Reporting Highlights
- Long Wait: A North Carolina home rebuilding program after hurricanes Florence and Matthew left hundreds of families waiting more than seven years to return home.
- What Went Wrong: The program struggled to keep track of expenses and hold contractors accountable for delays, prompting the governor to create a new recovery program for Hurricane Helene.
- Repeating Problems: Roughly 5,000 homeowners are awaiting the state’s help after Helene, but similar problems like rigid rules and not enough staff are already surfacing.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
In the 459 days that Willa Mae James spent living in a Fairfield Inn in Eastern North Carolina, her footsteps wore down paths in the carpet: from the door to the desk, from the bed to the wooden armchair by the window, her favorite place to read the Bible.
The 69-year-old retired dietitian had been sent there in July 2024 by North Carolina’s rebuilding program after Hurricane Florence ravaged her home and many others in 2018. The state had promised to help thousands of people like her rebuild or repair. But it had taken the program years to begin work. James spent nearly six years living in her damaged house in Lumberton, where floodwaters had turned the floorboards to pulp, causing her floors to sink and nearly cave in.
Of the more than 10,000 families who applied, 3,100 were still waiting for construction five years after the storm. Thousands of others had withdrawn or been dropped by the program. As of November, more than 300 families were still waiting to return home.
And James was the last of more than 100 displaced homeowners staying at the hotel.
“It’s like being in jail,” James said. “Everybody else done moved back home in their houses, enjoying it, except me.”
On the other side of North Carolina, nearly 5,000 homeowners find themselves waiting for the state government to help them rebuild after 2024’s Hurricane Helene. Gov. Josh Stein created a new program, Renew NC, promising to learn from the problems of the previous program that left James and thousands of others hanging for years.
Renew NC is just getting off the ground; the program began accepting applications in June and has completed work on 16 of the 2,700 homes it plans to repair and rebuild. But through public records and interviews with homeowners, The Assembly and ProPublica have found that some of the same problems that plagued the earlier program are surfacing in the Helene recovery.
Video by Nadia Sussman/ProPublica
That earlier program, which has the similar name ReBuild NC, was set up after Florence decimated a region that had been hit by Hurricane Matthew two years earlier. ReBuild NC was designed to help low- and moderate-income homeowners restore their homes by hiring and paying contractors to complete the work.
But the North Carolina Office of Recovery &