Eighty-Seven Thousand Dollars and a Screened-In Patio

Future Tense is The Docket's speculative fiction section. This interview takes place in September 2034 and, like all Future Tense content, is entirely imagined. Delia Tran-Fontenot is not a real person, though the program mechanics and policy structures described here are drawn from real programs and documented conditions.¹

The subdivision is called Cypress Trace, which is the kind of name developers give places where they've removed all the cypress trees. It sits in a low spot northeast of Houston, in Montgomery County, where Cypress Creek backs up during heavy rain events. By 2034, that means most years. Delia Tran-Fontenot has lived here for thirty-four years. She drove a school bus for Conroe ISD for twenty-two of them. She retired in 2030, which she describes as "the year I finally had time to watch my neighborhood disappear."

Of the twenty-three houses originally on her stretch of Saddlewood Lane, eleven were purchased through FEMA's Hazard Mitigation Grant Program between 2028 and 2031, demolished, and converted to permanent open space.² The lots are mowed by the county. Delia's house, a single-story three-bedroom ranch she and her late husband bought in 2000 for $142,000, sits between two of them. She applied for the buyout in early 2029. She withdrew eight months later. We spoke on her covered patio, which she has screened in since our last correspondence, because the mosquitoes, she says, have gotten "ambitious."

What made you apply?

Delia: The water came in the house three times in four years. '26, '27, and then that one in January '29 that nobody expected because it was January. You get tired. You get tired of the shop vac. You get tired of the smell. My daughter was calling me every time it rained saying Mom, is it in the house, and I was lying to her half the time because I didn't want her driving down from Huntsville in a storm. So when the county put out the flyers about the buyout program, I thought, okay. Fine. Let's see what this is.

And you withdrew.

Delia: They offered me eighty-seven thousand dollars.

For a house you paid one forty-two for.

Do you remember the actual moment? Was there paperwork?

Delia: There's always paperwork. I think I called the case manager and said I wasn't going forward, and then there was a form. Or maybe the form came first. Honestly, the whole process was so slow that by the time I withdrew, I'd already re-caulked the baseboards and put down new vinyl in the kitchen. You can't sit in a torn-up house for eight months waiting for the government to decide if your house is worth buying. You live in it. So you fix it. And once you've fixed it, you've already made the decision. You just haven't said it out loud yet.

What does the street look like now?

Delia: You drove in. You saw it. It looks like a mouth with teeth missing. My house, then a lot, then Pham's house (the Phams stayed too), then two lots, then the Guzman place, which somebody bought from a, I don't know what you call them. An investor. He bought it from Mrs. Guzman's son after she passed, for I think forty-something thousand, and now he rents it out. The tenants are nice. They have a dog that gets into my yard. The lots between us get mowed, I think every three weeks in summer. The county's supposed to maintain them because of the deed restriction. It has to stay open space in perpetuity.⁴

Perpetuity is a long time to mow.

Has the infrastructure held up?

Delia: The streetlight at the end of the cul-de-sac went out in 2031 and nobody's replaced it. The water pressure is, I don't know if it's actually lower or if I'm imagining it. Trash pickup is the same, but they changed the route so we're last now. We used to be early morning. Now it's afternoon, and in August that matters. You're smelling everybody's trash in the heat for an extra six hours.

Has it flooded again since you withdrew?

Delia: [pause]

Once. In '32. It got to the garage but not the house. I'd raised the threshold by then. I paid a contractor to do the garage entry, about twenty-two hundred dollars. The water sat in the street for two days. The lots actually help with that, I think. The empty ones. They absorb some of it. Or at least there's nothing on them to get damaged, so the water just sits there and goes away. The neighborhood is becoming its own detention pond.

That's a strange kind of useful.

Delia: Everything about this is a strange kind of something.

Do you carry flood insurance?

Delia: I do now. I let it lapse for about a year after I withdrew. I was angry about the whole thing, and the premium had gone up, and I thought, I'm not paying the same government to insure me that just told me my house was worth eighty-seven thousand dollars. Which is not rational. I know that. But I was angry. Then I reinstated it, and there's a thirty-day waiting period when you reinstate, which I did not know.⁵ So for thirty days I was paying for a policy that wouldn't have covered anything. I taped the effective date on the refrigerator. My daughter thought it was a doctor's appointment.

Do you think about what would have happened if you'd taken the offer?

Delia: I think about the napkin. The math on the napkin. I think I still have it somewhere. Eighty-seven thousand minus this, minus that, equals some apartment I've never seen. I don't think about it like, oh, I should have taken it. I think about it like, those were the two options and they were both bad, and I picked the one where I got to keep my patio.

Is that enough?

Delia: [long pause]

Delia Tran-Fontenot's interview was conducted on her patio in Cypress Trace, Montgomery County, Texas, on September 3, 2034. The mosquitoes were, as promised, ambitious.

Footnotes

1. Future Tense stories are speculative fiction grounded in real climate program mechanics. All characters, locations, and events are imagined. ↩

2. Under FEMA's Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, properties acquired through buyouts must be deed-restricted as permanent open space. Local governments are responsible for maintaining these parcels. See NRDC, "Going Under: Long Wait Times for Post-Flood Buyouts Leave Homeowners Underwater," June 2025. https://www.nrdc.org/resources/going-under-long-wait-times-post-flood-buyouts-leave-homeowners-underwater ↩

3. Documented buyout dynamics in Texas flood-prone communities include residents who stayed because they couldn't afford comparable replacement housing elsewhere, and those who sold to investors at a fraction of pre-flood value. See Insurance Journal / Texas Tribune, "These Texans Aren't Taking Buyouts Despite Repeated Floods," May 2024. https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/southcentral/2024/05/21/775245.htm ↩

4. FEMA deed restrictions on buyout properties require land to remain in perpetual open-space use. See Yale E360, "As Climate Risks Worsen, U.S. Flood Buyouts Fail to Meet the Need." https://e360.yale.edu/features/as-climate-risks-worsen-u.s.-flood-buyouts-fail-to-meet-the-need ↩

5. NFIP policies carry a standard 30-day waiting period before coverage takes effect, including upon reinstatement after a lapse. See Neptune Flood, "Flood Insurance Waiting Period," March 2026. https://neptuneflood.com/blog/flood-insurance-waiting-period/ ↩