ST. PETERSBURG — When she yanked open the metal front door on 14th Ave S., the smell hit her — potent like sewage and blanket-heavy. It was abrasive, a moldy brillo pad scrubbing at her lungs.
She took it in: The mattress in the living room, still dressed in checkered bed sheets. The mahogany dresser, warped by water so the drawers no longer worked. Her family’s belongings, turned to mush. A 12-pack of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup, unopened, prep before the storms.
Across the street, a towering new build wore no sign that two major hurricanes had passed through. When the floodwaters came, its occupants stayed dry — cozy in their elevated abode built to withstand mighty storms. Daylight revealed a few fallen tree limbs, a muddied pool that a technician was quick to address, minor inconveniences.
Down below, on the corner of the block where she’d lived since the 1970s, Aracelly Graffer had lost everything.
It took less than a week for an investor to call and offer to buy her home.
In Bartlett Park, where old single-story houses mix with pricey new builds, climate inequity is on full display. Though the approach of a hurricane can feel communal — the spaghetti models and ‘what ifs’ — storms are experienced individually.
In this already-gentrifying neighborhood, long one of St. Petersburg’s poorest, hurricanes Helene and Milton made one thing clear: how people fared came down to not just location, but net worth.
“Do you see any trash piled in front of the new homes?” Graffer posited, nodding toward the debris-laden curb. “Where do you see the trash? It’s in front of the houses of people who are lower-income because we’re the ones who got wrecked.”
In the months after a natural disaster, researchers have found that housing costs in hard-hit neighborhoods tend to climb. One study, published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, looked at property records in Florida over 16 years and found that when investors swoop in and redevelop wrecked houses, the new construction often prices residents out.
In St. Petersburg, where housing prices have soared, neighborhoods like Bartlett Park, conveniently close to downtown, were already seeing gentrification. The home built across the street from Graffer’s is worth nearly $600,000, according to property records. Hers was appraised at $96,000.
That the neighborhood is changing is not necessarily a bad thing, Graffer said. She wants to see her community thrive. She wants it to feel safe.
“But when you’re told, ‘We’ll just buy you out, you’re going to be forced out anyway,’ nobody wants to hear that,” she said. “Where are working people supposed to go?”
To Graffer, 57, it’s especially personal. Across the street is the cement-block home where she was raised. Her mother, 79, still lives there. Graffer’s daughter lives in the red house next door — at least she did until Helene, when all three homes flooded.
Graffer was four when she immigrated with her family from Panama, when her parents found their home on the corner, with a big grassy lot next door and a mortgage of $75 a month.
Graffer’s mom would hire neighborhood kids to pick weeds and help with the back garden, where she planted mango and cherry trees.
“They called Mama ‘boss lady,’” Graffer said.
There were block parties and cookouts with tamales and yellow rice and beans. In the summer, they made popsicles — paper cups frozen with Kool-Aid — and sold them for 10 cents apiece.
After high school, Graffer joined the military — better than flipping burgers. She spent four years on active duty, stationed in the northeast. When she got pregnant in 1991, she moved home and later took a job as a postal worker, wanting her daughter to grow up where she’d been raised.
By the early 2000s, things had started to change. There was an uptick in crime, more burglaries, more drugs. After a while, she said, she stopped calling the police.
“By the time they showed up, there was nothing for them to do, anyway,” Graffer said.
Some neighbors moved away. Others grew old, and their kids sold their properties. Still, the neighborhood remained one of service workers and mechanics, mostly Black and working-class.
The newer builds began popping up during the pandemic. Soon, Graffer had code enforcement at her door, telling her she needed to cut her grass.
Even as the neighborhood changes, Graffer has found that the new arrivals are mostly kind — more alike than they are different.
But during storm preparation, it became clear that they exist in different worlds. Some neighbors missed valuable prep time because they couldn’t get off work or missed bus rides to shelters because their shifts ran late. Others didn’t have to prep much, shielded behind hurricane-grade windows.
The disparity has grown starker since.
Graffer came back home after evacuating and cried and cried and cried. Fifty years of life had been taken overnight.
From her sister’s mobile home, where she’s now staying with her mother, Graffer gets dressed in clothes donated by her coworkers. She goes to work, where she smiles and asks about customers’ mothers, their children, their pets and their houses. She tells them she’ll be OK.
On weekends, the only time she can spare, she drives back to 14th Ave. S and chips away at cleanup. She focuses on specifics: picking up sticks, clearing out the fridge, sawing through the fruit trees taken out by Milton’s winds.
Her income, just over $2,200 a month, doesn’t leave wiggle room to hire help. Repairs will have to be done over time. FEMA, she said, offered money for a hotel but very little to replace her belongings.
She wishes the city, and the helpers, would pay more attention to neighborhoods like hers. She saw videos of food trucks in Shore Acres, of donation drives in Gulfport and dozens of volunteers heading to the beaches.
Bartlett Park felt like a ghost town. The flooded homes are unlivable, and the tenants have vacated, padlocking their doors and leaving their totaled cars behind. Many, she reckons, won’t come back.
But this is her neighborhood, and she’s an optimist.
“I’m not moving,” Graffer said, looking at her cluttered yard. “We just try. That’s all you can do.”
She hangs up when investors dial.
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