99% Invisible - Not Built For This #4: Unbuilding the Terrace

Episode Date: August 30, 2024

All across the country thousands of people are living in locations that regularly flood, and many of these places will only get more flood-prone as the climate continues to change. Residents who live in these danger zones are often trapped in a demoralizing loop—flooding, rebuilding, and praying each time that the pattern doesn’t repeat. However in some neighborhoods the government is trying a different approach. They’re buying out flood-prone homes and helping residents relocate to higher ground. But what’s it like for residents to fight like hell for help, and the only help on offer means leaving the place they love?Not Built For This is a 6-part mini-series from 99% Invisible, with new episodes on Tuesdays and Fridays in the 99% Invisible feed. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

This is episode four of Not Built For This, Unbuilding the Terrace. Lake Charles, Louisiana is a low-lying city in the southwest corner of a low-lying state. It's right off I-10, about halfway between Baton Rouge and Houston. And when I first pulled into town, the city was bigger than I was expecting. It was nighttime and from a distance the skyline was lit up like some giant metropolis. It's like a gleaming city. If you looked quickly you might think you were looking at Manhattan. But when you get a little closer you realize those aren't skyscrapers lighting up the

night. It's just nothing but fossil fuel infrastructure. It's just a series of refineries with lights all up and down the spires of these smok stacks. It's pretty dramatic. Lake Charles is a city built among petrochemical plants. It's sometimes hard to tell where a neighborhood ends and a refinery begins. Oil and gas companies are some of the largest employers in town. But you don't have to work in the industry

to feel its effects. The spills and the fires and the high cancer rates. A lot of the gas that comes through this city gets exported and burned overseas. But the impacts on the climate are felt right back here in southwest Louisiana. Lake Charles is trying to recover from back-to-back hurricanes. In recent years, Lake Charles has been hit with more big storms than just about any city in the country. Well, here's a moniker no one wants,

America's most weather-battered city. Yet, it belongs to Lake Charles, Louisiana. Even though we know intellectually that the burning of fossil fuels is making the weather more dangerous, it can be hard to really see that connection in our day-to-day lives. But you can't miss it in Lake Charles.

The causes and the effects of climate change are on full display. When I visited, the tallest skyscraper downtown was completely abandoned, windows blown out by a hurricane. And in the distance, you could see that ominous petrochemical skyline with smoke trailing into the sky. Of all the storm-battered neighborhoods in this storm-battered city,

there's one in particular that I'm here to see. It's called Greenwich Terrace. It's a mostly black neighborhood, with wide suburban streets and modest single-story homes. So I'm here in Greenwich Terrace and I'm standing under a tree. I try to keep cool. I huddled in the shade of a tree and watched as a tiny bulldozer chomped away at some concrete. This is a sound of a bobcat that is tearing up what's left of the house.

All around me were the footprints of homes that no longer exist, with brakes in the sidewalk where the driveways used to be. Yeah, just a lot of empty, empty land. These houses weren't ripped up to make way for some big infrastructure project or a new development. The terrace has flooded so many times in recent years that the government decided to do something dramatic.

They decided to tear down the houses and pay people to move to higher ground. Here is a sign that says, State Buyout Program, Greenwich Terrace Neighborhood, demolitions underway. Throughout the country, thousands of people are living in locations that regularly flood. And will only get more flood prone as the climate continues to change. Many of the people who live in these danger zones are caught in this demoralizing loop, flooding and rebuilding over and over again, and praying each time that the pattern doesn't

repeat. But in places like the Greenwich Terrace, the government is trying to break that cycle. They're giving up on the idea of rebuilding altogether, and instead trying to help residents move out of harm's way. It sounds simple on paper, but in practice it's often messy and painful. And so today, we're going to follow the process of unbuilding a flood-prone neighborhood through the eyes of one resident. We'll see what it's like to watch the place that you live become unlivable,

to fight like hell for some help. But when help shows up, it comes in the form of an offer to leave the place you love. Because the Greenwich Terrace was just not built for this. I'm Emmett Fitzgerald. I'm standing in my old driveway. I'm standing in your old driveway? This is it? This is my driveway.

I'm here for your old driveway. This is it. This is my driveway Here for 20 plus two years I'm standing with Tramica Rankins on the empty plot of land where her house used to be The only thing left from Tramica's old life is a big old pine tree, which she never cared for anyway Don't miss my pine tree because it puts sap during the wintertime and everything on the core So she may not miss her pine tree, but she does miss this place. It's bittersweet coming back here now just to see all the houses that are gone because this whole row were all homes. Chermica moved to Lake Charles when she was in high school.

She got married here, had kids, and eventually started looking for a home to buy. And she found a house she could afford in the Greenwich Terrace. Nice little house, nice little neighborhood, older people. Hey, great, cool. She had initially thought of the house as a starter home, a stepping stone on a journey to something bigger and better. But life got in the way, and they ended up spending over two decades in the terrace. And it was a good place to raise kids.

They had neighbors who looked after each other and also knew how to have a good time. And I used to at least wake up on a Saturday morning to somebody going down the neighborhood with their cars, music foaming. You hear somebody in the neighborhood fussing. You hear, you know, you smell the barbecue going or somebody fixing on a car.

She says the terrace was full of funny characters, like her next door neighbor. He meant well, but he kept the neighborhood ready. Anytime he step out of the house, you know, he's about to do something, fishing wasn't supposed to. There was a lot of colorful activities that may have happened in the neighborhood. The terrace wasn't Tremica's dream, but it worked for her.

At least until 2017. That's when Lake Charles got hit, with the first in what would be a string of devastating storms. Hurricane Harvey barreling into the Texas coastline, that could render some areas uninhabitable for months. Hurricane Harvey overwhelmed the drainage canal in the back of the terrace called the Cayuchi Cooley and flooded the neighborhood.

Tramica was shocked. I've been here for 17, 18 years, nothing ever happened. So maybe it was a fluke. Maybe it was a lot of rain that we just could not soak up. She made repairs, but now she was worried. The drainage infrastructure in the terrace couldn't handle Harvey. It's gonna happen again.

When? We don't know, but it will. Fast forward to 2020. Hurricane Laura came through and demolished the city. One of the strongest storms to ever hit the US left its mark on just about every part of Lake Charles. This second hurricane, Hurricane Laura, displaced thousands of people throughout Lake Charles. The 150 mile an hour winds knocked a tree into the back of Tormica's house, but the terrace stayed dry. I don't know if you can call that luck,

but whatever it was, it didn't last. Just a few weeks after Laura had came in August, maybe six weeks later, here comes Delta. Before the city of Lake Charles could even attempt to get back on its feet, another hurricane started bearing down on southwest Louisiana, this time Hurricane Delta. It's hard to believe that it's happening again.

Another hurricane hitting the U.S. Tramica and her family evacuated to Houston. They waited out the storm at a hotel. But when they got back home, it was obvious what had happened. There were worms at the bottom of the bathtub, lizards inside the house, and the whole place smelled awful. I remember my two-year-old grandson looking at me and he's coming outside and he's just shaking his head.

I'm like, what's wrong, baby? He said, again? Again, mama? Again? I was like, unfortunately, baby, again. The family was back to square one. They needed to gut the house and rebuild all over again. Tramica had tried to get flood insurance after Harvey, but there'd been a mix-up, and so

they had to pay for everything out of pocket. Still, she says that her family was lucky to be able to make repairs at all. Many of the older folks in the neighborhood who were living on fixed incomes just didn't have the resources. You know, it broke my heart after Delta. You know, I was repairing everything, doing what I had to do. But I watched the older lady open up her door, her screen door, raise up her windows, kept the same curtains in the house, but she tied them up for it to get sunlight.

She's taking a squeegee and squeezing the water out of her home, and she couldn't do nothing else. You can still see evidence of these hurricanes in Lake Charles today, and the uneven way that different neighborhoods were able to bounce back. In a federally recognized disaster like Hurricane Delta, FEMA will provide direct relief to survivors, but it's often slow to arrive and insufficient when it finally does. And over the years, FEMA has been widely criticized for giving more relief to white people than it does to people of color. Meanwhile, people in wealthier neighborhoods are also more likely to have insurance or just be able to pay for rebuilding out of pocket. The end result of all that is that when you drive around the wealthier, often whiter neighborhoods in South Lake Charles today, you would have no idea that these hurricanes even happened. But in the mostly black working

class neighborhoods in North Lake Charles, it's a very different story. You know, there's a, there's, I just passed three houses with blue tarps, four houses right there with blue tarps still on their roof. There are still so many blue tarps where a roof should be. It looks like the hurricanes happened months ago, not years. We're talking in, you know, upwards of upwards of two, three years ago at this point. You can really see a lot of damage still from the storm, or storms really, like a lot of houses that still don't feel like they've been fully rebuilt. Many of the people who were displaced in these storms

still haven't returned home. According to data from the US Postal Service, between 2019 and 2020, Lake Charles lost more of its population to out-migration than any other city in the country. Back at the terrace, as the waters receded and the repairs began, two very different stories started to emerge about why this neighborhood in particular seemed to be so vulnerable to

flooding. The first story from the local government's perspective was that the flooding situation was caused by a devilish mix of overlapping problems, including climate change. You're certainly seeing things that have never happened before. Jennifer Kobian is the grants director for Kaukeshoe Parish, where Lake Charles is located. She grew up in southwest Louisiana, so she's used to big storms. But the pileup of disasters in recent years

was eyebrow raising. We were certainly thinking, this doesn't feel right for it to be back to back like that. That's the red flag, the indicator of this feels a little different. As wild as this sounds, Jennifer actually thinks that Lake Charles has been lucky not to get hit with an even bigger storm

in the last few years. We did not see the major catastrophic rain that our neighbors just to the east of us and southeast Louisiana saw and then the 50 inches of rain that just to the west of us in East Texas saw with Hurricane Harvey. Which is a crazy thing to think about a city that's been through as much as you have that there's something worse coming out there. through as much as you have that there's something worse coming out there. Jennifer says that these supercharged storms are particularly problematic for Lake Charles because the city is so low lying. And although Lake Charles is about 30 miles from the coast, it sits along the Calcasieu River, a tidal waterway that is rising with the seas. And so when there's a big hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, the storm surge pushes a whole

bunch of water all the way up the river to Lake Charles, which makes it harder for the city to drain. It basically acts like a little stopper to all of our waterways. When you add rain events, especially historical torrential rain events, on top of that, there's nowhere for the water to go. It spills out of the bayous and the coolies and into the city, where it starts to pool in the lowest-lying spots. So this is the Greenwich Terrace neighborhood right here.

Jennifer pulls up a map of Lake Charles on her computer. It shows the ground surface elevation throughout the city. Higher elevations are red and the lower elevations are blue. And as she scrolls towards the terrace, the map gets very blue. It is sort of the low spot of a low spot, if you would. So that water is all rolling off and draining towards that neighborhood. Jennifer says that when the neighborhood was first developed, this was less of a problem because it was surrounded by a lot of empty fields that could absorb runoff during a rainstorm.

But in the 80s and 90s, Lake Charles sprawled outward and enveloped the terrace, encircling the neighborhood in big box stores, parking lots, and the 210 highway. And so now, when you get a lot of rain in a short period of time, the water runs off all that pavement and heads straight for the low spot on the map. There are a series of pumps that are supposed to help relieve pressure on the system, but Jennifer says they just haven't been able to handle some of these storms. They can only pump so much so fast and at the rate of rainfall, it just can't keep up

and that's when flooding happens. I asked Jennifer to try and sum up what exactly went wrong during these floods in the terrace. And she said it was a wicked combination of factors. Extreme rainfall, a low-lying community surrounded by asphalt, an aging drainage infrastructure that just wasn't designed to cope with this amount of water. It's sort of a lot of little things that add up to be a big thing. It may have been true that the Terrace was facing a series of interlocking problems that

didn't have any easy solutions. But that wasn't a very satisfying explanation for people who were actually living there. And here's where the second narrative comes in. A lot of residents of the terrace felt like the government just hadn't done enough to protect them. There was a lot of skepticism about those pumps

and whether they had even been turned on during that crazy series of storms. And when Tremieka Rankins kept hearing city and parish officials saying that there wasn't much they could do about these unprecedented 100-year floods, it started to drive her crazy. How you gonna keep telling me it's a freaking 100-year flood?

Well, God dang it. We in the last days, it's because 100 years come in every six months. Straight up. Like, don't insult my intelligence. It's called, you guys, infrastructure is horrible. And Tramica's bigger problem is that not all of the infrastructure

in Lake Charles is horrible. If you go to a newer, wealthier, often whiter neighborhood that was built to more recent standards, you'll see a drain at the end of every driveway. But that's just not the case in the terrace. I'm just saying that you did not invest in any kind of infrastructure or drainage structure here in the area that could have maybe offset this. That's what I'm saying. What I'm saying is, you have maliciously avoided to even help this area.

The flooding was new, but for Tramica and for many other residents of the terrace, it also felt like the latest chapter in a much larger story. A story about how there were no longer any grocery stores in the neighborhood. How the local bank closed down and the Walgreens moved away. Climate impacts don't happen in isolation. The climate is changing on top

of a pre-existing infrastructure of inequality. And so when Tramica heard government officials blaming the floods on these unprecedented storms and climate change, it almost felt like a convenient excuse, a way to avoid accountability for failing to invest in her community. It's a combination of climate change. I'm not saying that that does not play a fact in it.

But what you allocating your dollars to care for and do has a lot to do with what's happened here. Tremica started calling the city, demanding that something be done to fix the drainage problem. Enough is enough. How do you expect somebody to stay sane and you keep doing the same thing till it's over and over and you don't expect anybody to rise up

and say anything about it. She kept calling and calling. She even got in touch with the mayor and told him that he needed to do more to protect the terrorists, but she also made extra sure to protect herself. She got flood insurance for real this time. Her new policy kicked in on May 16th, 2021. And I kid you not just one day after it went into effect, Lake Charles got hit with one of the largest rainstorms in the city's history.

My insurance kicked in May 16th, and May 17th was a flood. Over a foot of rain fell on Lake Charles in less than a day. The storm was totally unexpected, and so there was no time to evacuate. Tramica and her son were actually in their house when water started spilling out of the coulee. She knew this could get ugly, and so she started running around, unplugging TVs and appliances, and just trying to get their most valuable possessions off the ground. Her son was looking at her like, what are you doing? He's like, what's wrong, mama?

I'm like, the water's coming. I don't know when it's coming, but it's coming. And then she heard the sound of her son's car in the driveway. I heard my son's car. I'll never forget it. It was like beep, beep, beep, baa, baa. The car died, submerged in floodwater. And then the water was inside the house.

I said, the water's here. And I looked out my window. And I felt like the people that fell in the Titanic. And the water came in so fast and so vigorous that it knocked the shoes off my feet and it made me fall into the water. And I'm six foot something, as you can tell. The water was over my waist. Tremica climbed onto the back of the couch

and in the middle of this drenched chaos called her insurance agent, just to double check that her new policy, that one that was supposed to kick in the day before, was definitely active. When I set up my house, it's filled with water. She said, there's no freaking way. I've never had anyone call me within 20,

not even 24 hours and the, are you serious? I said, yes ma'am. I said, I can show you pictures. I'm showing a picture of the water. She's like, oh my God. The May 17th storm was a turning point for Trameka. May 17th literally changed my life. That changed the way that I saw things,

because that was like a mental snap. There's no way I'm not going to live in this house any much longer. Like, I just can't make it make sense anymore. If the government wasn't going to improve the drainage situation, Tramica didn't know what to do. She didn't feel like she could justify rebuilding her house again in what had clearly become a dangerous location.

She needed help. Coming up after the break, help arrives. But it's not what Tramica was looking for. When we left off, Tramica Rankins was demanding solutions to the Terrace's flooding problems. And it turns out that someone was trying to figure out a solution. A man named Pat Forbes. I'm Pat Forbes. I'm the executive director of the Louisiana Office of Community Development. Pat heads up a statewide program called the Watershed Initiative, which tries to make Louisiana more resilient to the floods of the future.

Rainstorms are going to be more intense and more frequent. And so consequently, what we think we know about where the risk begins and ends from flooding is probably out the window. Traditionally, the government has managed flooding mostly with hard infrastructure and technology, things like pumps and levees. But as flood risk increases because of climate change, people like Pat are starting to come around to a different strategy. It's called managed retreat.

Yeah, I don't hate the idea. Managed retreat is much more efficient than chaotic retreat, and it's a lot less disruptive to people's lives. The idea is that with so many looming climate threats, it just isn't possible to protect every place with infrastructure, things like bigger levees or better drainage. We can't hold the line and defend every piece of property against rising seas and supercharged storms. And so, in particularly risky places, the safest, most resilient option might be to

try and get everyone out of harm's way. There's not enough money in the world for us to build our way out of flood risk. We're going to have to start getting out of the way where we never should have gotten in the way in the first place. Managed retreat is not a totally new idea. There's a famous example where the town of Valmeyer, Illinois moved away from the Mississippi River and onto higher ground after the big flood of 1993. And Pat has actually moved several flood-prone towns or neighborhoods in Louisiana, including

a couple where they have built a whole new community for everyone to move to together. And so they remain neighbors. Instead of having that be a diaspora, have them go live together somewhere else. But building an entire new neighborhood is really, really expensive. And so often they'll use a different tool to try and get people to safety. The buyout.

In a buyout, the government just pays people for their flood prone homes and lets them choose where they want to move. Then they demolish the old houses and ideally convert the land back into a wetland or a reservoir or something that can store water during a storm and help reduce flooding throughout the city. I mean, they can be parks and things like that that flood when it floods, but it won't

be people's houses. For Pat, this is an equity issue because while flooding certainly affects wealthy people with homes along the beach, it's actually a much more common problem for working-class communities and communities of color. There are a lot of reasons why that's the case. Sometimes racist housing policies like redlining pushed people on to flood-prone land. Sometimes the government has just failed to maintain the infrastructure. And often the lowest lying land is just cheaper.

Pat sees buyouts as an effort to address the mistakes of the past, the development decisions and housing policies that put a lot of marginalized people at risk. A lot of people have paid very steep price for development in floodplains. They've essentially had their opportunity for building generational wealth stolen from them

because their house is actually depreciated instead of appreciating. Pat talks about the buyout like a ladder out of a money pit. Our funds are focused on helping the most vulnerable people in the communities. We don't go do buyouts for affluent folks, right, on the beach or something.

Those aren't our targets. It's the people who have been shortchanged in the past and need an opportunity for a restart. Pat heard about the flooding in Greenwich Terrace from a local official and sent people to check out the area. And then when that final May flood happened, it was like, okay, this neighborhood meets all the criteria. And then that's when we set about setting up a buyout program for Greenwich Terrace. The Watershed Initiative allocated 30 million dollars to buy out

the most vulnerable homes in the terrace. But for a lot of the people actually living in the terrace, the buyout raised this question. If you've got 30 million dollars to help us out, why not just use that money to fix the drainage? You know, we could have just fixed the flooding situation and plumb it with all the money that they spent to buy the homes and then tear them down. You could have just invested the money into the plumbing, to the drainage. This is a man I met who still lives in the terrace. He didn't want to give his name, but he had a lot to say about the buyout program. He lives just outside the zone of houses that are eligible, so he wasn't offered a buyout.

But he wishes that money could have been spent on a solution that would have allowed everyone to stay. You know, as you can see here, we need a drain here on this street. That way the water would drain. Are you worried about more flooding? I worry about flooding every day when it rains. You know, that's something we worry about in an area every day. You know, it's not just flooding here in the Greenwich Territories, it's flooding in other areas in the city. But I really believe that to correct the problem is to correct the drainage.

Fix the drainage first, then you'll fix the problem. Many people I talk to express similar feelings. And it's really no surprise that fixing the drainage would be a more popular option than a buyout. People are always going to prefer a solution that allows them to remain in a community that they love. A recurring feeling that I feel like a lot of people have of like, we could have used that money differently. You know, $30 million. Why wasn't that money used to protect this neighborhood in some way?

I put this question to Jennifer Kobian, the grants director for Kalkushu Parish. What do you say to that? Jennifer Kobian Yeah, I mean, that decision was made at the state level and was sort of offered to the community to participate in the buyout program. We did not have an offer on the table to do a drainage improvement project. So we didn't have a choice between a drainage improvement project or a buyout. We only had the buyout on the table. Jennifer says that the parish is trying to get grants

to improve the capacity of the pumps in that area. But she's not sure how much they can lower the overall risk. Drainage improvement will have some improvement to the area, but it will not eliminate the flood risk, just given the low topography of the neighborhood. They're low. Those houses are sitting really low. Like, if a house was built there today,

they'd have to build four feet higher than where they're at right now. Jennifer said that buyouts should always be the last option, but there just wasn't a great alternative. And when the state called offering money, it wasn't something she felt she could afford to turn down. It seemed like the best way to get people help as quickly as possible.

It may well be true that there wasn't a viable way to fix the drainage situation in the terrace. But I think this situation raises an important question about climate adaptation. Who is being offered solutions that allow them to remain in place? And who is being asked to move? A lot of this is driven by economics. This is Anna Weber, a senior policy analyst with the NRDC. She says that a lot of decisions about whether or not to build new protective infrastructure, things like seawalls or new pumps, are determined in part by how much, quote, value the project

can protect. It is more, quote unquote, worth it to protect areas of higher value in a financial sense. And that means that on the flip side, areas of quote unquote lower value in a financial sense are often left out. They're not put behind the wall. They're not protected by the structural projects. And they are more likely to get offered a buyout. I want to just pause for a second,

because I think there is a genuine conundrum here. On the one hand, a buyout is a government benefit. And so, of course, you want to give that benefit to the people who need it the most. Communities of color, lower income communities, are much more likely to be faced with the impacts of chronic flooding. And so when buyouts are proposed, it makes sense that these communities might be at the top of the list. They're the ones facing the risks. They're the ones who should get the first chance to relocate.

That makes sense, logically, right? But a buyout is a weird kind of benefit, the kind of benefit that destroys a neighborhood and displaces everyone within it. And so if you're focusing on giving buyouts to working class communities of color, it also means that these communities are effectively being targeted, not in a malicious way, but they are being

prioritized for relocation. And that has additional effects. These are communities that have contributed the least to the problem. These are communities that are facing accumulative impacts, probably of lots of other kinds of challenges, environmental pollution, disinvestment in infrastructure, and now they're being told to relocate. That's a huge problem from a justice standpoint. Anna is in a funny place when it comes to buyouts. In many ways, she's one of their chief critics. I like to clarify when I talk to people about home buyouts, I'm not advocating for buyouts. People are taking a buyout because it's their last option.

It's their last least bad option. In a lot of ways, I think the best buyout is one that never has to happen in the first place. But she also knows as well as anyone that we're going to need more of them in the years ahead. All throughout the country, there are neighborhoods built on land that is too low or too close to the ocean. And eventually, the water is going to come. In the past 30 years, FEMA has bought out about 43,000 flood-prone properties. But by some estimates, there could be 13 million people living in houses that could regularly flood

by the end of the century. And that's just from sea level rise alone. There are millions more living in low lying floodplains that are vulnerable to supercharged storms. Any way you slice it, there are a lot of vulnerable people who are going to need to move. And so even though she knows about all the problems with buyouts, Anna Weber says we can't really give up

on them. We're stuck in this paradoxical situation where the tool that we have to help people move out of harm's way is not very good, but at the same time, it's the only tool that we have, and it needs to scale up in a big way. And so Anna spends a lot of her time trying to make buyouts better. She talks to people all around the country about what it's like to go through the process, including Tramica Rankins.

Back in Greenwich Terrace, it wasn't too long after the May 17th flood that Tramica finally got a call back from the city. From the mayor of Lake Charles, who said he had just spoken with the governor. And they had a new proposal. So I got off the phone with the governor. How do you feel like us buying out your house? Tramica didn't want to leave. She had spent the last several years fighting for her neighborhood.

But after that third flood, the one where she climbed onto the back of the couch to stay dry, the idea of continuing to live in the terrace just started to seem untenable. She was tired of badgering the city. I'm not going to keep calling you. I'm not going to keep telling you, hey, there's a rainstorm coming. Nobody came and cleaned these drains. I shouldn't have to do that. Trameka had so many good memories in that house.

But now she had all these bad ones, too. And she couldn't seem to shake the memory of wading through way-steep water in her living room. In the end, the decision wasn't that hard. I said, well, it's like a bulldozer to go straight through it right now, pull it right out. I don't care. There is no emotional attachment to the house anymore.

The voluntary buyout program used federal grant money to offer residents the fair market value of their home, and more if they moved to a less flood-prone area. The amount each family would get was determined based on the size of the house and the number of people living there. The most that any single household could get was 250,000. After some negotiation, Tramica and her family were offered 242,000, which Tramica knew was way more

than she was gonna get on the open market for a house that floods all the time. So in the end, it was like, you're giving me what? For a house that's probably not worth nothing now because you don't let it flood so many times? Oh, when do I sign it? Tremica Rankins accepted the buyout in January of 2022. in January of 2022. The buyout took about a year from start to finish. Believe it or not, that's actually really quick. Traditional FEMA buyouts have been known to take closer to five years.

But even on that fast track, a full year of housing limbo was really challenging for Tramica. And she says that filling out paperwork and jumping through hoops felt like this extremely stressful second job. Yes, the red tape.

I was driving down the street many days, put my hands in my hair, and my hair was coming out of the gloves. That's just how stressful it was. Tramica was particularly stressed about her neighbors, many of whom were a lot older than she was, and they were having a hard time following the process. So she became a volunteer bureaucracy navigator, helping all of the elders on her block understand the ins and outs of the program. So we all conferred like once or twice a week on what we've been told and things like that.

And it never was the same. It was like one person say this, but this person say this, this person say this. And it never was the same. It was like, one person say this, we know this person say this, this person say this. And it was crazy. So if I went through something first, I would say, hey, I hit this roadblock. One of the biggest roadblocks was just finding a new house to move into. The two hurricanes had destroyed so many houses

throughout the city, and the costs of the remaining housing stock jumped accordingly. On top of that, the pool of houses that Tremica could choose from was limited by the program. If she wanted to get the maximum amount of money, she needed to buy a house with significantly lower flood risk. Every house that you looked at, you had to vet it through St. Louisiana. You had to give them the address. Had to tell you whether it was suitable for their program or not. — Based on flood risk or what?

— So it had to be a flood risk of zero. Not only that, the elevation had to be above flood level. The elevation had to be high. — That's obviously a sensible policy for a buyout program, but it made the housing search a lot more difficult. Because in Lake Charles, the high ground is hard to come by. The state turned down multiple homes that Tramica found because they were too flood prone. But eventually, after months of searching, Tramica found a house that met all her criteria. It had everything she wanted, except the showers were tiny.

I'm standing in a tub and the shower's like right here. I'm like, I'm six foot something. I feel like this is supposed to be for somebody, maybe four or five feet. Like this will not jive with me. But Tramica bought the house, tiny showers and all. It did cost a bit more than what they got in the buyout. So she and her husband have a mortgage again, for the first time in years. They're doing their best to pay it down quickly.

But Tramica says that a new mortgage is a tall order for many of her elderly neighbors. How are you going to get a loan at 75 years old? How are you going to justify that, hey, you know, I got a 30 year mortgage, I'd be 100 plus years old to get a mortgage. Yeah, they had no choice. But even with all the headaches, the lost hair, and the new bills, Tramica says that she knew she made the right decision about the buyout on the day

her grandson Grayson saw the new house for the first time. So they picked him up from school and brought him here. He's like, where we at? They're like, we're home. So he jumps in the bed with me that night and the sigh of relief he had, he snuggled to me. He woke up at 12 midnight. He said, do we have to leave again? I'm like, no, this is home. Are you sure? I said, yeah. So will it be messy again? I said, I hope not. OK, my boy, you did good. And the sigh of relief that he let out, he went to sleep.

That's the first night that he had a peaceful, peaceful, peaceful, sound sleep. Tramica says the new neighborhood has taken some getting used to. It's part of a new, neatly planned development. And sometimes it feels a little lifeless compared to the terrace. She misses her noisy neighbors, the sounds of people having barbecues and working on their cars. But she does like the new drain right at the end of the driveway.

Is this for Halloween? Oh, wow. It's pretty spooky. When I visited her in October, Tramica and Grayson showed me around the new place. There was a giant inflatable skeleton hanging out on the front porch. Yeah, what do you want to be for Halloween?

I think a crown. A what? A crown. A crown? A clown, oh. I'm just like, how does it feel? Does this house feel like a home yet to you? I'm getting there. It's home. It takes time.

It takes time. I mean, when I wake up and I thank God for putting me in a safe place, you know, thank Him for not having any harm come our way, you know. Within a year I was like, okay, we made it for a year, we're going on two years, no harm has come this way, you know, let's keep it that way, please, am I in good graces now, you know? Because the other house, you had to question yourself, like man, did I do something wrong? Did I piss off the man upstairs or what? Because the other house you had to question yourself like man did I do something wrong that I paid that I'm Piss off the man upstairs. I was

Tramica is trying to embrace her new life, but she's still entangled with Greenwich Terrace She's part of an ongoing lawsuit about the flooding, trying to get damages from the city or the parish for all of the hardship she's endured over the past years. As for the buyouts, so far they've only been offered to the most vulnerable residents, with houses closest to the Coulee. The rest of the people there are waiting to see if more funding becomes available. They're also waiting to see what happens with the empty land. Jennifer Cobian wants to build a park back there that could hold water during a storm. Tramica would like to see something like that.

She would like to know that by moving, she helped make the neighborhood safer for the people who remain. safer for the people who remain. I don't know if you've ever visited a city or a neighborhood that you've lived in before and felt the urge to go drive by your old house. If you've glanced in the window and seen someone else's life just carrying on inside this space that still kind of feels like yours. For Trameka, there was actually no one living in her old house. It belonged to the state, but she still felt that pull.

She found herself driving by the terrace on the way home from work, even though it wasn't on her route. Like, I don't know what's drawing me there, but I found myself going out in front of the house and I found myself doing that once or twice a week And then one day she drove by the old house and there was a backhoe punching holes in the roof And I sat there took them all of 15 minutes to do it 15 20 maybe 25 minutes And I cried.

You know? It's wild that you just happened to be there that day. I was just like, jump out, because I wasn't expecting that. She knew that the house would be demolished soon, but she had no idea it was gonna happen while she was sitting right there in her car. She pulled out her phone and took a video of this bizarre scene to send to her husband.

The little house where they spent decades of their life getting torn apart board by board. I just happened to roll up on this today. I really don't know how I feel about this. I really don't know how I feel about this, she says. Even though Tramica was sure that taking the buyout was the right financial decision, you can hear the ambivalence in her voice. And honestly, I don't know how I feel about it either. When I left Tramica, I drove back to my hotel over the Calcasieu River Bridge,

past the glittering lights of the petrochemical plants reflecting off the water. And in that moment, I honestly felt overwhelmed at the thought of just how many people will need to endure some version of the brutally stressful, bittersweet process that Tramica went through. How many people will have to move away from a home that they weren't ready to leave? From a kitchen they painted themselves, with the heights of children penciled on the wall? There's no policy fix for that. Coming up next week on Not Built For This, we have an unlikely story of a community that didn't need to move.

A town that actually got the protective infrastructure it will need to survive in the years to come. And it only took them two decades, many trips to the Pentagon, and thousands of tamales. When we went back to Washington this evening, we were at the Pentagon. The first thing that came out was, you getting any tamales? We did not bring your tamales to the Pentagon. Sorry! You know, that was tamale diplomacy. Ha ha ha ha!

This episode of Not Built For This was reported and produced by me, Emmett Fitzgerald, along with producers Jason DeLeon and Sophie Kottner, and managing editor Delaney Hall. Further invaluable editing from Christopher Johnson, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, and the boss man, Roman Mars. Mix and sound design by Martin Gonzalez. Theme and original music by George Langford from Actual Magic with additional music by Swan Rayal.

Fact checking by Liz Boyd. Series art by Aaron Nestor. A huge thank you to everyone we spoke to this week, especially to the incredible Tramika Rankins. Also a big thank you to Roshetta Ozein, the director of The Vessel Project. If you want to support an amazing organization that does climate justice work and grassroots disaster relief in Lake Charles, you can find a link to the Vessel project on our website. I also want to thank Deodra Carmen and Cynthia White, aka The Purple Lady. And finally, a big thank you to my

good friends Casey Coleman, Susan Sakesh, and Leivon, who put me up and put up with me during my trip to Louisiana. Not Built For This is a six-part series from 99% Invisible. New episodes will be coming to you in the 99PI feed on Tuesdays and Fridays, wherever you get your podcasts. Cathy Tu is our executive producer, Kurt Kolstad is our digital director. The rest of the 99PI team includes Chris Barube, Vivian Ley, Lasha Madon, Gabriela Gladney, Jacob Maldonado Medina, and Nina Potuck.

The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are a part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family. You can find 99% Invisible on all the usual social media sites, as well as our new Discord server. There's a link to that and every episode of 99PI and Not Built For This at 99PI.org.