‘Seizing this moment.’ Slow but steady progress on EKY housing after floods.

Lexington Herald Leader

HAZARD - On July 28, 2022, Wayne White’s house in Breathitt County was filled with 13-and-a-half feet of water after five days of torrential rain. Those floods killed 45 people, mostly centered in Breathitt, Knott, Perry and Letcher counties, and damaged or destroyed almost 10,000 homes. White wanted to stay in the house he’d lived in for more than 20 years. He worked with FEMA to replace all the duct work in his house, but it was too far gone. In the next few weeks, though, he’ll be moving into a brand new three-bedroom house on top of an old strip mine just over the Perry County line.

“I’ll be glad to get here,” White said as he inspected fresh paint colors in the house under construction last week, including one bright purple room for his granddaughter. A crew from the Housing Development Alliance, helped by a bus load of volunteers from Dayton, Ohio, were bringing in doors and finishing the floors in the kitchen/living room of the sunny space.

The Alliance has worked on about 10 other houses that have already been built at the Blue Sky subdivision near the Wendell Ford Airport outside Hazard. As each survivor’s story is different, so is the resolution to their problems, each one a complicated patchwork quilt of people’s housing needs, finding land, finding financing to build and financing for renting or buying.

Eastern Kentucky already had a housing shortage; one night in July created the kind of overwhelming crisis that can take decades to solve. Two years later, progress is slow. But advocates and officials say the disaster also opened up huge opportunities to jump-start housing solutions throughout the region. “It’s become an amazing group of organizations that have collaborated in a way that is unusual,” said Scott McReynolds, the executive director of the Alliance. “And if we keep working together, we can do more.”

The coalition includes an array of non-profits who are working with state and local officials to best use the huge influx of federal disaster funds that have come into the state. McReynolds, for example, has doubled his staff so they can continue to build affordable housing across the region while also helping the numerous survivors who need somewhere to live that is safe and out of harm’s way.