Coalition takes aim at Helene-damaged homes

When Tropical Storm Helene swept through Western North Carolina in late September, the region’s already critical affordable housing situation immediately worsened. An Oct. 23 preliminary assessment by the N.C. Office of State Budget and Management estimates that about 126,000 homes were destroyed or damaged by the storm and that some 220,000 households will apply for assistance.

Even Asheville Area Habitat for Humanity, the nonprofit that partners with homeowners to build new houses and preserve existing ones, found itself without a home. The day the storm hit, the Swannanoa River jumped its banks, and water surged onto the first floor of Habitat’s administration building, says Joel Johnson, the nonprofit’s home repair director. He and his co-workers raced into the building to save what they could.

The organization’s repair trucks and construction tools escaped flood damage, but there was no place to warehouse them. With the administrative offices and nearby ReStore facility rendered unusable for the foreseeable future even as the need for home repair work was skyrocketing, Habitat needed to find a port in the storm. But the nonprofit bounced back quickly.

“I assigned our repair staff each a vehicle fully stocked with tools to take home,” Johnson explains. Two days after Helene hit, those staffers were either working from home or out in the community meeting homeowners face to face.

Since then, the local Habitat branch has partnered with three other nonprofits to launch the Asheville Regional Coalition for Home Repair, aka ARCHR, in collaboration with PODER Emma Community Ownership, Mountain Housing Opportunities and Community Action Opportunities. These groups are pooling resources and coordinating their efforts to help low-income, uninsured and underinsured homeowners with their post-Helene repairs.

ARCHR is also working with qualified families whose insurance payout is insufficient to meet their needs, notes Johnson. For details on the requirements, see the box, “How to Qualify.”

The coalition’s goal, says Johnson, “is to build an equitable, transparent and accessible platform for homeowners, one that limits confusion and serves as many people as possible in an organized fashion — all at no cost to the owners.” To that end, the group has developed a new software platform, posted on Asheville Habitat’s website, that streamlines the intake and assessment processes for homeowners.

A home repair center sets up house

A little more than one month after Helene hit, Johnson is working on his laptop at 17 Westside Drive, a facility operated by PODER Emma. Launched in 2018, the nonprofit is a network of housing and real estate co-ops in West Asheville’s Emma community, which has a large Latino population.

“We’re an organization that works to stop displacement by protecting mobile home communities,” says co-founder Andrea Golden, who is seated across from Johnson.

“I set up my office here,” he explains, adding, “My staff is here and our vehicles are here.” As Johnson and Golden conclude their meeting in the office, staff and volunteers stack and sort boxes of food and water bottles nearby.

Some PODER Emma partners, notes Golden, will continue to distribute supplies through the winter because the communities the nonprofit serves have been hit hard by the loss of tourism-related jobs. La Esperanza, PODER Emma’s neighborhood real estate cooperative, owns the building, which also serves as the command post for ARCHR.

Each of the coalition’s four partner organizations has experience providing affordable home repairs and accessibility upgrades for the region’s aging population.

“Community Action Opportunities offers a weatherization assistance program that focuses on energy efficiency as well as health and safety upgrades in homes,” spokesperson James Duncan wrote in an email. The work includes replacing old or inefficient heating systems and insulating attics, walls and floors. According to Duncan, the goal is to “make the home healthier, safer and more energy-efficient for the people living there.”

Mountain Housing Opportunities, meanwhile, specializes in repairs that address barriers to physical accessibility and remove urgent health and safety hazards. “Even before our collaboration with ARCHR,” President and CEO Geoffrey Barton wrote in an email to Xpress, “Mountain Housing Opportunities had already been completing 150 to 200 health and safety-related essential repairs each year.”

Golden sounds a similar note, saying, “What we all have in common is our home repair programs.”

The goal behind ARCHR, says Johnson, is “increasing our impact by working collaboratively, instead of in our individual organizational silos.” In the past, he notes, there have been cases where he signed a contract and went out to start the work — only to discover that it had already been done by another nonprofit. The client, he explains, “went all the way through the contract, and we didn’t know.”

That kind of overlap has been confusing for community members, too, says Golden, leading some homeowners to submit simultaneous aid applications to multiple groups. “It was not efficient for us, because you would think that you were going to go work with a family, but then they had already applied somewhere else,” she explains. “We knew we would do a lot better by collaborating with each other.”

Crafting a coalition

For at least the last five years, these four nonprofits have been trying to navigate a maze of application and funding requirements to cooperate as closely and efficiently as possible, notes Johnson.

The collaboration between PODER Emma and Asheville Habitat, says Golden, dates to 2018, when her organization launched its first repair program in response to an increased incidence of break-ins affecting mobile homes. Habitat helped PODER Emma install motion detector lights and anti-theft plates on those residences’ doors.

 “There has always been informal communication between the home repair programs in the area,” says Duncan of Community Action Opportunities. “Going back to 2019, we have completed weatherization services on 57 homes that listed a [future] member of ARCHR as the referral source on their application.”

But even though “We were all connected to each other in different ways,” says Golden, the four organizations “were not yet coordinating our efforts.” What they lacked, adds Johnson, was a centralized platform to efficiently track the work they accomplished.

A forerunner of ARCHR came together in 2019, when Asheville Habitat, Mountain Housing Opportunities and Community Action Opportunities began meeting with the Council on Aging of Buncombe County to discuss ways to improve communication. “We were trying to reduce confusion for our aging population around who offers what and [which organization] could be a good fit for them,” remembers Johnson. At that time, he says, the referral process among the different groups was “kind of clunky,” with too much duplication of effort.

Over time, the discussions expanded to include efficiency upgrades and broader home repairs. In the end, however, “We stalled as a group due to a lack of bandwidth to develop the needed platform and processes to work collaboratively,” Johnson maintains.

Then COVID-19 hit. And though the four nonprofits continued their respective work with families, there was still no dedicated platform to track referrals. So in September 2023, Johnson approached his peers to gauge their interest in joining forces to establish ARCHR. The future coalition partners were open to the idea as long as Asheville Habitat took the lead.

Accordingly, Johnson and Ben Wyatt, Asheville Habitat’s home repair project manager, developed the software platform, intake form and automated processes that would enable the coalition partners to communicate, collaborate and track projects. “We were at the point of rolling it out when Helene hit us,” Johnson explains.

At that point, notes Golden, she thought, “It’s now: Now is when we need to do this. The demand on our programs is more than any one program could dream of addressing.”

Johnson concurred. “I approached everybody that was at the table before,” he recalls, “and said, ‘Are you all willing to come back to this if it’s action-oriented?’” So the partners decided to pivot to a disaster repairs collaborative.

The long haul

“By formalizing collaboration among the area service providers, ARCHR helps us all respond to the vast home repair needs for low-income families in our community,” says Barton of Mountain Housing Opportunities.

Golden agrees. PODER Emma, she says, “would have been extremely overwhelmed had it not been for Habitat showing up immediately and saying let’s figure this out together. We’re a neighborhood-based organization, and we were called to provide a regional response. We couldn’t have done that alone; we had to collaborate.”

“These are life-changing and, in many cases, lifesaving services that are available at no cost, and so many do not know they can qualify,” Duncan points out.

Since its launch in late October, the coalition has started the assessment process for the more than 100 families that have entered the ARCHR disaster repairs pipeline. In the meantime, each partner organization continues to make home repairs and provide aging-in-place upgrades as well as emergency services such as tree removal, tarping and well repairs. Projects begun before the storm hit are also being completed.

The scope and cost of the work done for individual clients, stresses Johnson, will vary based on the severity of the damage. But by working collaboratively, ARCHR can leverage each partner’s funding sources, enabling the coalition to have a greater impact on the families it serves.

“We are local organizations that are dedicated to the long-term recovery effort,” he says. “We’re going to be here beyond other organizations that are going to be here and then move on. We are in this for the long haul.”