When Hurricane Helene hit Asheville, Janet Meadows watched the storm pour straight into her home.

It was just steady.

But yeah, it was like a stream from the front door all the way to the back wall.

The floodwaters filled her basement, a place she'll need to live during recovery from an upcoming hip replacement.

She called Asheville Area Habitat for Humanity to see if they could help.

Since then, crews have been working to make her basement livable again.

It's going to be extremely helpful.

There's no way I can get up here.

No way.

With my limited income, with my part-time job and my disability income, there's no way I could get it done.

So it was a surprise, a wonderful surprise.

Janet is one of hundreds of families that Habitat for Humanity has been helping since Helene.

The need is staggering.

More than 600 families are in Habitat's pipeline, with only about 20 homes repaired each month.

It is important to understand the level of need that is still out there.

We're a year beyond when the storm hit.

We're still working with folks that can't return to their home and still trying to have folks understand the level of need that's out there and the support that we're going to continue to need to keep going.

But when the storm hit, Habitat and other organizations faced a challenge of their own.

They took on flood damage themselves.

Their flagship restore in Asheville was underwater.

Offices flooded, inventory lost, and trucks destroyed.

So this was complete mud, everything thrown everywhere, stuff out in the parking lot.

Here, we had to gut everything, empty everything out, clean.

Habitat's support and state recovery dollars helped them recover.

Habitat's Restore is a retail shop that sells donated furniture and building supplies to fund their housing programs.

Crews rebuilt it, and by April 2025, they were back up and running.

Did you ever think you guys would get back to this point?

Great question.

Initially, not sure.

Not completely sure.

But getting their own operations back online was just one piece of the puzzle.

The demand in the community was far greater than what Habitat could handle alone.

So Habitat leaned on ARCHER, the Asheville Regional Coalition for Home Repair, bringing together multiple groups across Buncombe and Madison counties.

ARCHER created a single intake system where families could apply for help, no matter which organization ended up doing the work.

That coordination helped streamline requests, cut down on duplication, and made it easier to reach families faster.

We have been working on this coalition and our intake and really getting ready to roll it out to the community to test.

And so we were able to quickly pivot and turn that into a disaster repair intake form and just get it out there.

But even with coalitions and community support, the need still outpaces the help available.

A year later, thousands of families are still waiting.

Why?

Well, the storm's toll was staggering.

Across North Carolina, more than 73,000 homes were damaged by Haleen, nearly a thousand destroyed.

The state estimates over $15 billion in housing needs.

Many families had little or no insurance, leaving large gaps that federal aid is only now beginning to address.

And local organizations face another hurdle, limited access to contractors and subcontractors.

Even with funding available, finding skilled crews to take on the volume of repairs has been a challenge across the region.

To help meet that need, North Carolina secured $1.4 billion in federal disaster recovery funds.

Nearly three-quarters of that money is earmarked for housing.

We just completed the first house in our HUD CDBG DR, a lot of acronyms, that's a federal program for housing reconstruction after a storm.

We were the first state to get our plan submitted, the first state to have our plan approved, the first state affected by Haleen to have finished a home.

In fact, no state has moved faster than North Carolina in more than a decade after a major hurricane.

Through a new program called Renew NC, more than 1,900 families have already applied for repairs or reconstruction.

But federal recovery dollars take time to move through the system, and local organizations can only begin repairs once that money reaches them.

From there, contractors and nonprofits are the ones turning those funds into completed projects on the ground.

It's always been about reframing the challenge as an opportunity.

We're here, we feel blessed that we're in a position to be able to help these folks.

We have that can-do attitude that we're not going to stop until we can get out there to everybody that we can.

And for Janet Meadows, recovery is about more than just fixing a basement.

It's about holding on to her family's home and to the hope that recovery is possible, one house at a time.

And I'm just so blessed that I'm getting this help because I mostly don't feel like I deserve it, but I'm so grateful for it at the same time.