Home Grants | A Long Road Finally Leads Home For Alvar Street Resident
It’s been an extraordinary, heart-rending six Christmases for Alice Stewart.
That first Christmas after Hurricane Katrina was lost. Her home of 32 years on Alvar Street in the Upper 9th Ward was a pile of rubble. Her family was scattered to the winds.
A year later, in December 2006, her son Stanley, a polio victim whose family had been trapped in their Lower 9th Ward home during the storm, inspired a group of students from University of Central Florida to form the Hope for Stanley Alliance and rebuild houses across New Orleans, starting with his own.
A year after that, Alice Stewart, now 78, was one of thousands to get a mixed holiday blessing from the state’s Road Home housing recovery program : $104,000 based on a depressed pre-storm value, but not nearly enough to pay for the rising costs of reconstruction, even with the full insurance settlement she received. Years later, a federal judge in Washington would say that the state’s policy of calculating rebuilding grants based on home values was likely discriminatory against those living in poorer neighborhoods. That would offer little comfort for Alice Stewart, however.
On Christmas 2008, she was in tiny St. Bernard Parish town of Toca, safe but isolated as she tried to care for her husband, Thomas Stewart III, who had been paralyzed from the waist down since a 1990 stroke and was deteriorating rapidly. Feeling defeated, they were about to change their Road Home award from Option 1, which required them to rebuild on Alvar Street by December 2010, to Option 2, which let them sell out to the state and start over with her daughter Sherlonda Johnson in St. Bernard.
Then, on the fourth anniversary of Katrina, Thomas Stewart III died. On Christmas 2009, Alice Stewart didn’t know what to do.
Luckily, one of the last things Thomas Stewart actively did with his wife was to make a decision to move back to New Orleans, back to their old property on Alvar Street. They had been wary of fly-by-night contractors, having heard too many horror stories of friends losing their Road Home compensation and getting no rebuilding in return. But Thomas and Alice Stewart had found a nonprofit rebuilding organization called Build Now to make them a house on their property at a cost they could afford.
It took a year and $136,000, but Alice Stewart is back living on Alvar Street this Christmas.
Road Home follows up
Her case is exemplary of a growing number of recent returnees, people who could reverse the trend of seemingly wasted Road Home grants and help teetering neighborhoods turn the corner, even at this late date. She lives catty-corner from the cleared Florida public housing development and is flanked by an empty lot on one side and a blighted house on the other. But across the street there’s a raft of restored homes, and Stewart’s return appears to be a possible bridge to a full blockwide recovery.
New Orleanians have grown accustomed to the story of people who got inadequate Road Home grants and, three years later, have no money left to rebuild. Many used the grants, sometimes under great pressure from lenders, to pay off mortgages and other debts. The more popular perception is that people saw the covenants they signed promising to rebuild
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