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12 Moms Initiative member Jamie describes water and mold damage to her home at the Coppertree Village Apartments to members of the National Low Income Housing Coalition during a bus tour hosted by Houston’s housing justice organizers. Credit: Leah Mahan
No matter where we come from, or how much money we make, we all deserve a safe and healthy place to call home. In this episode we meet Jamie, a mom who lives in subsidized housing in Houston, Texas, who joins with other moms to stand up to landlords and local officials whose policies have kept Black and brown families trapped in unsafe homes for years.
Before and after Hurricane Harvey, Jamie and organizers in Houston came together to take collective action and push for change. Along the way they connected with leaders in Puerto Rico who have also been resisting and re-building in the wake of ongoing disaster.
We hear from renowned Puerto Rican activist and former political prisoner Oscar Lopez Rivera, Luis O. Gallardo Rivera, director of Centro para la Reconstrucción del Hábitat and Adriana Godreau, director of Ayuda Legal Puerto Rico, who along with our host Chrishelle Palay engage in on the ground work and advocacy in their communities, in the halls of Congress, and beyond.
Thank you to the But Next Time team. To listen to all of the But Next Time episodes and access video versions with Spanish subtitles visit www.butnexttime.com. You can also learn more about the organizations featured in the podcast and access resources like a listening and discussion guide.
But Next Time was created as part of Rise-Home Stories, a project in which multimedia storytellers and housing, land, and racial justice advocates came together to reimagine the past, present, and future of our communities by transforming the stories we tell about them. The Rise-Home Stories Project includes five pieces of media (a video game, children’s book, animated short, and online storytelling site, and the But Next Time Podcast) that help us rethink our relationships to land and home. For more info visit www.risehomestories.com
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Transcript:
Lucy Kang: I’m Lucy Kang. Today on Making Contact, we’re going to Houston, Texas, where a group of moms sued the Department of Housing and Urban Development because they failed to maintain their properties.
Jamie: We have sewage water. If you stand right here in the parking lot, you can smell our complex. Everything just smells like sewage. Kids can’t go out and play because of the sewage water, which is also seeping in through the floors.
Lucy Kang: And we’re going to hear how community-members in Puerto Rico stepped up to restore power and provide housing in the wake of Hurricane Maria. They aren’t just working in isolation though. Community leaders in Puerto Rico are collaborating with organizers from across the Gulf Coast to learn from one another and advance their shared work for just recovery.
Luis O. Gallardo Rivera: We just hope these relationships are durable and they keep lasting. And you know, five years from now there might be another disaster in Texas. There might be another one in Louisiana and we need to keep that network open. Fortunately we have models that we can look back now and say, you know what, it didn’t work in this or that situation and it created more inequalities. We need that community-based focus to make this work and count.
Lucy Kang: Stay with us.
I’m Lucy Kang. You’re listening to Making Contact. Today’s story is from our partners at the podcast But Next Time. It’s the third in a four-part series we’re playing all through December. If you haven’t listened to the first episodes, now’s your chance to go to our website or your favorite podcast platform to get caught up.
This series tells the story of several disasters: wildfires, the Covid-19 pandemic and hurricanes. These difficult events pull back the curtain on long standing inequities in our society. But you’re also going to hear the way the people most affected have organized response and recovery and how they’re rebuilding towards a more just, equitable future. The series is hosted by community organizers Chrishelle Palay and Rose Arrieta. Here’s Rose to start us off.
Rose Arrieta: In our previous episodes we learned about how communities in Northern California have responded to climate-fueled wildfires and the pandemic — in Sonoma County’s wine country and my neighborhood in San Francisco’s Mission district. Now we’re heading to Texas, where Chrishelle has lived most of her life.
Chrishelle Palay: After Hurricane Harvey in 2017, my family moved from the suburbs to our old neighborhood, Kashmere Gardens, in Northeast Houston. It’s historically African American and honestly, many have given up on the place. We moved into my aunt’s home to keep it in the family, but once we were there, I couldn’t ignore all the problems I confronted when I walked out my front door.
Hurricane Harvey was a huge storm. It rained hard for three days straight and it also flooded a third of the city. While affluent parts of the city were starting to bounce back, my neighbors still had to deal with mold in their walls and leaky roofs. I now lead an organization that addresses equity in disaster recovery, and we focus on Houston, but I’ve become connected with people across the country working on these issues.
Chrishelle Palay: In October 2019, I helped lead a tour of Houston for affordable housing advocates from around the country.
We are no stranger to disaster. And so we’ve used many of our lessons that we’ve learned over time from past disasters to try to really shift the way in which we recover.
We have all had to confront discrimination in the disaster recovery process that leaves people with fewer resources and much worse off than their wealthier neighbors. Zoe Middleton organized the tour.
Zoe Middleton: I’m the Southeast Texas and Houston co-director for Texas Housers and we’re a civil rights organization that does civil rights by doing fair housing and equable disaster recovery.
Rose Arrieta: The passengers on this tour included advocates from Texas, Puerto Rico, Florida, New Jersey and Washington, D.C. — all connected to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
Chrishelle Palay: Several organizations came together after the storm waters went down, (we) came together saying, okay, how can we work together this time? Why don’t we really make an effort to work more comprehensively and more strategically as opposed to us all working in our little areas.
Ericka Bowman: Hello everyone. My name is Ericka Bowman. I am the community organizer with Texas Housers. This apartment complex across the street, it’s called Coppertree. It is a Section 8 property that we’ve been working with. They have a natural disaster every time it rains in their home, it pours constantly.
Rose Arrieta: Ericka has spent countless hours getting to know the families in this sprawling cluster of two-story buildings. When she describes Coppertree as ‘a Section 8 property,’ she’s saying that the federal government helps provide affordable housing for these families — (mostly) single moms with children.
The corporate owners receive millions from the government to accept Section 8 vouchers from the renters. The owners of this old development from the 1970s get market rate. The federal government pays the difference between that and what the tenant can pay.
Zoe Middleton: Coppertree doesn’t rise to the level of national or even local media attention. It’s a chronic, slow-moving disaster.
Ericka Bowman: The mold is deep inside of the walls. It’s very evident when you walk into these homes that this mold is creating a lot of very, very serious illnesses inside of this apartment complex.
Chrishelle Palay: Through the windows of the tour bus, we could see that the Coppertree development occupies several blocks. There are more than 300 apartments. Driving through, I remembered seeing one burnt out building left abandoned. Others were just falling apart, with mold and water damage. Ericka knows more intimately about life inside this complex for the families here.
Ericka Bowman: This is Jamie. She has started to help organize the women in this apartment complex. I’m going to let her talk a little bit about some of the things she’s faced living on this property (applause).
Jamie: Hello, I’m Jamie. I’m a full-time student, full-time employee, full-time mom of five. I moved to Coppertree in 2011. It didn’t rain, it poured, like the walls would peel. So every couple of months they have to put new sheetrock. They don’t kill the mold.
Ericka Bowman: And instead of ripping and taking things out, they leave the same exact carpet that’s been there forever. They paint over mold, over leaks. And then within days you start to see the same mold.
Jamie: My three babies that live with me, two of them have severe asthma. I go through a box of albuterol per child per month and that’s in a good month. They can’t breathe. I called the office, they tell me they’re going to come look at it — and a year later, nothing.
Ericka Bowman: Like a lot of these women don’t have any type of renter insurance. She lost a lot of her furniture. She lost a lot of the clothes.
Zoe Middleton: It’s really important we understand who is able to recover as a renter, and it’s not low-income renters. Fair housing wage in Houston is something around $17 an hour to be able to afford a one-bedroom apartment. They have no place to go, or they’re forced into especially substandard housing stock.
Jamie: We have sewage water. If you stand right here in the parking lot, you can smell our complex. Everything just smells like sewage. Kids can’t go out and play because of the sewage water, which is also seeping in through the floors.
Chrishelle Palay: Jamie is part of a campaign called 12 Moms, one result of tenant organizing in Southeast Texas. The moms have sued the government. HUD, to be exact — The Department of Housing and Urban Development — because they have failed to maintain property or cancel contracts with landlords who won’t make repairs.
Zoe Middleton: 12 Moms is a fair housing campaign that seeks to put the people that are actually experiencing the insufficient and unsafe housing conditions at the forefront of the campaigns where they are able to ask for the solutions that they want.
Ericka Bowman: Jamie, she still is trying to figure out ways of how — not only can she get her family out of there, but how she can get others. Her being part of this 12 Moms campaign started to open her eyes as to how the system works and what needs to be done.
Zoe Middleton: Tenants are asking for vouchers to be able to move to a safer area.
Chrishelle Palay: Zoe explained it’s hard to look for housing with a HUD voucher. Especially where we live.
Zoe Middleton: The state of Texas has said that voucher holders can be discriminated against because they’re not under the Fair Housing Act a protected class. If a landlord does not want to have a voucher holder, they can simply say no, and it’s because of how you pay your rent. We’re kind of the wild west in terms of our respect for capital, but not human life.
Chrishelle Palay: There’s, like, this cycle when it comes to property owner, landlord, management, HUD, but it leaves the tenant just totally out of it. But the tenant is the one that’s supposed to be served. I mean these developments should not exist solely as commodities that are just revenue-generating machines. And that’s in essence, what they’ve become.
Zoe Middleton: HUD could do so much differently. It won’t come to anyone as a surprise that I think that! First,they could refuse to re-grant to property owners that have low inspection scores. HUD could also be futuristic by looking at where flood plains lie. There are hundreds of thousands of tenants in project-based Section 8 housing that live at risk of serious flooding, and HUD could refuse to subsidize citing people in the floodplain.
Ericka Bowman: The ultimate win would have been HUD coming in and giving these vouchers to the women. Letting them know, we do see that you are living in hazardous conditions. Obviously management isn’t doing what they’re supposed to be doing. And so we are now issuing vouchers for opportunity to find housing in other areas. That’s not what happened!
Chrishelle Palay: Ericka said HUD passed the responsibility on to the local housing authority that, in turn, gave vouchers to some families in the same area. All those renters had to find apartments within a very short time, without any financial help from government agencies.
Ericka Bowman: HUD — they kind of just put their hands up and just let them kind of fend for themselves.
Chrishelle Palay: A nationwide study from 2019 revealed that about 450,000 renter households — in public housing or privately owned, subsidized housing — are in flood plains. This situation can only get worse with climate change.
Jamie: So if there’s anybody in here today that can speak for us and help us get a little further with our voice, please, we’re begging you. Some of us need help to help ourselves. Thank you. (applause)
Zoe Middleton: Jamie’s super brave. I think anyone that decides to participate in organizing work in a state like Texas on an issue that is so underprotected, like tenants’ rights are in Texas, is doing something really brave. Because you will hear stories of people being threatened to be evicted. They’ll get a comment that’s like, you’re not going to cause any trouble, are you?
Ericka Bowman: I asked a couple of the tenants who are wanting to express themselves to hang SOS, little white rags, like this is an extreme emergency. I just wanted you to get a visual of that and feel the voices of those families that are in these apartments and are living the way that they’re living.
Hopefully it’ll get the attention of people. Cause we’re embarrassing the city council. They got these flags in their district that’s flying. Obviously you guys aren’t doing something that you’re supposed to be doing. You need to pay attention to that.
Chrishelle Palay: Ericka described the day she helped tenant families put up the flags. One very curious little girl asked what she was doing.
Ericka Bowman: I was super excited to tell her, cause she was so eager. So I was like, these are the voices of the people who live here. This is saying that in my apartment I have mold. And she goes, I have mold! I was like, you do? She was like, yeah I have mold. This is saying, water is coming from my ceiling. Water’s coming from my ceiling! This is telling people this is not fair, that this is how my house looks and something needs to be done about it. And she’s smiling like, okay, I’m getting it. I get what you’re saying. I’m always telling my kids, if you see something that’s not right don’t accept it. There’s never a time where you can’t use your voice. Your voice is your freedom.
Chrishelle Palay: In our final episode we’ll learn how the lawsuit brought by the moms in Coppertree. Their efforts are a step toward holding the federal government responsible for safe, sanitary and dignified living conditions.
Amy Gastelum: We’re jumping in to remind you that you are listening to Making Contact. If you like today’s show and you want more information or if you’d like to leave us a comment, visit us at radioproject.org. There you can access today’s show and all of our prior episodes. Okay, now back to the show.
Chrishelle Palay: A few months after we gathered in Houston, Zoe and I and colleagues from other cities traveled together to Puerto Rico. An environmental grantmakers group had invited us to their conference, to speak together on a panel about what our organizations have learned about disaster recovery.
Cashauna Hill: Hello, my name is Cashauna Hill. I’m executive director of the Louisiana Fair Housing Action Center based in New Orleans.
Chrishelle Palay: I’d come to know Cashauna Hill through our work on fair housing in the South.
Cashauna Hill: So I am missing Mardi Gras to be here with you all (laughs) and I’m going to ask that you excuse any residual glitter (laughter) that you might see on my face cause I know it’s still there. It was pointed out to me twice in the airport yesterday and you know, there’s nothing I can do about it.
Chrishelle Palay: Ariadna Godreau, who runs a legal advocacy organization in Puerto Rico, had been on our Houston bus tour, and we were all eager to reconnect with her on the island.
Ariadna Godreau: Hi, I’m Ariadna Godreau. I am the founder and director of Ayuda Legal Puerto Rico, which is a local organization that works with movement lawyering initiatives around just recovery and the right to dignified housing. We were the first disaster legal aid initiative on the ground the day after hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, and since then …
Chrishelle Palay: Hurricane Maria wrecked Puerto Rico just a few weeks after Harvey hit Houston. Maria was a major hurricane that caused close to 3,000 deaths on the island. And the recovery has been painfully slow. It’s still going on as we record this in Fall 2021.
Rose Arrieta: Half of the adults in the U.S. don’t know that Puerto Ricans are citizens. They’ve had U.S. citizenship since 1917, but it’s a qualified, unequal form of citizenship.Puerto Ricans cannot even vote in U.S. presidential elections or even elect their own senators and representatives to Congress. At the same time, the U.S. imposed austerity measures and cut services creating hardship and huge obstacles to disaster recovery.
Chrishelle Palay: I learned a lot about that reality from Ariadna and others at the conference.
Ariadna Godreau: When does a disaster start? And it’s a very difficult question. I know it is for all of us. In the case of Puerto Rico, the backdrop of colonialism, the backdrop of austerity — sustained austerity for the past 16 years — the backdrop of human rights violations. And then Hurricane Maria came in. The recovery process has been also a process of fighting for the right to stay on the land. If you need to move away from this place, you need to leave the Island, to actually leave the homeland.
Chrishelle Palay: One of the people in our small network of housing justice advocates at the conference was Luis Gallardo. I was intrigued by what I heard him say about his involvement in the right-to-housing movement in Puerto Rico. We met in a park to continue our conversation.
Luis O. Gallardo Rivera: Ever since I was a teenager, I would always wonder, how do we have people living on the street? The Maria situation only made it more intense because now you have folks who lost their house, or they live in substandard housing worse than we’d ever imagined. They have nowhere to go. They have no title, they don’t have access to FEMA assistance. The federal money is just not arriving. We saw abandoned schools that were occupied by families that created sort of communal settings where they would, you know, divide up the classrooms and that’s where we’d stay for shelter. So we saw an explosion of that occur.
Chrishelle Palay: So Luis co-directs Centro Para La Reconstruccion Del Habitat. It transforms abandoned buildings into affordable housing. And yes, you heard him correctly. Many families are denied FEMA assistance. That’s because on the Island, homeowners who inherit property are not required to have a deed to their homes, and FEMA requires that in order for homeowners to even get help.
Rose Arrieta: In the aftermath of a disaster, Puerto Ricans would be hard pressed to retroactively create deeds to homes that have been passed down generation to generation. So, they get left out – again. Luis explained that disaster recovery on the island requires a lot of creativity.
Luis O. Gallardo Rivera: We don’t march into a community and say, hey everybody, let’s take over an abandoned building. Like, what building do you want to take out? We are approached or we find these samples of community-based action. And I think Puerto Rico is a great laboratory for that, especially considering the disasters that had and the lack of a local, state or federal response. We had to find our own shelters, we had to find our own housing, we had to clear our own roads and we had to create our own networks of services, food, water, and basic necessities.
Rose Arrieta: Oscar Lopez Rivera, a renowned Puerto Rican activist and former political prisoner, told the story of San Sebastian – to illustrate how people took things into their own hands — when the government didn’t show up for them.
Chrishelle Palay: A big part of Hurricane Maria recovery was the worst electrical blackout in U.S. history, that lasted several months.
Oscar Lopez Rivera: In my hometown, the mayor, he brought all the retired workers from the electric company and in two weeks, San Sebastian had electricity. One of the few places in Puerto Rico that had electricity and it was done by the workers.
Rose Arrieta: The success in San Sebastian led to new laws in Puerto Rico that empower local governments during emergencies to restore critical services on their own.
Chrishelle Palay: There are examples like this all over the island, of people taking care of each other. On a stormy day we had the opportunity to see organizing in motion – beyond the shiny conference venues and tourist maps.
Ariadna and others encouraged us to visit the Caño Martin Peña. Eight densely populated neighborhoods of San Juan surround this tidal channel. In the early 1900s, people built informal dwellings along the channel in the mangrove wetlands. As the city grew, the channel became clogged and polluted. Often it overflows into the homes in these neighborhoods. Seven of us, including me, Zoe and Cashauna, squeezed into a van with our guides, María Yvelisse Inirio and Mariolga Juliá Pacheco.
María Yvelisse Inirio: There’s no air conditioner in the – (laughs) in the van so we are so sorry for that. We have to close the windows for the rain. But you’re going to see with your own eyes what is the struggle of the communities when it rains like it’s raining today.
Chrishelle Palay: Through the steamy windows we could see the streets filling with flood water. The modest homes and storefronts were bright blue and yellow, like the majestic ones we had seen in other areas. People were navigating past storm-damaged buildings and empty lots.
María Yvelisse Inirio: This is the Martin Peña bridge. This is one of the two bridges that connects one side of the community – north and south. Both sides of the district flooded. (windshield wipers) Also it is a health issue, because of the contamination.
Cashauna Hill: I’m from New Orleans. We have the same kinds of issues. Any sort of rain we have water in the streets and flooding. Are you still dealing with the same infrastructure from like 100 years ago? Or has there been recent upgrades?
María Yvelisse Inirio: No, that’s why we are here. Because the community designed a comprehensive plan to update and to build for the first time a lot of infrastructure that we here don’t have. We receive the water from all the communities around. But here, don’t have the infrastructure to deal with all the water that comes to this place…
Chrishelle Palay: What we learned was quite amazing, that more than 700 meetings and activities generated plans to revitalize the Caño neighborhoods. That’s empowered people to lead and carry out these plans through three institutions, including a community land trust — or CLT.
The land trust provides more than 2,000 families the legal right to live on the land where their homes stand and re-settle those who live in flood-prone areas.
María Yvelisse Inirio: And as you can see we have to relocate a lot of families. So, this is one of the constructions occurring right now, the new houses. And this is for a person that lost their house in the hurricane.
Rose Arrieta: Almost one thousand people in the Caño Martin Pena neighborhood will be relocated to new homes. Their plan includes removing debris & pollution from the waterways and creating parks. People hope the channel will become a center for recreation and transportation in the city, instead of a dumping ground for San Juan’s runoff and pollution.
María Yvelisse Inirio: We’re going to pass through this bridge. This is an historic bridge. It was constructed when we were a colony of Spain. We are now a colony of the US. It’s just a change of colony, but it’s a colony.
Chrishelle Palay: The day after our visit to El Caño, the sun had finally come out. and Zoe and I took a walk to a nearby park to share what we had experienced.
Driving through those narrow streets with little flood infrastructure was pretty nerve-wracking. Where the folks in the van were clutching their heart at some moments sometimes because it looks as if they were diving in the water at some points. If the community here in El Caño didn’t do it for themselves, would there still be homes in that area?
Zoe Middleton: Home is really a place to belong and to build your sense of self and to understand how you fit into all of these larger systems, into your family, into your neighborhood, but at its core home is about who gets to belong, who gets to remain. So disaster recovery is when it destroys your home, when it destroys a neighborhood — how we recover is also about who gets to belong and who gets to survive this disaster. And who gets to survive the next disaster and how they get to survive it.
Chrishelle Palay: It felt precious in Puerto Rico to build these relationships with our peers. We weren’t trying to impress a funder or plead with a government agency. We could just reflect on what was common and what was unique in our own experiences in our cities. If we could build on that, how different things could be. Luis Gallardo shared our hope that we could continue to build on our collective knowledge and experiences.
Luis O. Gallardo Rivera: We just hope these relationships are durable and they keep lasting. And you know, five years from now there might be another disaster in Texas. There might be another one in Louisiana and we need to keep that network open. Fortunately we have models that we can look back now and say, you know what, it didn’t work in this or that situation and it created more inequalities. We need that community-based focus to make this work and count.
Zoe Middleton: There was something that someone said the first day that we were here about, resistance is really strong in Puerto Rico, I think it’s really beautiful, dadada … But every beautiful story shouldn’t have to be about resistance. And that really, really spoke to me because I think we find a lot of comfort in our organizing work in Houston. It’s how we help to make sense of disaster, right? And how we find a way through it.
But we also deserve the peace of mind and the comfort, the other types of beautiful stories that are out there that feel really far away when you’re dealing with even a regular rain causing a flood, let alone a hurricane causing a flood.
Chrishelle Palay: All facts. It shouldn’t be a luxury to just lead our lives — all of us, regardless of whether we have a lot of money. Zoe and I, and so many others, do our work because, as a country, the U.S. just can’t get it together. We aren’t there yet — even after a record number of pandemic deaths and major job losses that have pushed millions of people to the margins.
Rose Arrieta: Even then, though, like Chrishelle’s colleague Ericka said — there’s never a time when you can’t use your voice. We’ll have more to say about what happens when people use their voices to resist, vote and organize for better living conditions. On the final episode of But Next Time.
Lucy Kang: But Next Time is a project of Rise-Home Stories. For more information visit risehomestories.com.
I’m Lucy Kang. You’re Listening to Making Contact. Since the 2021 broadcast of this episode, Chrishelle Palay has continued to collaborate with Ayuda Legal to press for equitable disaster preparedness and recovery.
In 2022, Chrishelle shared insight from her experience in Houston with Ayuda Legal on a panel titled “El Techo Es Un Derecho” (“Housing is a right.”)
Moderator (introduces Chrishelle in Spanish): Chrishelle también te pregunto lo mismo. Haga un poquito de tu organización state también me interesó mucha en esa sección que hay entre la raza y el espacio y la construcción, la la recuperación de la pi vivienda nos pues, habla un poquito más.
Chrishelle Palay: Disaster recovery is just the lens that we use to expose the longstanding inequities and discriminatory practices we’ve seen for generations.
What good is it rebuilding a home when it’s just going to flood again?
Lucy Kang: Chrishelle explained that voters in Houston pushed for a $2.5 billion dollar bond (to be accompanied by billions more in federal and state funds) and a Community Flood Resilience Task Force, which prioritizes the needs of vulnerable residents and advises county officials on the creation of a “comprehensive, innovative, and community-driven plan for resilience.”
As a board member of the National Low income Housing Coalition, Chrishelle presented Ayuda Legal with the 2023 Sheila Crowley Housing Justice Award. The organization was praised for “its persistent efforts to ensure a just recovery – including access to safe and affordable housing – in the aftermath of numerous disasters.”
Join us next week for the next installment of But Next Time on Making Contact. For more updates and connections to the organizations featured in the series But Next Time visit radioproject.org where you can find links to everything in the show notes. Until next week, I’m Lucy Kang.
More stories like this:
But Next Time Part 4: The Road to Rebuilding and Recovering, Better (Encore)
But Next Time, Episode 3: Rising Waters
But Next Time, Episode 4: Higher Ground
Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm (Encore)
But Next Time Part 2: Language Justice and the Road to Recovery After Disaster (Encore)
