CUT OFF — It’s a mad scramble Heidi Summers has grown accustomed to in recent years. Until just recently, she and her two children were living out of suitcases and storage containers after they were forced out of their rental home, which had been their most stable residence since Hurricane Katrina.

The reason: Summers, her 15-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son had been diagnosed with lead poisoning, a result of the outdated paint inside their house. The family spent two nights in a motel room before returning to the house, where they isolated themselves in rooms where the paint wasn’t problematic. 

“I just moved there. I just was unpacking a tote the other day, and now I have to do it all by myself,” Summers said. “Then, you know what’s the worst part? I have invisible diseases that people don’t see. So it’s hard for me, and nobody knows.”

Summers, 37, has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and fibromyalgia and is in remission from thyroid cancer that required surgery when she was a teenager. Flare-ups, which have become exacerbated through her post-storm living conditions, make it difficult for her to maintain steady employment.  

Her family is among those who haven’t found stable housing since Hurricane Ida plowed through the bayou region in August 2021. Official numbers on storm-related homelessness are either outdated or too fluid to calculate accurately. 

The most recent census of the unhoused from a coalition of groups that assists the homeless in Louisiana was in January 2023. It counted the unsheltered as well as people in transitional housing and showed 60 people without homes in the Houma region, which includes Lafourche, Terrebonne, St. Charles, St. James and Assumption parishes. 

It includes people still living in government-provided travel trailers almost three years after the hurricane. Lafourche Parish President Archie Chaisson said there were 104 families still in them as of mid-May, down from a high of 1,200.

Demand for public housing and government rental vouchers also reflects housing instability in Lafourche, which Chaisson said is more acute on the coastal southern end of the parish. Summers’ family was forced out of their public housing unit in Galliano when Hurricane Ida made it unlivable. 

Her struggle to find and keep a dependable home offers a glimpse at the fragility of the social safety net in rural coastal areas, where increasingly severe hurricanes test the capacity of local governments and nonprofits to meet basic needs. 

Summers’ housing options are limited in Cut Off, a community surrounded by swamp and shrinking marshland along lower Bayou Lafourche where Louisiana Highway 1 is the only way in or out. It’s roughly 45 minutes away from Houma and Thibodaux — both bigger cities, relatively speaking, but with few affordable rentals available themselves.      

The Housing Authority of Lafourche reports a waitlist of 400 for rental vouchers, even after putting back online all but four of the 276 units it offered before the storm, executive director Erial Branch said in an email. Before Hurricane Ida, the agency served 226 voucher holders.

Chiasson said people who legitimately need to remain in temporary travel trailers in Lafourche Parish would be accommodated, even though the state’s Ida Sheltering program officially ended April 30 — after an 11-month extension of the original deadline. As of the end of April, 557 travel trailers were still in use in Louisiana, according to the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.

Next door in Terrebonne Parish, renovations have yet to begin on two public housing developments that have been offline since Hurricane Ida. The Houma-Terrebonne Housing Agency did not respond to questions about how many units that entails or why repair work hasn’t commenced. 

“We have a lack of affordable housing,” Chaisson said. “We have a lack of a couple of large apartment complexes, one of that being a public housing complex that the parish housing authority owns and operates that they still haven’t rebuilt because they’re dealing with their own issues with insurance … So it’s been a struggle. 

“It’s been really heartbreaking to see the deadline come, knowing there wasn’t much we could do to stop it.”

Homeless again after false arrest 

Summers’ family was among those who lived out of a travel trailer until being forced out under questionable circumstances. She was arrested and locked out of her camper, even though the district attorney would later refuse to prosecute her case. She and her children had to sleep in their SUV until a nonprofit organization found the rental house they would later have to leave because of lead poisoning.

In March 2022, an acquaintance of Summers asked her for a ride and to accompany him to a nearby casino. She described him as “a friend of a friend” she had met two weeks prior. 

Summers obliged, not knowing that Robert “Robbie” Morningstar was the target of a Lafourche Parish Sheriff Office sting operation. 

According to a sheriff’s office  report, a confidential informant had set up a drug deal at the casino with Morningstar, who allegedly sold 2 grams of methamphetamine to the informant for $80. Sheriff’s investigators had set up surveillance to capture the encounter and sent the purchased drugs to a Louisiana State Police lab for confirmation.

Court records show Morningstar was charged with two counts of methamphetamine distribution and one count of distributing synthetic opioids and naloxone. He pleaded guilty to the meth charge in January 2023 and was sentenced to 90 days in the parish prison with a $1,000 fine. 

A sheriff’s task force arrested Summers five months later. It happened a day after she had made an appointment with the governor’s office to inspect her travel trailer for a growing mold problem — and hours after she had threatened to sue the state-contracted crew that was tearing its insides apart, spreading the mold. 

Summers said state officials left her with the impression she would receive a replacement trailer. But moments after their departure, sheriff’s deputies arrived to arrest Summers and charged her with being a principal to distribution of a controlled dangerous substance. She was taken to a sheriff’s substation, photographed and fingerprinted but never booked into jail. After posting $600 bail, she returned to her camper within a few hours to find its entrance padlocked.

Casey Tingle, GOSHEP director under former Gov. John Bel Edwards, said in a December interview that contractors were under the impression that Summers was not living in her camper at the time of her arrest and didn’t intend to move back into it. 

“From our perspective, the arrest … did not play into the issue with her being allowed to stay in the unit if she had wanted to keep that unit and allowed the repairs to happen,” Tingle said. “My sense is that the situation would have never evolved in the way that it did.”

Summers insists she was told her camper would be replaced and said she gave no indication she was backing out of the state sheltering program.  

Asked whether GOSHEP had any paperwork that would confirm Summers backed out of her lease agreement, Tingle said he couldn’t answer the question.   

“She certainly would have done something when she first occupied the unit,” he said “… But it’s my perception that it’s generally pretty vague.”

Lead poison concerns linger

Summers just moved her family into a rental home near Galliano, after two more months of living in the Cut Off house with lead paint problems. She continues to receive rental assistance and in-home health care through Start Corp., a Houma-based nonprofit that provides housing and medical services. 

“I had to fight for it, honestly … to get rude with them,” Summers said. “Let them know that, ‘Y’all, I’m homeless, and y’all got me in a program.’ I’m like, ‘I’m in a program to not be homeless, and I’m homeless.’” 

Start Corp. declined to respond to questions about Summers’ experience.

A doctor has attributed the family’s health issues earlier this year to lead paint exposure.

Summers’ teen daughter suffered with headaches and was uncharacteristically lethargic. Now that she’s in a different house, she’s back to normal and will return to the school sports teams that kept her busy before her symptoms slowed her down.

Summers is also concerned about her son, whose school told her he had been acting up frequently around the same time her daughter’s health worsened. Even low lead levels in children’s blood have been linked to behavioral issues and learning difficulties, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Such effects could be permanent. Summers won’t know for certain until he’s back at school, and she fears any lead exposure damage she and her children suffered could be long-lasting after spending roughly two years in the home.

It still bothers Summers that her current situation was triggered through a false arrest, one that she fears could haunt her once she looks for work again, applies for a passport or does anything that requires a background check. She doesn’t feel it should fall on her to have the arrest expunged from her record.

Then there’s what she describes as the emotional damage her family endured. Both children have lived with separate relatives while Summers ironed out their housing situation. For a while, she said her daughter stopped talking to her.

“My kids shouldn’t have had to go through that at all,” she said. 

Charitable effort reaches capacity 

One effort has addressed the post-Hurricane Ida demand for permanent housing in lower Bayou Lafourche one family at a time, though its leader acknowledges the need far outweighs their capacity.   

The Bayou Community Foundation put its resources behind a hurricane recovery project of a Mennonite group from Pennsylvania. With their free labor and construction expertise, the volunteers who started work in January 2022 will have built 53 new homes and made repairs to 450 homes in lower Lafourche and on Grand Isle by the end of August.

A stipulation of the Bayou Community Foundation rebuilding program is that the recipients hold clear title to the land where their homes are built. They represent a separate offshoot of homeless: property owners who cannot afford to rebuild their homes.

Michelle Dubois is one of the recipients of a new home, the first “tiny house” among the BCF projects. Finishing touches awaited in early June when she gave a reporter a tour of her new dwelling in Cut Off. It’s built right next to the lot where the trailer home she owned before Ida was destroyed.

For Dubois, a new home couldn’t be constructed soon enough. She described her temporary living situation as a shared home with five “strangers,” some of whom invade her privacy, eat her food and root through her belongings. Dubois has also found herself taking care of seven dogs that also live inside the home.

“It’s very, very rough,” she said. “Lately I’ve been crying so much because it’s overwhelming.”

A stroke left Dubois partially disabled and forced her to quit what she said was a good-paying job as a lab scientist. Standing for extended periods is difficult, forcing her to rely on a wheelchair at times. That lack of mobility removed a temporary travel trailer as an option for her, forcing her to endure the strained living conditions until she connected with the Bayou Community Foundation.

The foundation has reached its capacity for new homes, BCF executive director Jennifer Armand said. Her organization’s members feel good about the work that’s been done, but she acknowledged there’s more demand than resources.

Armand expects the need to increase further when people who are still in temporary trailers the Federal Emergency Management Agency have to exit them by an Aug. 31 deadline — a date that’s already been pushed back multiple times.

“The need is definitely still there,” Armand said, referencing a waitlist of 49 applicants and 25 more requests from outside of South Lafourche. 

“And that’s just applications that we received, not even the more people out there that we have not even been able to reach out to and get an application from,” she said. “But we know that the need still exists.”