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Doris Brown was almost asleep when a neighbor knocked on her door and asked her to look outside. “There were no lights, no lights anywhere,” Brown recalled of the power outage that night in the summer of 2023. “I didn’t even realize it.”
Brown’s solar panels and battery system were keeping his electricity running. He had prepared for a night like this. “Call everyone,” he said to the neighbor.
Soon about 15 “neighbors and neighbors’ neighbors” were inside Brown’s three-bedroom, 1 1/2-bathroom home in northeast Houston. He charged the phone, cooked, and showered before work and school. Some people slept.
“There were people sleeping everywhere,” said Brown, 75. She was happy to be “a port in the storm”, despite one downside: “They ate all my snacks.”
Brown’s home is a “Hub Home,” one of seven in a northeast Houston pilot program aimed at creating emergency safe havens — not at shelters or community centers, but inside neighbors’ homes.
The idea was a grassroots response to decades of community disinvestment and neglect that inspired neighbors to talk about what they could do to prepare for extreme weather and power outages.
“It’s us helping us,” Brown said.
The project was set to reach 30 more homes Environmental Protection Agency In August it canceled the $7 billion Solar for All program that would have funded its expansion. Harris CountyWhich now includes Houston as a plaintiff in one of several lawsuits over the cancellation.
People Those involved in the program acknowledge that hub homes are unconventional – they require trust and community collaboration and have an impact on fewer people than a larger resilience centre.
But they also say they are effective in creating pockets of preparedness in communities facing more extreme weather but lacking the resources to do more.
“It was a way to increase resiliency in areas that are often forgotten,” Sam Celerio said. texas Program director of Solar United Neighbors, one of the nonprofits involved with the pilot program, which is also suing over the cuts.
a unique perspective
According to the Texas Department of Health Services, the idea of Hub Home began after Winter Storm Uri in 2021, when frigid temperatures disrupted Texas’ power grid for five days and led to 246 storm-related deaths.
The loss of power contributed to many deaths, as people with health problems could not refrigerate medications or operate life-sustaining medical equipment. Nineteen people died from carbon monoxide poisoning due to improperly using generators and grills to stay warm.
“We were saying, ‘Shoot, power grid failure is a serious thing that we’re not prepared for,'” said Becky Seeley, co-director of disaster preparedness, organizing and operations at West Street Recovery, a northeast Houston nonprofit founded after Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
WSR purchased some generators for residents willing to share the resource. Brown, who nearly froze to death at Uri, stepped forward.
WSR added more supplies, such as life jackets and kayaks, to flood evacuation centers and conducted preparedness training for members.
When DC-based nonprofit Solar United Neighbors approached them with a private grant from the Hive Fund to add free solar panels and batteries to several homes, WSR knew where to install them.
The pilot faced challenges – some roofs had to be repaired before the solar panels could be placed, and the hub captain had to learn how to manage his batteries so as not to deplete them.
Success also requires neighborly relationships that are often lacking in modern communities.
“You have to build that trust,” said David Espinoza, Hub Home captain and co-director of community organizing and language outreach for West Street Recovery. The 34-year-old man would go door-to-door in his block and sometimes introduce himself to alert neighbours. “I’ve gotten to know my neighborhood a lot better,” he said.
About a dozen people have signed up on Espinoza’s “roster,” but she said the center is for anyone in need, giving priority to elderly neighbors and people with children or medical conditions.
There are other advantages, too: The solar and battery system reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and cuts Espinoza’s utility bills in half.
Espinoza, who is bilingual, said for neighborhoods like hers with mixed-status, Spanish-speaking and medically vulnerable households, hub homes are also useful in conjunction with other shelters nearby.
“They can get to me a little easier,” he said.
‘Social Capital’
Efforts to strengthen local resilience have increased in recent years as extreme weather, power outages and rising electricity prices continue to place a heavy burden on communities.
Average annual power interruption hours have increased across the U.S. over the past decade, largely due to extreme weather, according to Sarah Kotweis, senior associate at clean energy nonprofit RMI.
“Communities need to think more strategically about resiliency,” Kotvis said.
That preparedness starts with relationships between neighbors, said René Hanwin, CEO and founder of Resilient Ready and an expert on “social capital” or “relationships, trust and cooperation between people.”
“This is the missing link in the disaster resilience ecosystem,” Hanwin said. “At the end of the day, the first thing you need (in an emergency) is a person to help you.”
As disasters get worse, first responders can’t help everyone at once, she said, so neighbors should think of themselves as “zero responders.”
Many communities have turned to “resilience centers” or locally trusted institutions such as community centers or churches that are equipped with backup power, emergency supplies, and even year-round social services.
Ideally, resiliency investments aren’t an either-or decision, said Dori Wolfe, SUN’s senior Texas program associate. “Hubs are a piece of the home web, and there should be a resiliency center at the center of each of these nodes,” she said. “We want it all.”
‘A big drop’
Solar United Neighbors and West Street Recovery plan to expand the program this fall as part of a $54 million grant awarded to Harris County by the EPA.
They intended to increase the number of hub homes to 30 and add more batteries to existing homes to better run heating and air conditioning during outages. The money will also fund a local resilience centre.
In August, EPA Administrator lee zeldin Canceled the EPA’s Solar Energy for All program, which was intended to support residential solar energy for more than 900,000 low-income households. Zeldin said the authority for the “boondoggle” program was eliminated under Trump’s tax-and-spending bill.
“This is a huge reduction,” Celerio said. Both Solar United Neighbors and Harris County sued the EPA in separate lawsuits this month over the reductions, as did more than a dozen state attorneys general.
“This termination alienates the very people the federal government is supposed to protect,” Harris County Interim County Administrator Jesse Dickerman said in a statement to The Associated Press.
West Street recovery isn’t leaving more hub homes. The non-profit intends to raise funds through the community and obtain other grants.
“These programs have been a huge help to the community,” Espinoza said. “It’s going to be very difficult without money from the federal government.”
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