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 Thousands of others had withdrawn or been dropped by the program.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.

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 & Resiliency, which runs the program, failed at nearly every step, according to reports by outside consultants, journalists and auditors. It struggled to manage its $779 million budget and couldn’t keep track of expenses. It rarely held contractors accountable for delays that dragged out projects and drove up costs for temporary housing and storage. ReBuild NC provided only limited resources to understaffed local governments that couldn’t handle the volume of permit and inspection requests.

At the same time, the agency was laden with “administrative steps, paperwork, and procedures” to comply with federal regulations, according to a state auditor report. And rigid rules meant the agency spent money rebuilding homes that needed less expensive repairs, some homeowners said.

“The response from North Carolina to hurricanes Matthew and Florence was a disaster,” State Auditor Dave Boliek said in a statement after releasing a report on ReBuild NC in November.

The auditor’s office consulted with the former administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency under the Obama administration, Craig Fugate, who noted that ReBuild NC officials “spent a tremendous amount of time on process, when their job was swinging hammers.”

Bridget Munger, a spokesperson for the North Carolina Office of Recovery & Resiliency, said the office welcomed the report. “NCORR remains committed to serving those affected by hurricanes Matthew and Florence and any insight that supports that mission is valuable,” Munger said in a statement.

State leaders set out to manage Helene recovery differently. Among Stein’s orders on his first day in office in 2025 was to lay the groundwork for a new home rebuilding program with fresh leadership in a different department. The state would again pick and pay contractors to repair and rebuild homes of people who applied, but this time, it would scrutinize contractors more to ensure quality. Stephanie McGarrah, who oversees Renew NC, pledged “robust financial oversight” and a willingness to work with stakeholders who “identify challenges and gaps in funding.”

But again, homeowners are encountering rules that steer them toward demolition and reconstruction when less expensive repairs would do. Some counties are struggling to get the staff and inspectors to handle all the required permits. Many residents will be out of their homes without a plan from the state to pay for temporary housing or storage during construction.

McGarrah, a deputy state commerce secretary, said that every disaster is different and that the agency is learning as it goes and has already revised policies to allow more homes to be eligible for repairs. “There’s this perception that you can figure out what all the problems are going to be, and you can figure them out at the beginning,” she said.

The Helene recovery program set an ambitious goal to finish all homes before June 2028, but the long waits of James and others in Eastern North Carolina serve as a warning for what might happen next.

Behind the Scenes of the Disaster

North Carolina had just begun rebuilding homes Matthew destroyed in 2016 when Florence hit two years later, bringing up to 2 feet of rain in some inland counties.

Damage from the two storms totaled an estimated $22 billion spread across half of North Carolina’s 100 counties, among the costliest storms in U.S. history. After FEMA’s short-term disaster assistance ended, the state received applications from more than 10,000 homeowners still in need of repairs.

But progress was slow. The state’s homebuilding program trailed others after 2018 hurricanes, according to a 2022 Government Accountability Office report. North Carolina had completed 0.4% of the homes it set out to repair and rebuild after Florence while South Carolina had completed 22%.

ReBuild NC’s management problems are most apparent in the time people like James spent in hotels waiting for construction. One of the reasons it took so long is that ReBuild NC hired two administrative contractors, one to manage construction and another to handle temporary relocation.

Although the agency denied it, contractors told the legislature that ReBuild NC discouraged its relocation vendor from speaking directly with the construction vendor, requiring them to communicate via a spreadsheet that was supposed to track construction. The approach delayed repairs as the vendors were unable to line up move-out dates with construction start dates. Among the 766 families who spent at least a year out of their homes during construction, more than 500 didn’t have damage that required them to move out early.

Such problems contributed to the roughly $100 million ReBuild NC spent on temporary relocation services, like hotels and portable storage pods, for 3,800 families.

The program required families to move out before construction was ready to begin. James was moved into the Fairfield Inn nine months before her assigned construction company filed for demolition and construction permits. A large part of the delay was caused by ReBuild NC pausing “notices to proceed” for four months as it ran low on funds and sought more money from the legislature. While the local government OK’d the permit applications within days, it took another two months for the contractor to pay for the permits and begin reconstruction. P.H. Lowery, the general contractor for James’ home, did not respond to calls or text messages seeking comment about the delays. The nonprofit news organization NC Newsline found that ReBuild NC never fined contractors for missing deadlines during the program’s first years.

Other families faced delays because ReBuild NC failed to coordinate rebuilding efforts with local governments or because the homeowners came up against the program’s rules. The state had a set number of home designs that homeowners could choose from. Sometimes, the state’s plans proposed homes that were too big for properties or didn’t account for septic systems.

Kath Durand encountered such problems when she sought ReBuild NC’s help after Florence’s deluge seeped through the roof, saturated the walls and collapsed part of the ceiling of her home in Atlantic Beach. She applied to ReBuild NC in 2020, hoping to finish an estimated $20,000 in repairs after she ran out of money to fix the home herself.

But under ReBuild NC’s rules, wood-frame homes like hers had to be above a certain level to avoid flooding before the program would pay for repairs, and the program wouldn’t pay to elevate houses. The home was just shy. So ReBuild NC would only pay to demolish the home and build a new one — a more expensive undertaking.

It took four years for the agency to offer Durand a floor plan, but none of the designs fit her 1/6-acre lot. One plan placed part of the home in the street easement, which utility companies need to access. A second placed the home in the tidal zone, effectively putting her home in a canal. A third covered the septic field, which could have destroyed the system that breaks down sewage. All those things would have been cause for rejected permits, she said, making her question ReBuild NC.

“I would like to get in a room and talk to them about ‘what were you thinking?’” she said. Durand said she settled for a smaller home, but at the end of December, ReBuild NC withdrew her from the program, saying it didn’t have houses available for the size of her lot.

Munger, ReBuild NC’s spokesperson, said the program has the ability to develop custom building plans to fit challenging lots, but doing so in every case “would have exponentially increased project costs and greatly reduced the number of families helped by the program.”

Such delays and complaints from homeowners led to years of legislative scrutiny, after which ReBuild NC’s two top leaders left the agency.

In 2022, the agency’s chief program delivery officer, Ivan Duncan, resigned after he was accused of giving preferential treatment to a construction vendor, NC Newsline reported. Then, after several legislative meetings questioned oversight of the program, his boss, ReBuild NC director Laura Hogshead, abruptly left the agency in 2024.

Duncan said in an interview that the allegations were unfounded. He said he cooperated with the investigations, was not asked to resign and left for a higher-paying job.

Hogshead did not respond to requests for comment. At a 2024 legislative hearing, she listed several things the program would do differently if it were put in charge of the Helene recovery but noted that rebuilding thousands of older homes across a wide area came with challenges.

Behind the scenes, ReBuild NC struggled to hold contractors accountable to timelines, paid invoices without verifying work and spent money on things auditors couldn’t track, according to reports by disaster recovery consultant SBP and the state auditor and an internal audit.

For James, the wait was especially hard as her husband, Christopher, was in treatment for bone cancer. She remembers Christopher questioning whether the home would ever be done. “Baby, them people might never get to you,” he’d told her. When he died in 2021, she was left to fight alone for the home to be rebuilt.

James said a neighbor who applied for ReBuild NC died days after moving into the hotel. She knows others who are still staying with friends or family as they wait on ReBuild NC to finish their homes.

She hopes Western North Carolina residents have better experiences.

“I pray that they don’t go through what we did, I sure do,” James said.

At the Edge

Under pressure from the legislature and homeowners to not repeat these problems with the Helene recovery, the new state program, Renew NC, made a number of reforms.

ReBuild NC had been criticized for locating its office almost 100 miles from the epicenters of the disaster zones. Renew NC’s office is in Asheville, in one of Helene’s hardest-hit counties. A bipartisan group of legislators, business leaders, activists and government officials meets across Western North Carolina to publicly advise on challenges and assist with recovery.

To avoid the problem of having different vendors administer the construction and relocation, Renew NC has hired one vendor to manage the housing recovery program.

Despite the reforms, the Stein administration has already faced questions from lawmakers over potential conflicts of interest. His first Helene recovery adviser, Jonathan Krebs, had been a partner at the company administering the housing program and contributed heavily to Stein’s campaign and a Democratic political committee in the year before receiving his job.

Kate Schmidt, a spokesperson for the governor, said Krebs “was hired because of his decades of experience working on nearly every major disaster recovery since Katrina” and noted that the State Ethics Commission found no conflict of interest. Krebs said at a legislative meeting last year that while he helped draft the request for proposal and scoring criteria for an $81 million contract that was awarded to Horne, his former employer, he viewed his past employment not as a conflict but as an asset.

“They’ve got to have somebody in the room that knows what’s going on and what has to happen to get houses built. I was that person,” said Krebs, whose temporary role has ended. Krebs echoed those sentiments in an interview, noting that he supported Stein as a candidate who was “trying to be practical and help people.”

The state did not renew Horne’s Florence and Matthew recovery contract amid complaints over slow application processing. BDO, an accounting and consulting firm that has since acquired Horne, referred questions to the state. A state official said in contracting documents that the decision to not renew was mutual and acknowledged that “problems continued” after the state took over case management.

As South Carolina did after Florence, Renew NC has avoided the high costs of temporary housing and storage simply by not paying for them, except under “extreme circumstances,” though it is common for disaster recovery programs to pay for such costs. That has left homeowners to cover the costs themselves.

The lack of coverage for temporary housing concerns Vicki Meath, a local housing advocate working on the recovery.

“When I think about survivors that have been impacted and would apply to this program that are below 60% of the area median income, they don’t have a lot of resources,” she said. “They don’t have another place to live.”

In an interview, McGarrah noted that her agency is discussing policy changes to help make temporary housing more affordable but will need local partners to identify places families can live.

“We’re seeing some slowdowns in our pipeline because people don’t have places to go,” she said.

Local governments in Western North Carolina, like those on the other side of the state, are struggling with a lack of staff and resources. Dennis Aldridge, a commissioner in Avery County, northeast of Asheville, said the county’s 18,000 residents face a shortage of environmental inspectors who certify well and septic systems, on which homes in rural counties overwhelmingly rely. Aldridge said he reached out to the state for assistance, but there aren’t enough inspectors in North Carolina — an issue that’s been known for years.

“It’s taking right now about six to nine months to get a well and septic permit because we don’t have the people,” Aldridge said in September.

Danny Allen, inspections director in Madison County, north of Asheville, said he’s worried his department will face backlogs on building permits with about 75 local homeowners actively applying for the state program.

“They’re feeling it now, but it’s really going to be six months from now that the pressure is going to build,” said Aimee Wall, dean of the University of North Carolina’s School of Government.

The number of people waiting for inspections could increase if homeowners who applied for repairs learn they need to have their homes rebuilt because damages exceed the state’s threshold of $100,000 for wood-frame homes. The amount is intended to avoid costly repairs, as homes could have additional issues like termite damage that aren’t immediately visible. But it doesn’t cover all scenarios.

That’s what Chuck Brodsky, a folk musician and songwriter, encountered after two landslides wiped out much of the Asheville mountainside that supported his home. His two-story house survived Helene unscathed, but it’s now perched on a cliff that drops to a road 150 feet below.

Two construction companies quoted him about $200,000 to stabilize the mountainside and keep his home from falling over the edge. He couldn’t afford it, so he began the application for help from Renew NC to repair his storm-impacted property in September.

But the agency told him under the program’s rules, to fix the mountainside, it would have to tear down his home and rebuild. It can’t just repair the land.

The agency told him he could appeal, but he worries he’ll receive the same answer. McGarrah noted that the region had over 3,000 landslides, and the agency will evaluate properties affected by them case by case.

“It would cost them way more to demolish the house and rebuild the house than repair the landslide,” Brodsky said. “The whole thing is just preposterous.”