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In Flood-Hit Public Housing, a Reminder That the Poor Bear Brunt of Storms’ Fury

The Trent River seen from Keisha Monk’s front door in New Bern, N.C. Ms. Monk and her children evacuated when Florence hit, but came home to find their apartment flooded.Credit...Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times

NEW BERN, N.C. — Before the river rose and the water trespassed into her little public housing unit, ruining her black sectional sofa and her children’s clothes, leaving her walls moist to the touch — indeed, before she even knew that the river could be her enemy — Keisha Monk thought she had found something better than basic shelter at Trent Court.

“Trust me,” she said this week, as one of the last rain bands of the storm called Florence fell all around her, “when I first came here, I thought it was heaven.”

It was January when Ms. Monk and her four small children moved to this historic pearl of a Southern city and to Trent Court, a downtown cluster of red brick public housing right on the banks of the Trent River. Ms. Monk had been in a family shelter in Columbia, S.C., that ground down her soul, she said. At Trent Court, she could gaze out her front door onto the wide, rippling river. She could take in its breeze, its smell, its changing colors and moods.

This week, after a brief evacuation, she returned to Trent Court to find that flooding from Florence had turned her place into a sodden wreck. She also realized that she was now a player in the kind of redevelopment drama that tends to swamp storm-battered places like this — a story of race, class, gentrification and safety fears, and questions without easy answers about who gets to live on often alluring, sometimes treacherous, waterside real estate.

She is also being reminded, in the way low-income residents of New Orleans were reminded after Hurricane Katrina, that the poor are always vulnerable — to the vagaries of the real estate market and to the perceived value of their residences in good times and the ravages of Mother Nature when disaster hits.

On Friday, to no one’s surprise, the water rushed into Trent Court. Residents said it was as high as eight feet in some places, prompting city workers and volunteers to dash into the complex in the darkness to rescue many residents. Some remained on their second floors, refusing to leave.

More than a year ago, the city housing authority had approved a plan to move people out of potential harm’s way. Broadly put, it called for relocating Trent Court’s residents to new housing units away from the water, tearing down the old brick buildings and replacing them with a mix of market-rate and subsidized housing.

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Ms. Monk and her son Jamil, 1, with belongings she had to throw out because of water damage.Credit...Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times

With local, state and federal governments involved, and with land to purchase and private developers on board, it could not be done with a snap of the fingers, but the hopes among supporters were high. Martin Blaney, executive director of the housing authority, said the 1940s-era buildings and their 218 units were riddled with maintenance problems that were often too expensive to fix. They were also built on concrete slabs.

The new project, he said, would be raised and safe, although it would only include 80 affordable housing units.

“It’s valuable property,” he said. “You’ve seen how pretty it is, and we want to turn it into something that will be attractive and livable and an enhancement not only for the lives of people who live in Trent Court, but for the businesses downtown and for a middle- or high-income retiree that would want to live in a closer setting, rather than living out in suburbia and cutting grass. We’re trying to make everybody happy.”

The plan won the approval of the residents’ council. But in a complex that is more than 90 percent black, there is significant suspicion that the plan is just a scheme to move the poor out to make room for a richer, whiter population.

“They want all that waterfront,” said Charles Holloway, 47, a furniture mover, gesturing toward the broad river. “They want to extend it so they can walk their dogs all the way down.”

As she sat on a staircase overlooking her wrecked living room, Ms. Monk, 23, said none of this mattered to her. She simply wanted out.

“I don’t want to live nowhere near water, because I’m scared,” she said. “I’m just lost, and hoping my kids don’t get sick. Can you smell it?

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Ms. Monk said she has tried to keep her children confined to one room upstairs to minimize any potential exposure to mold.Credit...Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times

New Bern is a three-centuries-old city of about 30,000 people with a complex racial history: Jim Crow reigned here in the 20th century the way it did in nearly all of the South, but there was also a large free black population before the Civil War. Economically, working people of all races have struggled in recent decades with the decline of manufacturing jobs.

But on weekends in normal times, the quaint downtown thrums with tourists taking in the two rivers that converge here, the Neuse and the Trent, and the historic architecture, including Tryon Palace, the city’s signature building, a recreation of the stately Georgian administrative headquarters from the days of British rule.

The palace complex, which includes a state history center, is Trent Court’s neighbor to the east. It appeared to be largely undamaged in the storm, standing in grim contrast to the scene at Trent Court, where water had pulled up street signs, scattered trash and left tangled limbs from the massive oaks that once offered shade. The adjacent local housing authority office was surrounded by a fetid moat.

Life was back here, too. Children played in the courtyards; families sat on stoops. Some had power and some did not. Some had flood damage and some did not. A man was selling single cigarettes. Another was blasting music — Alicia Keys, Biggie Smalls — in an effort, he said, to improve the mood.

No one here denies that New Bern, like most American cities, struggles with issues of race and class. But Bernard George, a retired city planner and local historian who traces his lineage to the city’s free black population, said that it has “stabilized somewhat” on race matters since segregation ended. The city, he noted, has black aldermen and has had a black mayor.

As New Bern emerged from days of pounding rain to assess the damage, officials both black and white said their most pressing concern was for Trent Court’s residents, and what to do with them. Ms. Monk said a city worker came by to see her on Monday.

He acknowledged the presence of mold in her place, and told her she would need to leave. “I said, ‘Where are we going to go?’” Ms. Monk recalled. “He said, ‘We don’t know.’” Mr. Blaney said some of the residents would probably be eligible for housing vouchers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

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Ms. Monk wearing a mask to protect herself from mold. “When I first came here, I thought it was heaven,” she said.Credit...Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times

The long-term solution for Trent Court feels only more pressing. But it is a complicated issue, and one that does not sort out easily along racial lines. Mayor Dana E. Outlaw, a Democrat who is white, said Monday that he simply wants to see the residents moved away from danger, and soon. In an emotional phone interview, he said he would like to convince fellow members of the board of aldermen to put an end to the class and racial tensions by turning the place into a riverside park.

“I’ve got to get us out of this constipation of political rhetorical dialogue and do the right thing, and get folks out of the lead paint, asbestos and flood conditions,” he said. “The best way I can do it is abate the concern. Why don’t we just build a common greenway area where all the residents can have a gazebo and some benches and a piece of monolithic art? It can be the people’s recreational park. I’m out of the box, brother.”

Alderwoman Sabrina Bengel, a white politician whose district covers Trent Court and the historic heart of town, is a champion of the plan, and noted that it had the support of the residents council president, Cheryl Reed. In July, according to the local paper, Ms. Reed, 67, told the board she wanted to see “decent housing that no longer looks like public housing,” adding: “We pray that we don’t have a big hurricane this year.”

On Monday, Ms. Reed was at a shelter at a local elementary school. She said she was hoping to get into Trent Court to check on her apartment, which she heard had taken on two feet of water.

Among the plan’s opponents is Jameesha Harris, an African-American alderwoman who moved here from Albany, N.Y. “I just feel it’s modern-day gentrification,” she said. Her district includes a predominantly black neighborhood, Pembroke, where some Trent Court residents could be relocated. Some Pembroke residents have raised objections, worried about a possible uptick in traffic and crime.

At Trent Court on Sunday evening, Ms. Monk was worrying about other things, including the neighbors who had it worse than her. She pointed to Sylvester Smith, 62, a retired cook who lived in one of the apartments closest to the river.

Mr. Smith offered a tour of his apartment, where the water had been shoulder high. His belongings were a jumble. The stench was overpowering. He said he was sleeping upstairs at a neighbor’s place for now.

He showed off what was left of his tiny garden, where a few tomatoes and bell peppers clung precariously to their stalks. He talked of the fish and crabs that he could catch just steps from there.

“I’ve always lived on the water,” he said. “I’m not going nowhere. I love it here.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: At Water’s Edge, a Hostage to Nature and Poverty. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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