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Miguel Lameda removed flood damaged debris from a relative’s home in the Canyon Gate at Cinco Ranch neighborhood of Houston. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times

KATY, Tex. — When Hurricane Harvey struck Houston, floodwaters swept through Eileen and Jeff Swanson’s two-story brick home, blanketing the first floor in muck and nearly destroying a domestic existence 12 years in the making. Their china cabinet, in the family for three generations, was reduced to a sodden mess. A couch, once a soft red, had blushed into a watery burgundy; the carpet squished like grass at the bottom of a marsh. A dirty foot-high water line ran wall to wall, marking the local crest of an event that the National Weather Service called “the most significant tropical cyclone rainfall event in United States history.”

After the floodwaters receded, the Swansons returned to a house ravaged, endless questions, few answers — and a looming decision.

They are not alone. Hundreds of homeowners in Canyon Gate at Cinco Ranch, a quiet subdivision in a west Houston suburb, are mired in a slow, frustrating effort to rebuild. Others have formed an uneasy exodus, their attachment to familiar places and routines irreparably battered by a storm that dumped 50-plus inches and caused widespread flooding. They are now selling their gutted homes at well below pre-storm prices.

The fundamental decision — stay or go — is one being faced by homeowners all around the Houston area. As climate change increases the frequency and intensity of storms like Harvey, no neighborhood is immune from being flooded again. But the Swansons and other homeowners in Canyon Gate face a far more certain prospect: Their neighborhood is on land that was designed to be flooded. It is part of a reservoir that was built by the United States Army Corps of Engineers in the 1940s to prevent catastrophic flooding downtown, a fact that developers did little to publicize when they built Canyon Gate in the 1990s.

On a blistering September afternoon at the Swanson house, 20 box fans and an industrial blower ran nonstop in a battle against rot and decay. The family was still consigned to five rooms upstairs, and Ms. Swanson, 48, a senior executive assistant at an industrial automation company, was downstairs watching a YouTube demonstration of how to hang wallboard. At the top of the steps, Mr. Swanson, 52, was compiling a mental to-do list: Make another trip to Home Depot, haul more stuff to the storage unit, get back in time to help with the delivery of a stack of new wallboard. Their 23-year-old son Allen, who is severely developmentally disabled, was watching television. It was already a familiar routine. “It feels like our life is somewhere between, ‘Where do I start?’ and ‘Why isn’t this getting done?’” Mr. Swanson said.

There was a lot keeping the Swansons in Canyon Gate. They had paid off the house, purchased in 2006 for $225,000, just a few months before the flood. That freed them from a monthly mortgage. The home was close to their younger son Nick’s school and in a neighborhood they loved, and they had adapted the space to suit Allen’s disabilities — he has seizures, so they needed open areas where they could watch him from other parts of the house. In a hundred different ways, floods or no floods, this was their home.

And yet the case for leaving was clear. Two weeks before the floods, Mr. Swanson had quit his job as a security guard, with the intention of looking for work without so many late hours. The Swansons had some savings, but the money was meant to pay for Nick, 17, a high school junior, to attend college. With only one income, there was little money left over for repairs and renovations that would cost upward of $60,000.

Hanging over the entire process was the knowledge that a similar — or even worse — flood could hit again, possibly even as soon as the next hurricane season. “I am pretty sure we would not have moved into this house if we knew,” Ms. Swanson said.

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A car damaged by flooding; a manhole covered in mud in Canyon Gate at Cinco Ranch. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times
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Sharon Sanders outside her home in Canyon Gate. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times

‘It’s Worth Saving’

Hugh Durlam knew he was staying. As a 13-year resident and former homeowners association board member, Mr. Durlam was completely invested in Canyon Gate. But he wanted to know what happened to others in the neighborhood. So on the Canyon Gate Facebook page he administers, he recently posted a survey asking homeowners if renovations were completed or close to completion, if they were still rebuilding, or if they had not yet started.

Of the 202 responses, all but two were involved in some kind of renovation.

“This is going to be a brand-new 20-year-old community. It’s worth saving,” said Mr. Durlam, who works for a Houston engineering firm. He supports a plan to deepen the reservoir and build a levee to protect the neighborhood, he said, “something that should have been done a long time ago.”

Christina Raena Micu isn’t certain about what to do next. When Harvey hit, she anxiously watched television footage of the storm from a Dallas hotel room, where she had taken shelter with her husband and two of her three children. Her 20-year-old son had stayed behind, sending dispatches as the waters invaded their neighborhood, before finally evacuating in chest-deep water with only a backpack.

Inside Ms. Micu’s home, everything on the first floor was submerged within or floating atop a couple of feet of muddy water. When she returned from Dallas, she rushed to her bedroom hoping her collection of childhood photos had somehow survived. She had left the photo albums in a pile on the carpeted floor with plans to one day organize them on a bookshelf. They were stuck together, the images swirled into watercolor blurs, too damaged to save. But what she saw next was more immediately concerning: mold.

“I have a 5-year-old son with asthma who has already been hospitalized once for it,” she said. “I can’t just move back in. It’s much more complicated than that for me.”

After she moved her family into an apartment about 10 minutes away, signing a one-year lease with some financial assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Ms. Micu, a real estate investor, embarked on a monthslong renovation of her flood-soaked home, ripping out the floors and walls and repeatedly treating the house with mold bombs, foggers and air purifiers.

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A message written by the Swanson family marked the date of Hurricane Harvey; Lisa and Joel Perez, residents of Canyon Gate, looked out their bedroom window at the bayou that flooded during the hurricane. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times
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Children’s handprints covering the wall at Becky and Brook Matthews’s home in Canyon Gate. The family left the neighborhood after their home was damaged in the storm. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Almost every day, Ms. Micu weighed her choices. Some days, she was sure she would stay. The house was in a safe neighborhood, roomy with a swing set in the backyard. Before the storm, she was even planning an addition. Other days, she knew moving was her only choice. Both options were expensive. Selling meant taking a big hit: She paid $183,000 for the house six years ago and figured it was not worth much more than half of that now. But for as long as they lived in their temporary apartment, she was paying rent and a mortgage. FEMA gave her about $16,000, but the renovation bids were all around $70,000.

By the time the four-bedroom house passed a mold test in February, Ms. Micu was thinking that she might split the difference. Move her family elsewhere, but keep the house as a rental. “With my son’s immune system, I can’t have a situation where the mold is a trigger,” said Ms. Micu, a Houston native whose parents are Filipino immigrants. “I can’t take the chance.”

Something else was nagging Ms. Micu. She wondered how the subdivisions could have been built in a reservoir. And if they had to be sacrificed, shouldn’t the homeowners be compensated?

“This pushed our lives in another path,” she said. “How could we have known that we would return from Dallas and practically have to start over?”

The questions are what pushed her to look for a law firm. In September, she became one of the lead plaintiffs in a federal class-action suit against the Army Corps of Engineers.

“Harvey took away my photo album with pictures from every year of my life. It took so many things. It took the purse that my husband bought me as a gift. He spent three months looking for it,” she said.

“Harvey took away my sense of security, but so did the Army Corps of Engineers. What happened to us was wron

When Paulette Delynn Archer, 70, greets a visitor in the doorway of her one-story brick house, she is framed by large picture windows that reveal the emptiness inside, where flooding and renovation have left little more than wood studs between the front door and the back patio.

“Come in, let me show you the house,” Ms. Archer offered in a cheery voice that soon gave way to silence. “Well, this used to be my house. Now it’s just a shell.”

Ms. Archer had once delighted in having guests over to see her four-bedroom home, where everything was the color of soft gold or pumpkin. This is where she had raised her only son, where her husband and mother spent their final days, where she had planned to spend her remaining days. But the four feet of mud and water that gushed through the house had demanded something radically different.

Two decades ago, Ms. Archer and her husband had paid roughly $200,000 for the house and watched it appreciate to more than $300,000. She said it would cost well over $100,000 to renovate the house and her FEMA grant would only cover a small fraction.

Video

How a Community Was Sacrificed to Save Houston

After Hurricane Harvey hit, these communities, built in what is called a flood pool, were sacrificed to save the city of Houston. We followed homeowners as they decided whether to cut their losses or rebuild, knowing it could happen again.

By LESLYE DAVIS, RAY WHITEHOUSE and ERIC MAIERSON on Publish Date March 19, 2018. Photo by Todd Heisler/The New York Times. Watch in Times Video »

In the mornings, while staying at a La Quinta Inn, Ms. Archer would make lists in a blue three-ring binder of items lost, mostly items that came to her in her dreams. “I finally stopped trying to sum up my entire life. It was just too stressful. But that list told me that as much as I loved my house, there was no way out of this but to sell,” said Ms. Archer, who spent the first part of her career as a flight attendant then became a police officer for the Port of Houston Authority. “I couldn’t get a loan at my age and with no job. How would I pay it back?”

She had lost everything once before, as a teenager in a house fire. The crushing loss felt the same; the inability to recover felt far different.

Like other homeowners, Ms. Archer said she had no idea the house was built in a reservoir. She was told over and over that she did not need flood insurance, she said. Two or three times she purchased it anyway and then let the policy expire.

Three years earlier, she had taken out a reverse mortgage, which allows homeowners over 62 years old to convert equity into cash. After the flood, her house was worth less than the loan balance. It left her in a terrible bind. “I am sitting here thinking that I am not going to be able to get out of this situation,” she said.

Interactive Graphic

How One Houston Suburb Ended Up in a Reservoir

Most residents whose homes flooded during Hurricane Harvey had no clue that their gated community was built in an area prone to such damage in extreme storms.

OPEN Interactive Graphic

She eventually negotiated with the lender to offer the house as a short sale for $125,000. Earlier this month, Ms. Archer closed on the sale and walked away for good. Now fearful of floods and the sound of hard rain, she plans to move near a nephew in Dallas, where she will re-enter the job market 10 years after her retirement.

“There is no way I could have imagined I would be starting over at this point in my life,” she said, then sighed deeply. “I know everything will be O.K. Eventually.”

Staying Home

On a fall afternoon, as they were in the garage sorting the few salvageable pieces — the roar of trucks carting debris in the distance — Mr. Swanson turned to Ms. Swanson, his wife of 24 years.

“I don’t want to leave. Do you?” he blurted out. Ms. Swanson shook her head. Neither did she.

For the Swansons, rebuilding was the only choice. They knew it would be hard, but this was home.

Instead of returning to work, Mr. Swanson pitched in on the repairs. “For now,” Ms. Swanson said, “it make more sense for Jeff to be home helping with the house rather than to be on a job making $12 an hour.” The couple also bought flood insurance.

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Eileen Swanson with her son Allen. For the Swansons, rebuilding was the only choice. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times

In October, they received a FEMA grant for about $10,300, part of the more than $91 million the federal agency distributed in Fort Bend County. They also received donated kitchen countertops and cabinets through a state program and a $25,000 grant from Fort Bend Recovers, a local public-private disaster assistance coalition, for construction costs. There was still a gap, but it was manageable, and less than the cost of a new house and mortgage.

The numbers made sense, but Mr. Swanson said he also had a more personal reason for staying.

“It took me this many years to finally become a Texan,” he said. “Harvey is not going to run us away.”