Unbuilding the Terrace

ROMAN MARS: This is episode four of Not Built for This: Unbuilding the Terrace.

[Lucinda Williams’s Lake Charles plays on car stereo]

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: It’s like a gleaming city. If you looked quickly, you might think you were looking at Manhattan.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: But when you get a little closer, you realize those aren’t skyscrapers lighting up the night.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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 smoke stacks. It’s pretty dramatic.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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.

NEWSCASTER #1: Lake Charles is trying to recover from back-to-back hurricanes, the first from…

EMMETT FITZGERALD: In recent years, Lake Charles has been hit with more big storms than just about any city in the country.

NEWSCASTER #2: Well, here’s a moniker no one wants: America’s most weather-battered city. Yet it belongs to Lake Charles, Louisiana…

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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 Greinwich Terrace. It’s a mostly Black neighborhood with wide suburban streets and modest single-story homes.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: So, I’m here in Greinwich Terrace and I’m standing under a tree. I try to keep cool.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: I huddled in the shade of a tree and watched as a tiny bulldozer chomped away at some concrete.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: This is a sound of a Bobcat that is tearing up what’s left of the house.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: All around me were the footprints of homes that no longer exist, with breaks in the sidewalk where the driveways used to be.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Yeah, just a lot of empty, empty land.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Here is a sign that says, “State buyout program, Greinwich Terrace neighborhood demolitions underway.”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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 Greinwich 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 Greinwich Terrace was just not built for this. I am Emmett FitzGerald.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: You’re standing in my old driveway.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: I’m standing in your old driveway? This is it?

TRAMEKA RANKINS: This is my driveway, here for 20+ years.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: I’m standing with Trameka Rankins on the empty plot of land where her house used to be. The only thing left from Trameka’s old life is a big old pine tree, which she never cared for anyway.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: Don’t miss my pine tree because it puts sap during the wintertime and everything on the car, so…

EMMETT FITZGERALD: She may not miss her pine tree, but she does miss this place.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: It is bittersweet coming back here now just to see all the houses that are gone because this whole row were all homes.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Trameka 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 Greinwich Terrace.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: Nice little house. Nice little neighborhood. Older people. Hey, great, cool.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: And I used to at least wake up on a Saturday morning to somebody going down the neighborhood with their car’s music booming. You hear somebody in the neighborhood fussing. You hear, you know, you smell the barbecue going or somebody fixing on a car.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: She says the Terrace was full of funny characters, like her next door neighbor.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: He meant well, but he kept the neighborhood ready. Anytime he stepped out of the house, you know he was about to do something fishy he wasn’t supposed to. There was a lot of colorful activities that may have happened in the neighborhood.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: The Terrace wasn’t Trameka’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.

NEWSCASTER #3: Hurricane Harvey barreling into the Texas coastline. That could render some areas uninhabitable for months…

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Hurricane Harvey overwhelmed a drainage canal in the back of the Terrace called the Cayouche Coulee and flooded the neighborhood. Trameka was shocked.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: 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.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: She made repairs, but now she was worried. The drainage infrastructure in the Terrace couldn’t handle Harvey.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: It’s going to happen again. When? We don’t know, but it will. Fast-forward to 2020. Hurricane Laura came through and demolished the city.

NEWSCASTER #4: One of the strongest storms to ever hit the U.S. left its mark on just about every part of Lake Charles…

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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 Trameka’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.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: Just a few weeks after Laura had came in August, maybe six weeks later, here comes Delta.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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.

NEWSCASTER #5: It’s hard to believe that it’s happening again. Another hurricane…

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Trameka 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.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: I remember my two-year-old grandson looking at me. 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.”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: The family was back to square one. They needed to gut the house and rebuild all over again. Trameka 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.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: You know, it broke my heart after Delta. I was repairing everything, doing what I had to do, but I watched an older lady open up her door, her screen door, raise up her windows…She 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.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: I just passed three houses with blue tarps, four houses right there with blue tarps still on their roof.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: There are still so many blue tarps where a roof should be. It looks like the hurricanes happened months ago, not years.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: We’re talking upwards of two to three years ago at this point. You can really see a lot of damage still from the storm or storms, really—a lot of houses that still don’t feel like they’ve been fully rebuilt.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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 outmigration 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.

JENNIFER COBIAN: You’re certainly seeing things that have never happened before.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Jennifer Cobian is the grants director for Calcasieu 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.

JENNIFER COBIAN: 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.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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.

JENNIFER COBIAN: We did not see the major catastrophic rain that that our neighbors just to the east of us and southeast Louisiana saw and then the 50 inches of rain just to the west of us in east Texas saw with Hurricane Harvey.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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.

JENNIFER COBIAN: Somethin’ else out there.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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.

JENNIFER COBIAN: 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.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: It spills out of the bayous and the coulees and into the city, where it starts to pool in the lowest lying spots.

JENNIFER COBIAN: So, this is the Greinwich Terrace neighborhood right here.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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. As she scrolls towards the Terrace, the map gets very blue.

JENNIFER COBIAN: 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.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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.

JENNIFER COBIAN: 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.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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.

JENNIFER COBIAN: It’s sort of a lot of little things that add up to be a big thing.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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 Trameka 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.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: How are you going to keep telling me it’s a freaking hundred year flood? Well God dang it, we in the last days because a hundred years is coming every six months. Straight up. Like, don’t insult my intelligence, it’s called, “You guys’ infrastructure is horrible!”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: And Trameka’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.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: 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.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: The flooding was new, but for Trameka 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 Trameka 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.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: It’s a combination of climate change. I’m not saying that that does not play a factor in it, but what you allocating your dollars to care for and do has a lot to do with what’s happened here.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Trameka started calling the city, demanding that something be done to fix the drainage problem.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: Enough is enough. How do you expect somebody to stay sane and you keep doing the same thing to us over and over? You don’t expect somebody to rise up and say anything about it?

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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 Terrace. 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.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: My insurance kicked in May 16th. And May 17th was a flood.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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. Trameka 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?”

TRAMEKA RANKINS: 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.”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: And then, she heard the sound of her son’s car in the driveway.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: I heard my son’s car—I’ll never forget it—it was like, “Beep, beep, beep, borw braw…”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: The car died, submerged in floodwater. And then, the water was inside the house.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: I said, “The water’s here.” And I looked out my window, and I felt like the people would’ve felt 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.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Trameka 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 was supposed to kick in the day before was definitely active.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: I said, “My house is filling with water.” She said, “There’s no freaking way. I’ve never had anyone call me within not even 24 hours and the… Are you serious?” I said, “Yes, ma’am. I can show you pictures.” And I’m showing her a picture of the water. She’s like, “Oh, my God.”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: The May 17th storm was a turning point for Trameka.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: 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 going to live in this house any much longer. I just can’t make it make sense anymore.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: If the government wasn’t going to improve the drainage situation, Trameka 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 Trameka was looking for.

[AD BREAK]

EMMETT FITZGERALD: When we left off, Trameka 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.

PAT FORBES: I’m Pat Forbes. I’m the executive director of the Louisiana Office of Community Development.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Pat heads up a statewide program called the Watershed Initiative, which tries to make Louisiana more resilient to the floods of the future.

PAT FORBES: Rainstorms are gonna 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.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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.”

PAT FORBES: 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.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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.

PAT FORBES: 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.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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.

PAT FORBES: And so, they remain neighbors. Instead of having that be a diaspora, have them go live together somewhere else.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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.

PAT FORBES: I mean, they can be parks and things like that, that flood when it floods. But they won’t be people’s houses.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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 onto 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.

PAT FORBES: A lot of people have paid a very steep price for development in floodplains. They’ve essentially had their opportunity for building generational wealth stolen from ’em because their house is actually depreciated instead of appreciating.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Pat talks about the buyout like a ladder out of a money pit.

PAT FORBES: 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.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Pat heard about the flooding in Greinwich 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.

PAT FORBES: Then that’s when we set about setting up a buyout program for Greinwich Terrace.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: The Watershed Initiative allocated $30 million 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 to help us out, why not just use that money to fix the drainage?

MAN: You know, we coulda just fixed the flooding situation and plumbing with all the money that they spent to buy the homes and then tear ’em down. You coulda just invested the money into the plumbing, into the drainage.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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’ve allowed everyone to stay.

MAN: You know, as you can see here, we need a drain here on this street. That way the water will drain.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Are you worried about more flooding?

MAN: I worry about flooding every day when it rains. You know, that’s something we worry about in the area every day. It’s not just flooding here in the Greinwich Terrace, 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.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Many people I talked to expressed 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.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: A recurring feeling that I feel like a lot of people have of like, “We could have used that money differently. $30 million. Why wasn’t that money used to protect this neighborhood in some way?”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: I put this question to Jennifer Cobian, the grants director for Calcasieu Parish.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: What do you say to that?

JENNIFER COBIAN: Um, 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.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Jennifer says that the parish is trying to get grants to improve the capacity of the pumps in that area, but it’s not clear how much they can lower the overall risk.

JENNIFER COBIAN: 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. If a house was built there today, they’d have to build four feet higher than where they’re at right now.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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?

ANNA WEBER: A lot of this is driven by economics.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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 sea walls or new pumps—are determined in part by how much “value” the project can protect.

ANNA WEBER: It is more “worth it” to protect areas of higher value in a financial sense. And that means that, on the flip side, areas of “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.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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.

ANNA WEBER: 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?

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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…

ANNA WEBER: 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 cumulative 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.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Anna is in a funny place when it comes to buyouts. In many ways, she’s one of their chief critics.

ANNA WEBER: 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.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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.

ANNA WEBER: 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.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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 Trameka Rankins. 

Back in Greinwich Terrace, it wasn’t too long after the May 17th flood that Trameka 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.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: So, I got off the phone with the governor. “How do you feel like us buying out your house?”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Trameka 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.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: But I’m not gonna keep calling you. I’m not gonna keep telling you, “Hey, there’s a rainstorm coming. Nobody came and cleaned these drains.” I shouldn’t have to do that.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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 waist-deep water in her living room. In the end, the decision wasn’t that hard.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: I said, “Well, take a bulldozer, go straight through it right now, pull it right out. I don’t care. There is no emotional attachment to the house anymore.”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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 thousand. After some negotiation, Trameka and her family were offered $242 thousand. Which Trameka knew was way more than she was going to get on the open market for a house that floods all the time.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: So, in the end, it was like, “You’re giving me what? For a house that is probably not worth nothing now because you let it flood so many times? Oh, where do I sign it?”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Trameka Rankins accepted the buyout in January of 2022.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: The buyout took about a year from start to finish.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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 Trameka. And she says that filling out paperwork and jumping through hoops felt like this extremely stressful second job.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: Yes, the red tape. I was driving down the street many days, putting my hands in my hair, and my hair was coming out in gobs. That’s just how stressful it was.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Trameka 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.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: So, we all conferred 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, and this person say this. And it was crazy. So, if I went through something first, I would say, “Hey, I hit this roadblock.”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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 Trameka 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.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: Every house that you looked at, you had to vet it through the state of Louisiana. You had to give ’em the address—had to tell you whether it’s suitable for their program or not.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Based on flood risk or what?

TRAMEKA RANKINS: 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.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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 Trameka found because they were too flood-prone. But eventually, after months of searching, Trameka found a house that met all her criteria. It had everything she wanted, except the showers were tiny.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: I’m standing in a tub and the shower is, 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. This will not jive with me.”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: But Trameka 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 Trameka says that a new mortgage is a tall order for many of her elderly neighbors.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: How are you going to get a loan at 75 years old? How are you going to justify, “Hey, I got a 30-year mortgage. I’d be 100+ years old to get a mortgage.” Yeah, they had no choice.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: But even with all the headaches, the lost hair, and the new bills, Trameka 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.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: So, they picked him up from school and brought him here. He’s like, “Where are we at?” They’re like, “We’re home.” So, he jumps into the bed with me that night. And the sigh of relief he had. And he snuggled to me, and 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.” “Okay, Mama, you did good.” And the sigh of relief that he let out… And he went to sleep. That’s the first night that he had a peaceful, peaceful sound sleep.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Trameka 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.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Is this for Halloween? Oh wow. It’s pretty spooky.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: When I visited her in October, Trameka and Grayson showed me around the new place. There was a giant inflatable skeleton hanging out on the front porch.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Yeah, what do you want to be for Halloween?

GRAYSON: I think a clown.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: A what?

GRAYSON: A clown.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: A clown. Oh… How does it feel? Does this house feel like a home yet to you?

TRAMEKA RANKINS: I’m getting there. It’s home, you know?

EMMETT FITZGERALD: It takes time.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: It takes time. I mean, when I wake up every morning, I thank God for putting me in a safe place. I thank him for not having any harm come our way. 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. Let’s keep it that way please. Am I in good graces now?” The other house—you had to question yourself like, “Man, did I do something wrong? Did I piss off the man upstairs or what?”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Trameka says that 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 neighbors—the sounds of people having barbecues and working on their cars.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: My son makes a comment that somebody said, “Man, you moved from the hood to the burbs.”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Trameka is trying to embrace her new life, but she’s still entangled with Greinwich Terrace. She’s part of an ongoing lawsuit about the flooding, trying to get damages from the city or the parish for all 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. Trameka 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.

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 kind of still 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.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: 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.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: And then one day she drove by the old house, and there was a backhoe punching holes in the roof.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: And I sat there. It took them all of 15 minutes to do it—15, 20, maybe 25 minutes. And I cried.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: It’s wild that you just happened to be there that day.

TRAMEKA RANKINS: I was just, like, dumbfounded because I wasn’t expecting that.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 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—their old house, the little box where they spent 20 years of their life, getting torn apart board-by-board.

TRAMEKA RANKINS (VIDEO): I just happened to roll up on this today. I really don’t know how I feel about this.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: “I really don’t know how I feel about this,” she says. Even though Trameka 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 Trameka, 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 Trameka went through. How many people will have to move away from a home that they weren’t ready to leave—from a kitchen that 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.

JOSÉ PUENTE: When we went back to Washington, D.C., we were at the Pentagon, the first thing that came out was, “You get any tamales?” [laughs]

LEEANN GRIGSBY PUENTE: We did not bring your tamales to the Pentagon, sorry.

JOSÉ PUENTE: You know, that was tamale diplomacy. [laughs]

EMMETT FITZGERALD: This episode of Not Built For This was reported and produced by me, Emmett Fitzgerald, along with producers Jayson De Leon and Sofie Kodner, and managing editor Delaney Hall. Further invaluable editing from Christopher Johnson, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, and the bossman Roman Mars. Mix and sound design by Martín Gonzalez. Theme and original music by George Langford from Actual Magic with additional music by Swan Real. 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 Trameka Rankins. Also a big thank you Roishetta Ozane, 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: Diadra Carmen and Cynthia White, AKA the Purple Lady. And finally a big thank you to my good friends Casey Coleman, Susan Sakash and Levon, who put me up and put up with me during my trip to Louisiana.

Not Built For This is a 6-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.  Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. The rest of the 99PI team includes Chris Berube, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Gabriella Gladney, Jeyca Maldonado-Medina, and Neena Pathak. 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.