SWANNANOA, N.C. — Before the remnants of Hurricane Helene swamped this town, the Super 8 Motel, wedged between a highway and the Swannanoa River, provided affordable short and long-term housing for dozens of people who couldn't find affordable housing elsewhere.
Now, it's like a scene from a post-apocalyptic movie, frozen in time. A thick layer of mud covers the area.
Kim Maisch points to a section of the motel that shifted and landed in the river. "We are actually standing in the middle of where a foundation was for one of the hotel sections," she says. "We are looking at rooms shifted off, cars open, mud, debris everywhere, insulation hanging from the ceilings. Room 222 was my dad's room."
Last September, when Tropical Storm Helene hit western North Carolina, heavy rains forced rivers and tributaries out of their banks, causing the worst flooding seen in more than two centuries. The Swannanoa River swamped much of the town.
Maisch, 36, lives not far from the motel. She was up most of the night, watching the river rise and worrying about her father.
"I called him that morning and woke him up and asked him if he was okay," says Maisch. "He didn't know exactly what was going on. He just knew that they were measuring and keeping an eye on the water. He stood [up] and there was water in his room. His trash can floated right by him, and that's when he had the National Guard knocking on his door."
Everyone got out of the motel safely. Her father has since found another place to live. But most of the others living there still haven't.
Maisch, who used to clean Airbnb's before Helene, is now working with Swannanoa Communities Together. Local residents formed the group after the storm to focus on the area's greatest need — finding an affordable place to live. She's been helping residents put their lives back together with the help of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and private aid groups. But it's slow.
"I still see heartbreak and I do see a little bit of hope and not the hope that I would have thought during this whole process. It's still one day at a time, one breath at a time," Maisch says.
Maisch's home sits on higher ground across from the Super 8 Motel and sustained damage. "We have to have our roof replaced," but she says she's not complaining. "I still say minor damage compared to what's around us right now."
Months after Helene, many still struggle
Eight months after the storm, evidence of Helene's destruction is everywhere in Swannanoa, Black Mountain, Asheville, and other communities throughout western North Carolina. In some places, it's as if the storm came through just last week. Buildings sit damaged, often tilted and off their foundations. Downed trees and piles of debris still wait to be cleared.
But for many people, the most pressing problem remains finding an affordable place to live. In Asheville, even before the storm, Jen Hampton says there was a housing shortage.
"Pre-Helene, we had a vacancy rate on rentals at like 1.2%. So 98.8% of our housing rental units were occupied."
Hampton is the housing and wages organizer for Just Economics, a non-profit that advocates for government policies that help address wage and housing issues. With its beauty and moderate climate, North Carolina is one of the nation's fastest growing states. In the 20 years Hampton has lived there, she's seen the community blossom into a major destination for visitors, retirees and remote workers. It raised the demand for housing and its cost dramatically.
"We have quite a few illegal Airbnb's operating within city limits. And paired with that, we also have the highest cost of living in the state and also some of the lowest average wages," says Hampton. She speaks from first-hand experience. For many years, she lived in public housing while working in the service industry as a bartender, server and line cook at a restaurant struggling with low wages.
Helene's flooding and high winds damaged or destroyed more than 100,000 homes, wiping out whole communities in western North Carolina. Many people struggled to find even temporary housing.
It also wrecked Asheville's tourism and service-based economy. "There's still a lot of people out of work, and unemployment [benefits] stopped," she says. Even though businesses are reopening, Hampton says, "we're seeing the wages actually lower than they were before the storm because there's more demand for jobs than there are jobs available."
Housing advocates wanted the state to impose an emergency moratorium on evictions after the storm, but were unsuccessful. As a result, many were forced to leave their homes.
"There are a lot of people living in their cars. There's a lot of people about to be evicted or being threatened with eviction", says Hampton. "And we can't build more housing fast enough, and we can't build enough affordable housing fast enough."
Now, it's residents stepping up with possible solutions to the housing crisis.
Mobile home parks offer an affordable and dignified housing option
There are dozens of mobile home communities in Emma, a hilly wooded community west of Asheville. Emma didn't flood during Helene, but it did receive extensive storm damage.
Andrea Golden says, "so many trees came down and the wind and the rain." Golden is the founder and co-director of Poder Emma, a nonprofit that focuses on housing and economic development.
At the Mosswood mobile home park, Kelvin Bonilla with Poder Emma drives up to a home being repaired and greets the crew of five working on the property. "Que onda chicos?" Bonilla says in his native Spanish, "what's up dudes?"
The crew is replacing the outside deck on an aging mobile home. Since Helene, crews have repaired roofs, cleared downed trees and installed new insulated siding on dozens of mobile homes, Bonilla says.
The work is done at no cost to the homeowners. It allows people to stay in their houses and helps keep housing affordable. Poder Emma has a long home repair waiting list. "The majority of the people we serve is Latino," says Bonilla who came to the U.S. from Honduras.
Golden says the group was created several years ago as developers and national companies began targeting the community's mostly locally-owned mobile home parks. "We started the organization to protect the affordable housing that exists here."
Poder has helped residents form cooperatives that, in several cases, have been able to buy the land their homes sit on. Golden and her husband Abel Gonzalez, for example, bought the land their mobile home sits on via a cooperative. That allows them to build equity in their homes and create long-term stable communities.
In part because of Poder's work, Golden says local officials have begun to revise old views on mobile homes and the people who live in them. "Local governments were trying to zone us out of mobile homes and mobile home parks for years," she says. "Now, I think with the affordable housing crisis, the conversation has changed some. But I think there's a lot of myths and stereotypes about mobile homes."
In communities where residents own the land, she says mobile homes can become permanent, long-term housing. But a lot depends on where they're located.
A community badly hit by Helene's inland flooding
In the town of Swannanoa, people drowned in communities near the river that were overwhelmed by Helene's flooding. It's left many former mobile home residents searching for stable, long-term housing.
Beth Trigg, with Swannanoa Communities Together, says some people went through the winter living in tents and sheds.
"To me, those are a symptom of the fact that the housing crisis is ongoing because it doesn't really work for most people to live in a ten-by-ten uninsulated structure," she says. "It's one step up from a tent."
Trigg and other activists working on the housing crisis are thankful to nonprofits and charities who have stepped in to do repairs and, in some cases, provide homes. But they are frustrated that local, state and federal governments are devoting so little attention to long-term housing needs.
"Policy tends to center around rebuilding roads and bridges, and small business loans, and many other things that are very important," says Trigg with frustration in her voice. "And housing is kind of an afterthought. And for us, we think housing needs to be the first thing we think about. And then everything else needs to be centered around that."
That's the case, Trigg says, especially in Swannanoa, one of the communities hardest hit by Helene. "We experienced housing loss at a scale totally disproportionately to anywhere else in the region."
Paulina Hernandez has lived in Swannanoa for about two decades. Before the storm, she and her husband used their savings to buy and rent out several mobile homes in a small community next to the river, Hourglass Way.
It's now an empty lot. "There were nine mobile homes here. We own seven. And my son living here and my daughter living in the second one," says Hernandez. The couple rented out four.
The mobile homes were destroyed in the flood. With them went Hernandez and her husband's life savings. She becomes emotional looking at the bare foundations.
"Everything is gone, we don't have a house," Hernandez says, tears rolling down her cheeks. "My son and my daughter, everybody is safe."
That's the positive note Hernandez holds on to. Everyone got out safely, even a neighbor who refused to evacuate, but was later rescued from his rooftop. With the help of Swannanoa Communities Together, Hernandez and her family have found a temporary apartment.
But like many after Helene, she and her husband are searching for a long-term housing solution. Her dream? She says, if the landowner agrees, they hope to be back and rebuild their small mobile home community on Hourglass Way.
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