"In Houston’s poorest neighborhoods, an unfamiliar winter storm stoked a familiar anguish, one fueled by recurring floods and what residents see as a pattern of neglect."

"HOUSTON — In her kitchen, Juanita Hall routinely found opossums staring back at her from the cage trap she kept under the table. In one room, the flooring had simply washed away. The door to the back bedroom — her mother’s, and still filled with her possessions — stayed closed. Those walls, like many others in the house, were streaked with mold.

And that was all before a winter storm last month left Ms. Hall shivering over a heater and caused pipes to leak. The culprit behind so much of the damage to her home had been Hurricane Harvey. The storm hit Houston in 2017, and for many, the trauma endured as a haunting memory. But for Ms. Hall, almost four years later, the devastation remained a grinding reality.

“I think about it every day, all day long,” Ms. Hall, 59, said as she walked through the house she had lived in since childhood."

Rick Rojas reports for the New York Times with photographs by Tamir Kalifa March 23, 2021. [2]