Why does it seem that, after a disaster, the government’s response is not always focused on helping the people who survived rebuild their homes, restore their land, and put their lives back together?
Instead, many residents are beginning to feel as though the opposite is happening.
Rather than providing the support needed to help local families recover and remain in their communities, decisions made by local officials, including commissioners, mayors, and other government leaders, can create conditions that make it increasingly difficult for longtime residents to stay.
There is growing concern that some communities are being transformed into tourist destinations at the expense of the very people who have lived there for generations. As property values, development pressures, and property taxes rise, families who have already suffered through a disaster may find themselves facing another crisis: being unable to afford to keep the land and homes they worked their entire lives to build.
For some landowners, the choice may eventually become painfully simple: pay rapidly increasing costs they can no longer afford, or sell.
And it doesn’t necessarily have to happen all at once. It can happen one acre at a time, one property at a time, one family at a time. A family may lose part of its land simply to pay the bills, and eventually even the home they live in could become impossible to keep.
A community cannot truly recover if the people who call it home are gradually priced out of it.
After a disaster, survivors should have the opportunity to rebuild, not find themselves facing a second disaster created by rising costs, taxes, development, and policies that make staying on their own land increasingly difficult.
Tourism can bring money and opportunity to a community, but it should not come at the cost of pushing out the people who were there before the tourists arrived.
The question we should be asking is:
Are we rebuilding our communities for the people who live here, or are we rebuilding them for the people who can afford to buy them?
Because when longtime residents can no longer afford their homes, farms, and family land, we aren’t simply changing a community, we are changing who gets to have a future in it.
What Hurricane Helene Did to Ashe County
When Hurricane Helene hit Western North Carolina in late September 2024, it became the costliest natural disaster in the state’s history. The state budget office estimated about $59.6 billion in damage and more than 73,000 damaged homes. Some mountain weather stations recorded over 30 inches of rain, including 30.78 inches at Busick.
North Carolina lost 108 people to the storm, including one here in Ashe County. Local reporting describes hundreds of Ashe County homes damaged or destroyed, with families along the New River and its creeks hit hardest.
Very few of those families were insured against it. Only about 2% of properties in the hardest-hit mountain counties sat inside FEMA’s mapped flood zones, so most people never had flood insurance. And the help that has reached individual homeowners has been small next to the need: in the fall of 2024, Ashe County used a $750,000 housing grant, and it was enough to replace homes for three households.
What’s Driving This?
I researched this question with the help of AI. Here is a summary of what I found about why recovery keeps favoring money over the people who live here. It isn’t one villain; it’s how the whole system is built.
1. Federal disaster aid is built to fix roads, not homes. FEMA’s Public Assistance program reimburses counties and towns for most of the cost of rebuilding roads, bridges, water systems, and public buildings. Help for homeowners comes from a separate program designed only to make a house “safe, sanitary, and functional,” not to rebuild it. The maximum grant is a little over $40,000, and most families receive far less. A new home in the mountains costs many times that. For anything more, the main federal answer is a disaster loan, which means a second mortgage that retirees and working families often can’t take on.
2. Rebuilding rules can make it illegal to rebuild the way you were. When a home in a regulated floodplain is damaged to 50% or more of its value, it must be brought fully up to modern flood codes, which can mean elevating it or moving it entirely. When the government buys out a flooded property, the land must stay open space forever and can never hold a home again. Both shrink the number of places families can afford to live.
3. Tourism tax money can’t legally go to housing. Under North Carolina law, most of the occupancy tax visitors pay on hotels and rentals must be spent promoting more tourism. Local leaders can’t redirect it to rebuild homes, even after a disaster. So while displaced families wait in campers, public money goes to advertising that the mountains are open for business.
4. Counties need the tax base back fast. After a disaster, county budgets are stretched thin. A vacation home or short-term rental brings in far more property and occupancy tax than a modest family home, so recovery plans lean toward tourism and higher-value development.
5. Cash buyers move faster than aid. While families wait months or years for grants, investors arrive with quick offers for damaged land. Exhausted owners with no other help often feel they have no choice but to sell, and what gets built next is usually a vacation home, not a neighbor’s house.
What Could Change It
None of this is inevitable. State lawmakers could let occupancy tax money go toward housing recovery, fund direct rebuilding grants instead of loans, and give counties tools to limit speculation in disaster zones. Locally, residents can push for property tax relief, short-term rental rules, and recovery plans that put the people who live here first. But that only happens if people show up and ask for it.
Sources: N.C. Office of State Budget and Management (Helene Damage and Needs Assessment); N.C. Department of Health and Human Services (storm-related fatalities); National Hurricane Center; Ashe Post & Times; WRAL; NC Local.
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