Every House on Mariposa Street

The average FEMA home buyout takes 5.7 years from disaster to project closeout.¹ A child who was twelve when Hurricane Harvey submerged her Houston neighborhood in August 2017 would be twenty-two now. She would have spent her entire adolescence inside the buyout process: the appraisals, the contested appraisals, the meetings at the community center with maps and charts, the neighbors vanishing one by one, the house that still belonged to her family but had somehow already been surrendered. She would have finished high school somewhere else. She would have started over.

FEMA does not know where she is. The Government Accountability Office has found that the agency lacks property-level data sufficient to reconstruct who entered buyout programs, who withdrew, and what became of participants afterward.² No federal database records household members by age. No follow-up survey asks what the children remember. The program measures success in structures demolished and acres converted to open space. What happened inside those structures, and inside those children, was never the program's question to ask.

Lourdes Quintanilla does not appear in any FEMA database. This is consistent with the agency's data practices, which do not track individual outcomes after buyout completion. It is also consistent with the fact that she is a fictional character. That the federal government cannot distinguish between these two explanations tells you most of what you need to know about the program.

We met at a taqueria in a strip mall off the Grand Parkway in Katy, Texas, on a Wednesday afternoon in August. The parking lot shimmered. Inside, the air conditioning was punitive. Lulu — nobody calls her Lourdes — arrived in lavender scrubs, between clinical rotations at her dental hygiene program. She ordered a horchata and sat with the composure of someone who has told pieces of this story before and is deciding, in real time, how much to assemble.

You grew up in a neighborhood in northeast Houston. What was it like?

Lulu: Mariposa Street, off Greens Bayou. Three generations of my mom's family on that street. My abuela, my tía, us. My dad's from Ohio, so he was the outsider, but he'd been there since before I was born. It was — I mean, it was regular? People had yards. People had dogs. My abuela had this thing where she'd water the sidewalk every evening, just to cool it down. The ice cream truck came on Thursdays. It was a neighborhood.

You've said that flooding was part of growing up there.

Lulu: OK, so this is the part where people get weird. Yes, it flooded. It flooded a lot. Allison hit before I was born, but I grew up hearing about it like a family legend. Then there were smaller ones, and then Harvey, which was different. But before Harvey, when I was little, when it would flood? We'd go outside. The kids. We'd put on our flip-flops and just wade around. My cousin had this inflatable raft, one of those cheap ones from Walmart, and we'd float down the street. The water was gross. I know that now. I knew it then, honestly. My mom would yell at us. But it was —

She pauses, turns the horchata cup slowly.

It was ours. That's the thing I can't say to most people. The flooding was terrible and it was also the most specific thing about where I grew up. Every neighborhood has an ice cream truck. Not every neighborhood has kids floating down the street on a raft in July.³

Harvey was 2017. You were thirteen?

Lulu: Twelve. Turned thirteen that October.

What was different about it?

Lulu: The water didn't go down.

Before Harvey, it would flood and drain within a day or two. Harvey just stayed. My dad carried my abuela out of her house. She's four-foot-eleven and she was holding her photo albums above her head like she was crossing a river in a movie, except the river was Mariposa Street. We stayed in a shelter at a middle school for nine days. When we came back, the waterline was about four feet up the wall. My mom's high school yearbooks were in a box in the closet and they were just pulp. You could stick your finger through them.

When did the buyout process start?

Lulu: Depends what you mean by "start." My mom went to a meeting at the community center in early 2018. Harris County was doing presentations. Maps, charts. She came home and told my dad the number, what they'd offer for the house, and he said a word I'm not going to repeat. Then nothing happened for about a year and a half. Then more meetings. Then an appraisal. Then the appraisal was wrong, according to my mom, so she contested it. Then COVID hit and everything froze. Then another appraisal. We didn't close until 2022. So four years? Five if you count from Harvey? I was seventeen when we actually moved. I did most of high school not knowing whether we were leaving or not.

What were those in-between years like?

Research on Houston's post-Harvey buyouts has found that homeowners from more affluent neighborhoods tended to relocate near each other, while families from less affluent, more Black and Hispanic neighborhoods were more likely to scatter in search of affordable housing.⁴

Mrs. Dominguez left first. Took the first offer, didn't contest anything, just gone. Then the Nguyens. Then the abandoned house on the corner got demo'd. So you'd walk to school and there'd be a house, then a lot, then a house, then two lots, then a house with a FEMA notice taped to the window. My friend Adriana's family left in 2020 and she transferred to a school in Cypress and I didn't see her for two years.

My abuela moved in with my tía in Pasadena — the Texas one — and she stopped watering any sidewalk. She just stopped doing it.

She stirs her horchata.

The thing people don't get is that the waiting is the thing. Everyone asks about the flood or the move. Nobody asks about the four years of not knowing. Those were my years. Thirteen to seventeen. That was my whole — whatever. Adolescence.

Have you been back to Mariposa Street?

Lulu: Once. Last spring. I drove out there with my boyfriend and he didn't understand why I wanted to go, and honestly, when we got there, I didn't either. It's a detention basin now. Big shallow concrete-and-grass thing designed to hold stormwater runoff. There's a sign. The street is still technically there but it dead-ends into the basin. My abuela's lot is under it. Or next to it. I couldn't tell. The trees are different. They planted native grasses or whatever. It looks very intentional. Very designed.

My boyfriend said, "It's nice, actually." And I said, "Yeah." And then I sat in the car and cried for about ten minutes, which I did not expect and which I have not adequately explained to him or to myself.

Do your parents talk about it?

Lulu: My mom keeps the appraisal letter in a drawer in the kitchen. She also keeps my abuela's tamale recipe in the same drawer, which I think tells you something about how she organizes loss.

My dad — he's from Ohio. He loved that neighborhood, he really did, but he can let things go in a way my mom can't. He says things like "it was the right call" and "we're safer here." He's not wrong. He's just answering a question nobody asked him.

What question are you asking?

Lulu: I don't know. That's the honest answer. When people ask where I'm from, I say Houston, which is true but — Katy is not the Houston I'm from. The Houston I'm from is a drainage feature now. When forms ask for my home address I write the Katy address, obviously. But home?

A long pause. The taqueria's kitchen radio switches from norteño to something with a horn section.

I think home might be something that happened to me. Not somewhere I can go back to. And I don't think there's a form for that.⁵

Does that bother you?

Lulu: It used to.

She finished the horchata. She had a two o'clock clinical. Before she left, she pulled out her phone and showed me a photo. Not of the old house. Of the detention basin. Green engineered slopes, a stormwater sign she couldn't quite read from where she'd parked. "I took it for my mom," she said. "She hasn't been back yet."

She put the phone away and walked out into the heat, lavender scrubs bright against the asphalt until they weren't. Somewhere beneath or beside the basin on Mariposa Street, the land holds water the way it always has. The policy calls this a successful outcome. Lulu hasn't decided what she calls it.

Footnotes

1. Mach, K.J. et al. found FEMA HMGP buyout projects averaged 5.7 years from disaster to closeout, with a range of 0.4 to 16.8 years. See also PreventionWeb/NRDC, "Climate-driven floods could displace millions of Americans" (2023). ↩

2. GAO-22-106037. The Government Accountability Office found FEMA lacks systematic property-level purchase, demolition, and attrition data for buyout programs. ↩

3. Reporting by the Texas Tribune and Grist documented children in Houston's Allen Field neighborhood swimming and floating through floodwaters as a routine part of growing up in a flood-prone community. See "Mandatory home buyouts are dismantling a flood-prone Houston community" (2022). ↩

4. Kinder Institute for Urban Research, Rice University. "Urban flood buyouts are fracturing some Houston neighborhoods more than others." ↩

5. Research on place attachment has found that losing a cherished place through disaster or displacement can trigger grief responses structurally similar to mourning a person, yet this form of loss is rarely recognized as legitimate grief. See Neurolaunch, "Place Attachment Theory" (2024). No peer-reviewed longitudinal study tracking the meaning of "home" for children who grew up in FEMA buyout communities was located in the research for this piece. That absence is itself part of the story. ↩