LAKE CHARLES – Scented candles, room sprays and air fresheners have become necessary supplies in Beverley Bardley’s home. They cover the smell of dead rats emanating from the patched-up walls, the result of an infestation that began two months ago at her public housing complex.
Bardley, 64, has been living in the Lloyd Oaks development for five years. Life there has never been luxurious, but after Hurricane Laura tore across the region in August 2020, things took a turn for the worse.
Since the storm, Bardley and her neighbors have lived with plastic sheets and wooden posts where walls and ceilings should be. In some units, water leaks through the ceiling when it rains. In others, rats scurry within the walls.
Inside Jessie May Harrison’s home, plastic sheets still cover parts of the wall destroyed by the 2020 hurricanes.
“I’m ready to get my stuff and get out of here, go somewhere,” said Bardley, who lives on social security and disability assistance. “I can’t take it.”
But finding accommodations for those living in damaged public housing units has been a challenge for the Lake Charles Housing Authority, which administers public and affordable housing programs across the city, ranging from rental vouchers to traditional public housing complexes like Lloyd Oaks.
“It all boils down to money,” said Director Ben Taylor, speaking from the modular building that has housed the agency since its offices were destroyed by Laura. Of the housing authority’s 463 publicly owned and managed units, 399 were deemed uninhabitable after the series of storms that hit southwest Louisiana, beginning with Laura.
The housing authority is currently in litigation with its insurance company, Lloyd’s of London, over the damages to its offices and its public housing units.
Initially, the insurer assessed a total of $7.2 million in damages to the agency’s public housing properties. In its initial complaint, the housing authority cites an estimated $42.4 million in damages. The two parties are currently going through re-inspections to determine the final payout sum.
Jessie May Harrison, 67, is one of the remaining residents of the Lloyd Oaks public housing complex. Harrison said she can’t sleep at night because she’s scared of the rats heard scurrying around her home.
FEMA, which is supposed to fill the gap between insurance funds and the actual cost of repair, has yet to pay for anything beyond immediate cleanup and mitigation efforts, like blue tarps on roofs and the plastic sheets adorning Bardley’s home.
“Most of the time, we’re putting band-aids, because we simply don’t have the money,” Taylor said. But two years after Laura, whose damages were further compounded by Hurricane Delta, a winter freeze and a May 2021 flood, the band-aids are starting to peel off.
‘Raining in our houses’
“It’s raining in our houses,” said Wanda Bryant, pointing to water marks on the ceiling of her living room. Bryant said she’s given most of her living room furniture away, with the exception of a small couch and some side tables, figuring it would be damaged by water if she kept it.
Bryant also places cloves of garlic around the parameters of her house to defend against snakes and relies on a plethora of other natural remedies to stave off the rats, which have so far spared her home.
“We go through a lot,” the 63-year-old said. But, “we got to have somewhere to live, so we have to live like this.”
Wanda Bryant, 63, at her home in the Lloyd Arms public housing complex.
While repairs have been delayed, finding a new place for public housing residents to move to can be a challenge. “We still don’t have a lot of housing here,” Taylor said.
The private rental market remains extremely constrained as a result of the slow recovery, making it difficult for recipients of federally funded Section 8 rental vouchers to find an apartment or house to rent. The housing authority has not accepted new applications since the storms, with the exception of former and current public housing residents.
“We would be issuing vouchers to people without a reasonable chance of getting housed,” Taylor said.
There are currently 1,266 households waiting to be placed in public housing or to receive a Section 8 rental voucher. Of the 394 households who left their homes in public housing after they were deemed uninhabitable because of storm damage, 80 are still searching for housing.
Don Richard, 65, is one of the last remaining residents of the Golden Arms public housing complex for seniors. He said he wants to move out but has found it difficult to find housing that a Section 8 voucher would cover, and being wheelchair-bound has made the prospect of moving daunting.
“I can’t just pick up and go,” Richard said.
Don Richard, 65, is one of the last residents of the otherwise abandoned Golden Arms senior public housing complex.
As the recovery process continues, the housing authority is looking to convert much of its public housing stock to privately owned and operated properties, where residents can use HUD-funded rental vouchers to pay for a majority of their monthly rent.
Privatization has been the solution du jour for public housing woes in cities across the nation, as decades of federal disinvestment and rising costs have left public housing in disrepair. In storm-battered Lake Charles and the rest of the state, hurricane damages have only exacerbated that problem.
‘Really bad design’
It’s unclear what’s to become of the Lloyd Oaks public housing complex, where Bardley, Bryant and their neighbors live.
The authority is working on an application for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Choice Neighborhood Initiative, which provides grants to fund projects that replace conventional public housing with mixed-income developments.
Proponents of this approach say mixed-income developments will improve residents’ well-being and the community at large by deconcentrating poverty.
“You take all these poor people and stick them in one place,” Nicole Miller, chair of the Lake Charles Housing Authority board, said of the traditional public housing concept. “That was just really bad design.”
Critics, however, point to the legacy of HUD’s Hope VI program, the predecessor to the current Choice Neighborhood Initiative, as an example of the risks of privatizing public housing. That program was found to displace low-income residents, especially during the reconstruction period after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.
“What we always see is a reduction in public housing, which is the last thing we need,” said John “Jay” Arena, a Tulane University graduate and assistant professor at the City University of New York. Arena wrote a book about the displacement of low-income residents from the former St. Thomas public housing project in New Orleans’ 10th Ward.
Latasha Anderson helps her mother, Beverly Bardley, fill out an application for a Section 8 housing voucher.
The Obama-era Choice Neighborhood Initiative aims to rectify some of the flaws of Hope VI by requiring grant-funded developments to match the amount of public housing units that previously existed in the area with new public or Section 8 units.
In Louisiana, choice neighborhood projects have been built in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, where residents have reported positive outcomes. The Lake Charles project, if approved, would likely take five to six years to be completed, according to Taylor.
In the meantime, applying for housing vouchers and existing units where they are accepted is likely Bardley’s and her neighbors’ best bet.
After attending a public meeting on the proposed redevelopment project and voicing her concerns about living conditions at Lloyd Oaks, Bardley’s daughter was provided with paperwork by the housing authority to apply for a Section 8 voucher for her mother. As a senior, her chances of a prompt placement are higher than for most applicants, according to Taylor.
“I just want to move,” Bardley said. “Somewhere — somewhere besides here.”