Move after move, NC family searches for stable housing after Helene displaced so many
FEMA money, private insurance payouts and lots of private donations have helped many of the thousands of people displaced after Helene’s historic destruction in Western North Carolina. The state expects $1.4 billion in federal block grants will in time serve as last-resort aid for disaster repairs, most of it for housing.
For now, many people are still not back at home, including Kari Kelly and her daughters, who are moving again in search of stable housing.
Since Helene ripped through her temporary home, Kari Kelly, her two daughters and their pitbull Lagertha have had to move three times while searching for stability in the wake of the storm’s devastation.
Their longest stay, from December to this month, was in a Black Mountain hotel, with the cost covered by FEMA and the nonprofit Resilience Force after they were deemed no longer eligible for federal vouchers.
None of it has been easy. The biggest blow after the storm came before Christmas. To limit clutter inside the two-bed hotel room where they stayed from December to this week, Kelly stored the belongings they had left in a trailer a church gave her family.
Somebody stole the trailer from the motel parking lot, hooking it up to a car and driving off. Black Mountain Police found it at Asheville East Storage in Swannanoa, she said, but her family’s belongings were gone — including Christmas gifts for her daughters, ages 19 and 12. Also missing were the trailer’s sewage and water hookups, propane tanks and hot water heater from the trailer.
Kelly struggled to take care of Josephine, her sixth-grader, who missed 12 days of school in February for a bad case of the flu. Buying the medicine she needed wasn’t easy because her cleaning business has had little work to do with so many homes in the area damaged. Nor could she cook her daughter nourishing meals in the hotel room.
She teared up when talking about how she wasn’t able to bake her daughters birthday cakes for the first time in February and March. It was impossible in the hotel room she was sharing with her girls, she said.
“I’ve never had one birthday with my kids that I didn’t bake them a cake, and I wasn’t able to. I know that doesn’t seem big, but it is to me,” Kelly said.
Before Helene hit, Kelly and her daughters were staying at a friend’s house in Black Mountain while they looked for a place to move after their apartment’s lease ended. That friend’s house was destroyed in the storm, she said, along with most of her belongings she had stored in a shed on the property.
She and her youngest daughter moved to Indiana temporarily to stay with close friends. Landing hotel vouchers from FEMA was slow at first, Kelly said, between filling out the right forms and long telephone hold times. But it worked out.
It was helpful to be near Owen Middle School, in the heart of badly damaged Swannanoa, where Kelly grew up and Josephine attends school. Through the hardships, there have also been other gifts.
After Asheville television station WLOS reported their trailer was stolen, people she’d never met showed up at her motel door with a new Xbox and Nike sneakers for her daughters. One person arrived dressed as Santa Claus.
She’s extremely grateful for the three-bed trailer a church donated to them and outfitted to their needs, she said. She and her daughters were scheduled to move into it, at a trailer park in Old Fort, this week.
It’s taken a while to get the sewage and water hooked up, Kelly said, While moving to the trailer offers a chance at stability, worries about basic necessities like propane and the $900 rent for the trailer park spot leave her anxious about what’s next.
“I feel like I’m orphaned. I feel like everything I’ve ever known has been stripped from me, and I don’t feel like I’m ever gonna get that back ever,” she said.
She is eager to leave Black Mountain, where downed trees, scraps of cars and unrepaired homes along the roadsides are a constant reminder of Helene’s destruction, including the deaths, she said.
“We go down Old 70 every morning. It’s just like every day there’s a pain in my heart,” she said. “Before, it didn’t matter how many times I left, how long I was gone, when I came back, Swannanoa was always going to be the same… But now it’s gone, and that’s a really empty feeling.”
This story was originally published March 19, 2025 at 8:00 AM.
