香蕉秀

Today, McCartney is SBP鈥檚 COO. She runs the organization with Rosenburg, now her husband, who is the CEO. This spring, I visited her at SBP鈥檚 headquarters for a wide-ranging discussion about the nonprofit鈥檚 emergence as a national leader in not just storm recovery but also preparation. Our conversation touched on the millions of homeowners who are at far greater risk of flooding than they realize, the government鈥檚 dangerously out-of-date flood-zone maps, and the statistical models demonstrating that the frequency and intensity of catastrophic storms are only getting worse. 鈥淎s a country, we spend so much money reacting to disaster,鈥� McCartney told me. 鈥淚t鈥檚 insane how much money we spend trying to clean up after the fact. If we鈥檇 spend some of that money beforehand鈥攃reating better building standards and helping people understand what their risk truly is鈥攚e would spend a lot less money doing all of that, and be better prepared for what鈥檚 to come.鈥�

The conversation in the pages ahead has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.

香蕉秀M: Here in New Orleans, SBP continues to rebuild and sell homes that were damaged during Katrina. How does the process work?

LM: After Katrina, if you were a homeowner who was eligible for federal funds, it could take years to actually receive the money鈥攁n unbelievably long time. So you could wait for those funds to come in and use them to repair your house, or instead you could sell your house to a special program. All the property that was sold to the program was transferred to an agency called the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, or NORA, which has programs to incentivize developers to get the properties back into the market. So we started by redeveloping property in one of the communities where we were working. It was just sitting there vacant. We redeveloped and then sold to first-time, lower-income buyers. We鈥檇 fix the roof, fix the mechanical, electrical, plumbing, hang all the drywall, do the finishes to make it a nice home. Simultaneously, NORA would provide subsidies for buyers who were under a certain income level, helping with closing costs and down payment assistance. Then we would go out and advertise the homes.

Do your buyers have to meet any requirements?

The goal is for people to live in the house for as long as possible, to help stabilize the neighborhood. Whenever we sell a property, the buyer has to go through a qualification process with the lender. We also require that they have lived in the city for a certain amount of time. There鈥檚 also a lien attached to the property and they have to live in it for a certain amount of time or they forfeit their equity. We鈥檝e probably redeveloped and sold eighty properties now. The buyer wins because they get a great house with a big subsidy attached to it. The neighborhood wins because property gets redeveloped and the area starts to feel more whole. NORA wins because they鈥檙e achieving what they want to do, which is to put as much property back into commerce as possible. We benefit from it too because we get revenue while helping to stabilize these communities that we鈥檝e been working in for a long time.

SBP has now responded to fifteen natural disasters. How did that process of expanding beyond your New Orleans base begin?

It started with the terrible tornado that hit Joplin, Missouri, in 2011. Zack went to Joplin and met some local people, and we decided that we would share what we鈥檇 learned and developed over the years. We ended up opening an SBP there in partnership with a group called Rebuild Joplin. We gutted and repaired just shy of 200 houses in three or four years. Hurricane Sandy was the next storm鈥攕ome people in New Jersey who had come to New Orleans to volunteer now had their community impacted. So we opened a site up there, raised money, and repaired houses. From there, we started working in more and more communities.

How has the growth of SBP affected its mission?

Following Hurricane Katrina and tornadoes that impacted New Orleans in 2017, we rebuilt 758 homes for people who weren鈥檛 adequately insured. Our mission is to shrink the time between a disaster and a community鈥檚 recovery. That means rebuilding, but also so much more. Today we continue to repair homes for homeowners, but much of our work is centered around ensuring that residents won鈥檛 need a group like SBP to rebuild for them after disasters. We work with homeowners to mitigate their risk through preparedness education. We develop affordable housing in an energy-efficient and resilient way to better withstand severe weather and flooding. And everything we鈥檙e doing in New Orleans can then be replicated in other disaster-impacted cities.

I imagine that each situation you respond to is unique, but are there any similarities?

We鈥檝e seen the same thing happening over and over again: Big storm comes through. Some people have insurance and are able to rebuild and move back home, but a lot of people don鈥檛 and they鈥檙e just left out there until鈥攐r if鈥攖hey can get federal assistance. That鈥檚 led to a kind of frustration for us. We say to ourselves, We just can鈥檛 keep coming in and rebuilding afterwards. What can we do to really help solve this problem?

What solutions have you come up with?

We鈥檝e developed straightforward resources that outline simple actions to take before and after a storm. The topics include making your home more resilient, understanding your need for flood insurance, navigating disaster-assistance protocols, and avoiding contractor fraud. We also consult with governments and municipalities. A few years ago we worked with the governor of South Carolina to help better coordinate the delivery of federal aid after the catastrophic flooding in the Columbia area. We were proud that the first federal dollars hit the streets within thirteen months of the disaster, as opposed to the two to five years it took elsewhere. In some ways that鈥檚 a victory. In other ways it鈥檚 not. Real victory is preventing people from even needing to get that federal money by being properly insured.

What other work is SBP doing with government officials?

In the Florida Panhandle, we held a mayors鈥� convening to connect officials in the Panhandle, which was hit by Hurricane Michael last year, with ones from Texas who had just been through Hurricane Harvey. It was an opportunity to share lessons and ideas. We recently launched our Leader Practitioner Course, which is a three-day in-person training for officials charged with spending federal recovery funds. Through this course, SBP has the opportunity to affect the way billions of dollars allocated to disaster recovery get spent, specifically ensuring that socially vulnerable people are able to access recovery dollars faster. So far we鈥檝e hosted twenty-seven government leaders, who account for a total of more than $12 billion in government funding. We鈥檙e finding that sharing what we know and applying past lessons allows us to shrink the time between disaster and recovery for more people, more quickly.

Another concern is that our flood-zone maps appear to be significantly out of date. Why is that?

I think it鈥檚 all to do with climate change. The number of catastrophic disasters鈥攖he number of just significant rain events that aren鈥檛 even a named storm, like the one in South Carolina in 2015 or the one in Baton Rouge in 2016鈥攈as increased substantially. We鈥檙e seeing these things happening more frequently and more severely than before. There are plenty of companies out there doing catastrophic modeling that understand this and can pinpoint almost precisely where the next incidents are going to occur. I think our federal government just hasn鈥檛 been able to keep up with that information.