On Wednesday morning, Jessica Calix planned to pick up donuts and goody bags to drop off at her son Chago’s school. He was turning 9.
Preparing for his birthday felt like deja-vu. It was the last thing she did before their life was upended.
It’s been one year since storm drains failed to handle the unusually heavy rains on Jan. 22, and water flooded her Southcrest home. She escaped with only Chago and their ball python, Princess Peach.
The year had somehow been very long and passed very fast.
Chago seemed to be processing more as the anniversary approached.
We didn’t celebrate my birthday last year, he’d been saying lately. I’m glad I didn’t get everything from my Christmas wish list, because we would’ve lost it anyway.
Calix tried to have conversations with him at an age-appropriate level.
How do you help an 8-year-old to accept losing everything?
How do you accept it yourself?
Nights are hard — she can’t sleep. Mornings are hard, too — facing the uphill battle of piecing her life back together.
“Dealing with a disaster like this, it really pushes you to your breaking point. You're always feeling like you're just one setback away from everything falling apart. And that's a hard thing to cope with,” she said.
She still reaches for a go-to piece of clothing before remembering it was lost.
They live in an RV now, moving between parks to avoid seasonal hikes in rent. She thinks it will be a long time before she earns enough to rent another home.
She misses her old neighbors.
They tell her someone else lives in her old home now, and pays a much higher rent.
That’s a common obstacle to finding new housing for the people displaced by the floods — more than 1,200 San Diegans.
Most were Black and Latino and low-income, because of which neighborhoods’ storm drains overflowed. (And, a lawsuit claims, which neighborhoods’ storm drains the city failed to maintain.)
Many were displaced from homes with below-market rent — something nearly impossible to find in San Diego’s current housing shortage — and their former landlords often raised the rent after making flood repairs.
Less than half of those displaced received money from the San Diego Housing Commission to help secure new housing or get back into their homes.
The total funding allocated to the commission — more than $5.3 million of which has been distributed so far — was determined by the number of people still in the county’s hotel voucher program on May 23. The commission restricted eligibility to those people.
Like most of the displaced residents, Calix wasn’t among them. She left the temporary hotel program before that date — when the instability started to affect Chago — and moved into the RV given to her by her grandfather.
The commission’s program is now in what they call Phase 2. People who applied for Phase 1 and weren’t eligible are now being considered to receive a lump sum of up to $5,500.
That still excludes people like Calix, who never applied for the first phase because they knew they weren’t eligible.
“It's just all very dehumanizing,” Calix said. “You have to fight so hard every day to tell yourself that you deserve better, and that it shouldn't be this hard.”
She started studying past disasters to see what she could learn about how entire communities can recover. She watches documentaries about Hurricane Katrina. And she watches the news of hurricanes and wildfires displacing so many others from their homes this year.
The seeming outpouring of support for Angelenos displaced by recent fires is bittersweet. She is glad they have it. She wishes San Diego flood survivors received the same.
She still meets weekly with other displaced community members at the Jackie Robinson YMCA. They help each other with ongoing recovery. They try to patch the cracks in San Diego’s disaster response with their own effort and time and solidarity.
As fires rage and the rainy season returns and climate scientists sound alarm bells, they discuss what the city could do to respond better to future disaster survivors — a number Calix worries is growing fast.
“We need a system in place that no matter what disaster hits San Diego, we're ready. We can't just be leaving people in the streets,” she said.
The amount of work left to do overwhelms her. But it’s not too late to make things right, she insists.
“Don’t forget about us,” she said.
