelter during storms or heat waves and access emergency supplies.
Now, the group says cuts to federal funding will create “a crisis in disaster recovery” that nonprofits just don’t have the resources to replace.
“But you know, we carry on,” Barley said. “The folks who live out here still have to make do, regardless of what happens or what the government says or does.”
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