Flooding from Tropical Depression Chantal displaced more than 150 people from their Central North Carolina homes in early July. The storm exposed deep inequities in the region’s housing market, activists and academics say, with a significant focus on Chapel Hill.
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Rising waters disproportionately affected older public and low-income housing built in undesirable flood plains, particularly in Chapel Hill. Thirty-seven units of public housing are in need of repair in the town, leaving 102 people without a home. In Camelot Village, a privately owned condo complex, 74 more units were left uninhabitable.
While temporary, patchwork solutions are in place for many of the displaced, no long-term strategy exists to stop this from happening again.
Chapel Hill housing already under pressure
Jasper Oliver began volunteering with Triangle Mutual Aid after Chantal. She coordinates with those displaced Chapel Hill residents, using Signal chats to connect people with furniture, childcare, groceries, clothing and home repair services. She also serves as a liaison between county officials and residents, distilling complex and often confusing information.
“These people lost everything in the flood, and they weren’t prepared for this,” Oliver told Carolina Public Press. “Whether it’s from flood damage or toxic mold, their homes are uninhabitable and they have nowhere to go.”
Triangle Mutual Aid and Orange County have been successful in getting many people into hotel rooms, AirBnBs or spare rooms. The hard part, Oliver says, is finding midterm and long-term solutions. With applications for Section 8 housing vouchers currently closed in Orange County, finding a new, permanent home for low-income families is difficult.
“That’s not something the county has figured out how to provide,” Oliver said. “The county is telling us that they don’t know the answer quite yet for where people can go permanently.”
For Oliver, this isn’t just a one-time tragedy. The displacement of Chapel Hill’s low-income residents is a symptom of a housing crisis that was already at a boiling point.
“The existing housing crisis is just perpetuated by the disaster, now that there’s so many more folks who are homeless or unhoused,” she said.
“It’s very hard for people who have gone through the trauma of losing their homes and experiencing such a horrible disaster to navigate a housing system that was already broken in the first place.”
Affected properties in Chapel Hill include Airport Gardens, the South Estes Drive Ext. community, Bolinwood Condominiums and Booker Creek Townhouses.
The way Chantal hammered public and affordable housing isn’t random. It is a necessary outcome of the current housing market, according to Roberto Quercia, a professor of urban planning at UNC-Chapel Hill who researches low-income housing.
Lower-income residents tend to live in less desirable properties that have a greater risk of flooding. Oftentimes, they were built before modern flood regulations, and have flooded many times before.
“With time, units that are built filter down and become less expensive relative to newer units, either because of location or age,” Quercia said. “They become affordable to people with less income. That’s the way the markets work.”
Part of the problem, Quercia says, is that after each flooding event, the county or private owners patch up the property and move on. When the next storm comes, they rinse and repeat, leaving low-income residents exposed to the exact same outcome a few years down the line.
Camelot: A not-so congenial spot
Camelot Village in Chapel Hill, where 74 bottom-floor units were damaged beyond habitability, is a prime example of this problem.
The condominiums were built in the 1960s, before FEMA flood maps existed, Barbara Duffy, property manager at Camelot Village, told CPP. The building has flooded four times in four years, according to Duffy.
“When FEMA developed the flood maps, they realized that this was the lowest point on the floodplain,” Duffy said. “It’s considered a floodway. It’s honestly designed to flood. It has been flooding since the ‘70s. But it’s not always as severe as what we experienced most recently. The last time it flooded this bad was Hurricane Fran (in 1996).”
At this point, Onyx Management is an old hand at dealing with flood damage at the Chapel Hill complex. First they do demolition, then a dry-out, then they bring in the antimicrobial products, dry it out again, and then start the build back.
Instead of rebuilding every time, county officials and property managers have considered a FEMA buyout. The government would purchase and demolish the building, leaving the land as permanent floodable greenspace.
However, a FEMA buyout requires unanimous consent from all owners in a building. Because only the lower units flood, owners of the upper units won’t agree to a buyout. In 2005, Chapel Hill secured $2.3 million in FEMA funding, but had to return it in 2009 due to lack of owner agreement. The town tried again in 2013 and 2019 to no avail.
Duffy’s vision is to rebuild Camelot Village on stilts. Paradoxically, Duffy doubts that FEMA and the Town of Chapel Hill would allow redevelopment in a floodway. That leaves Camelot Village in a perpetual cycle of destruction and rebuilding.
The condos are privately owned then rented out to tenants, so the financial burden of the flood falls directly on residents, Duffy said. Last she checked, just four residents and owners held flood insurance on their unit.
Most of the inhabitants are staying at a Comfort Inn nearby.
For Quercia, the solution to repetitive flooding in vulnerable communities goes beyond the housing market.
He says the answer lies in dealing with the creeks and rivers that flood: either infrastructure needs to be built to contain them, or buildings in their floodways need to be removed, he argues.
Without major public investment in water infrastructure or the political will to abandon floodplains, events like Chantal will continue to occur. The most economically vulnerable will continue to be at the greatest risk.
“They are going to fix what was flooded, maybe try to minimize the cost of that, and then just get back to business,” he said. “My concern is the next one.”
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