Tammy Arceneaux Sends Herself a Violation Notice Every Sixty Days

The Docket's Future Tense section publishes speculative fiction — imagined characters, invented scenarios, plausible futures. Tammy Arceneaux is not a real person. But the system she lives inside is.

Cypress Bend Estates is forty homes on a cul-de-sac grid in Sulphur, Louisiana, about twelve miles inland from the Gulf. In the early 2030s, it is also a community split between houses that have been jacked up onto new pilings and houses that haven't. The difference is visible from the street, legible in insurance premiums, and increasingly the subject of HOA violation notices signed by a woman whose own house sits at grade.

Tammy Arceneaux, 53, has been president of the Cypress Bend HOA since 2027, when the previous president relocated to Baton Rouge. She works four days a week as a pharmacy technician. On Wednesdays, her day off, she processes covenant violation notices from her kitchen table, which is three feet and two inches below the base flood elevation her board adopted as the community standard in 2026.

We spoke on a Wednesday.

You've sent how many elevation violation notices this year?

Tammy: Fourteen. And I should say, that's fourteen initial notices. The follow-ups, the second warnings, I lost count. It's the same eight or nine households cycling through. They get the letter, they call me, we have the conversation, nothing changes, sixty days later I send it again.

What's the conversation?

Tammy: It's always the same. They know what it costs. I know what it costs. We both know what the ICC covers, which is thirty thousand, and we both know what the gap is.¹ So really we're just acknowledging the gap. Out loud. To each other. Then I say I have to send the next notice anyway, and they say they understand, and we hang up, and I've accomplished exactly nothing except making a piece of paper exist.

Your own house isn't elevated.

Tammy: No.

Does that come up?

Tammy: Every single time. Gerald Hebert, he's on Cypress Lane at the far end, Gerald said to me:

Which is accurate. He's not wrong. I told him he's not wrong.

So why keep sending them?

Tammy: Because we voted on this. The board adopted the BFE-plus-one standard in '26, after Delta and then the one in '25 that didn't even get a name, just the number. And the vote was correct. If you don't have an elevation standard in your covenants, your CRS score drops, everybody's premiums go up, and the three or four families who already elevated are subsidizing the rest of us through the community rating.² The math is real. The math doesn't care that I can't do the math on my own house.

What would it cost to elevate yours?

Tammy: Last estimate was sixty-two thousand. My structure value is maybe fifty-five. So I'd be spending more than my house is worth on paper to bring it into compliance with a rule I voted for. And the ICC would cover thirty of it, except I've never had a substantial damage determination because I did my own repairs after Laura and Delta and kept the costs under the fifty percent line.³ Which at the time felt smart. Now it means I don't qualify for the one program that would help.

You intentionally kept repairs under fifty percent?

Tammy: I kept repairs under what I could afford, which happened to be under fifty percent, which happened to mean I never triggered the determination. I wasn't gaming anything. I was putting up drywall with my brother-in-law on weekends because that's what we could do. The fact that the system treats that as a choice I made about regulatory compliance is — I mean. It's very funny if you're not the one living in it.

How do you think about the neighbors who have elevated?

Tammy: Good for them. I mean that sincerely. The Rodrigues family did theirs in '29, the house looks beautiful up on those pilings, and Michelle told me their premium dropped forty percent the first year.⁴ That's real money. That's groceries. I'm happy for anyone who can do it. What gets me is that doing it costs sixty thousand dollars and not doing it costs you a different way every single month, and there's nothing in between. You're up or you're down. Literally.

Has anyone challenged your authority to enforce this, given your own status?

Tammy: (pause) Not formally. Not yet. Gerald jokes about it. But if someone filed a formal challenge with the board, yeah. Selective enforcement is a real legal concept, and I'm selectively not enforcing on myself.⁵ I know that. My position is that I'm subject to the same violation schedule as everyone else. I get the same notices. I just also happen to sign them. I understand how that looks.

Wait. You send yourself a violation notice?

Tammy: I do. I put it in my own file. It's in the records. If I'm going to maintain that the standard applies uniformly, it has to apply to me too. Whether that would hold up if someone actually sued the board, I genuinely don't know. I try not to think about it on Wednesdays because Wednesdays are already bad enough.

The community applied for a FEMA mitigation grant in 2030. What happened?

Tammy: We applied. The parish submitted it on our behalf, because homeowners can't apply directly.⁶ That was January 2030. We heard back in, I want to say August 2031. Eighteen months. We got partial funding for six homes, which is great, except fourteen need it. And the six that were selected were the six with the strongest applications, meaning the six whose owners had already gotten engineering assessments done, meaning the six who could afford to spend two to eight thousand dollars on structural drawings before knowing if the grant would come through.⁷ So the grant went to the people who were closest to being able to afford it anyway. That's just the pattern. Every program works like that if you watch long enough.

What happens to the other eight?

Tammy: They get another violation notice from me in sixty days. Their premiums go up again in October. We'll apply for the next grant cycle and maybe get two or three more funded. And in the meantime the neighborhood is splitting. You can see it from the street. Half the houses are up, half are down. The up houses have new siding, new stairs, that little lattice work underneath. The down houses look the same as always.

Do you ever think about stepping down?

Tammy: Every Wednesday. But then who does it? The people who've elevated don't want to be president because they're done, they're in compliance, they don't want to spend their Wednesdays on this. The people who haven't elevated don't want to be president because then they'd be the one signing notices they can't cure. So it's me. I'm the person who'll do the job that makes no sense to do from where I'm standing. Three feet and two inches below where I'm supposed to be.

Tammy Arceneaux is a fictional character. The elevation costs, ICC coverage limits, FEMA grant mechanics, CRS premium structures, and substantial damage thresholds referenced in this interview reflect real programs and documented ranges as of 2026. The specific subdivision, community, and all persons named are invented.

Footnotes

1. FEMA's Increased Cost of Compliance (ICC) coverage provides up to $30,000 toward bringing a substantially damaged home into compliance. Most residential elevations cost $20,000–$150,000 depending on foundation type and required height. https://www.fema.gov/floodplain-management/financial-help/increased-cost-compliance ↩

2. The Community Rating System (CRS) provides 5%–45% premium discounts to all policyholders in participating communities based on community-level floodplain management activities. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45999 ↩

3. Under FEMA's Substantial Improvement/Substantial Damage rule, a structure must be brought into compliance with current floodplain standards when repair costs reach 50% or more of the structure's market value. https://www.jsheld.com/insights/articles/femas-commonly-misinterpreted-50-rule ↩

4. Under Risk Rating 2.0, homes elevated 1 foot above base flood elevation pay roughly 40% less in NFIP premiums than at-BFE properties; BFE+2 reduces premiums by approximately 65%. https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/documents/fema_rr-2.0_04-2025.pdf ↩

5. HOA boards are generally required to enforce covenants uniformly. Selective enforcement — including unintentional non-enforcement based on a board member's own inability to comply — can be raised as a legal defense by any homeowner challenging a fine. https://www.askalawyeroncall.com/law/v3q9b-live-single-family-home-hoa-live.html ↩

6. FEMA flood mitigation grants are competitive and community-applied; homeowners cannot apply directly. Processing typically takes 6–18 months, and the federal cost share is 75%, with a 25% non-federal match often required upfront. https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/documents/fema_hma_fma-nofo-fact-sheet_fy2024.pdf ↩

7. Structural engineering assessments required for elevation permit applications typically cost $2,000–$8,000. https://floodprepare.com/knowledge/how-to-elevate-your-home-above-flood-level ↩