When Rosanna Giles and her husband Alexander bought their home in Conroe’s Forest Hills neighborhood, they didn’t know that it had flooded before or that a few months after they got settled, many of their belongings would be destroyed by another deluge.
The couple arrived in the Lone Star State from Pittsburgh on a rainy day in January 2024. The movers had to take items through the front door because the backyard of the two-story home on Sherbrook Circle was underwater, Giles recalls.
They chose the house because it’s embedded in what Giles refers to as a “semi-rural area” on the San Jacinto River. She planted a rose garden and a fruit orchard. It’s “close enough” to the big-city amenities of The Woodlands and two of her children in Houston and Dallas, she says.
But then came a text message from a City of Conroe project engineer in May 2024 that the home must be elevated or it could be demolished. One of Giles’ neighbors says she’s never been told that her home would be torn down, but she was advised two years ago that if she needed to rebuild after a flood, she’d have to lift her home with stilts, piers or other raised foundations in order to qualify for federal flood insurance.
“Everyone who had more than 18 inches [of rain] in May 2024 was told by the city that they couldn’t rebuild without elevating,” the resident wrote in a private Facebook group, where the issue of raising versus razing homes has been a hot topic lately.
The pressure mounted earlier this year and now at least eight homes on Sherbrook are in the elevation process. Giles and her husband hired Clint Harris, a Katy-based structural engineer who owns Comal Home Elevation, to raise their home by nine feet while they temporarily relocated to a short-term rental.
“I didn’t want to elevate the house, but what are we going to do?” Giles said. “I’m not going to tear it down. We went along with it, and Clint was nice enough to do the lift for us. It seemed to me that it was going to get more expensive the longer we waited. This has been in the works, but I’m baffled about why all of a sudden they were telling us we had to do it now.”
Giles applied for a FEMA grant that will cover the $200,000 price tag for elevating her home. Those who aren’t approved for FEMA assistance can pay out of pocket and may be eligible for up to $30,000 through their insurance policy’s Increased Cost of Compliance coverage.
Conroe Assistant Director of Engineering Brandy Taylor said Tuesday she wasn’t aware of anyone being told they had to elevate or their home would be demolished. When asked why the sudden sense of urgency to lift homes years after Hurricane Harvey in 2017, Taylor said the staff members who initiated the grant process in May 2024 are no longer employed by the city. “However, grant approval is often a lengthy process, and the timeline varies depending on the specific requirements of the grant application and the funding agency’s review process,” she said in an email.
Giles says she was told by neighbors that FEMA had already made two recent payouts to prior owners, including after Harvey when floodwaters rose to the second floor of what is now Giles’ home. She says she believes the government would rather spend the money up front to mitigate the loss if it floods again than make another payout to rebuild the whole property. “One condition of the lift was that you have to keep flood insurance,” she says.
Repeated calls and emails to the FEMA office in Washington, D.C., have gone unanswered since July 10. A media line for a regional FEMA office says the voicemail box is full and reporters are unable to leave messages. Since early 2025, FEMA has had substantial cuts to its workforce and grant programs, with President Donald Trump at one time suggesting that the agency be eliminated.
FEMA has consistently said that elevating homes is one of the primary ways to reduce future flood damage and in many cases — such as rebuilding after significant damage — it is required under the National Flood Insurance Program, which Conroe participates in.
According to information on FEMA’s website, the federal agency doesn’t order individual homes to be elevated. It sets the minimum NFIP standards and the local floodplain administrator determines whether a structure is substantially damaged and enforces the local floodplain ordinances in order to remain in the program.
Several residents say they’ve gotten more information from Harris, the contractor, than from FEMA or the City of Conroe. Harris has worked on hundreds of home elevations across Texas and Florida in some capacity — design, engineering, inspection, or as general contractor — since 2017, including in Conroe, Houston, Jersey Village and Brazoria and Galveston counties.
FEMA gives money to the state and it runs through a grant administrator at, in the case of the Forest Hills homes, the City of Conroe, so Harris submits his invoices to the city.
The cost to elevate a home varies, depending on what type of foundation the home has, how big it is and how high they want to elevate. Some contractors quote based on square footage, and a lift for even a small home costs at least $100,000.
“There are lots of variables in the equation,” Harris says. “Do they want me to do everything, turnkey? Or do they just want me to raise it and they’ll do the stairs and the plumbing? It depends on what all they want done.”
Although FEMA is covering the cost to elevate Giles’ home, she’s still stuck with the expense of paying for a rental property for almost three months and doing any cleanup once the job is finished. What used to be a garage is now an unairconditioned room, and some people have to rearrange their plumbing or electrical wiring after a lift, depending on whether the lines have been disturbed.
“So, thank you, FEMA, for paying, but they’re doing the bare minimum,” she says. “They’re getting the house in the air. Once they get the house in the air, it’s up to me to make it a home.”
Why Elevate a Home?
Eddy Jo Jemison has lived in Forest Hills for more than 40 years. The area floods frequently — she estimates her home has flooded at least 20 times over the years — but the residents usually file their insurance claims, make minor adjustments and go about their business.
Until recently.
Jemison, who lives two streets over from Sherbrook on Saddle and Surrey Lane, is in an unincorporated area that has not been annexed by the City of Conroe and therefore isn’t subject to its codes or eligible for its grant program. Even though she could pay out of pocket to lift her house, she’s not planning to do so.
“It’s very unusual,” she says. “This is the first time I’ve ever seen anyone do it with brick homes. I’m too old to do that with the stairs. Every box of popcorn and every gallon of milk has to go up the stairs.”
According to the City of Conroe’s website, if a home is in a Special Flood Hazard Area and sustains damage that costs 50 percent or more of its pre-flood market value to repair, it is considered substantially damaged. And under the City of Conroe Floodplain Management rules, owners “must bring the rebuilt structure into compliance with current codes. This means your home’s lowest floor must be elevated at least one to two feet above the Base Flood Elevation,” the website states.
According to Conroe’s floodplain ordinance, the city can order demolition if a structure is deemed unsafe or unfit for residency. A federal buyout program detailed on Montgomery County’s website offers residents whose homes have suffered severe flood damage the option to sell to the government. The homes in the buyout program are typically torn down and the land is preserved as open space to mitigate future floods.
The process of elevating a home involves a crew digging out the area underneath the structure, then placing hydraulic jacks around the house. Wooden boards that Harris refers to as “cribbing” support the jacks. Hoses connected to the jacks feed into a system of gauges that can identify if the pressure is too high or if something is uneven.
“It’s a very slow, controlled and methodical process,” Harris says as he oversees a crew lifting Giles’ home by a few inches, a process that will be repeated throughout the day. “It’s kind of like foundation repair. We put piles around and level it back up. But we’re doing it under the entire house and we’re raising up the whole house at the same time.”
Harris says the lifts are done incrementally, and the process of elevating a home takes about seven or eight weeks. Work started on the Giles property on May 12 and, due to rain delays, the owners expect it could be another few weeks before they can move back in. Homeowners can leave personal items inside while the work is ongoing. Harris says a person could even be inside the house while it’s being lifted and not feel anything.
Another Sherbrook Circle resident who asked to remain anonymous lives in a home that’s owned by a relative and doesn’t have flood insurance. The home has been in her family since 1988, and she plans to have the title switched into her name at the end of the month.
She says she’s interested in getting her home elevated but is concerned that once she does get the property insured, it could cost up to $30,000 a year because the house has been classified as noncompliant due to the lack of elevation.
“The city didn’t give any information except that we didn’t qualify for any grants to help with the cost and we were on our own,” she says. “As long as we don’t flood again, they weren’t going to enforce the raise, but if we do and exceed the significant damage level, we would not be issued permits to rebuild until we were compliant.”
She says if her property floods again, she’s going to be homeless because “they’re not going to grant me a permit until I elevate. FEMA’s not going to give me any money. I’m going to have to get an SBA loan and pay for my home all over again.”
Harris says he recommends elevation for people whose homes have flooded numerous times but he understands their concerns. “It’s going to look like a beach house unless you do some fancy architectural stuff to it, which you can,” he says. “Some people are maybe up in age and they have health problems. It’s a lot of steps to go up and down. There are ADA-compliant lifts that you can install.”
People elevate their homes for a number of reasons, he added. “I’d say the biggest reason, based on feedback from homeowners, is they just don’t want to have to go through the trauma again of having their house flooded out,” he says. “It’s a traumatic thing to have to muck out your house and tear down sheetrock and get rid of all your stuff and start over rebuilding. I mean, there are benefits when it comes to flood insurance and premiums or whatever, but for most of them, it’s just that they don’t want to have to go through that again.”
Moving Wasn’t An Option
Giles, who is in her 60s, says that when she found out the house would have to be lifted, she never considered moving.
“That really wasn’t an option,” she says. “After knowing what we knew about the house, that would be a non-starter for a lot of people. When they ask why we’re selling the house, it’s like, now they know that it floods every two years. In January 2024, the market was really tight and interest rates were going up. People were sitting on property and weren’t willing to sell. We didn’t have a lot of choices for the price range that we were willing to be in.”
They paid $280,000, a figure awfully close to the costs associated with the elevation project. Giles says her criteria when searching for a new home were that it not be a high flood risk and not have any foreclosures. She says no one disclosed to her that the property had flooded before. Realtors and sellers are required to disclose a home’s flood history, according to the National Association of Realtors Code of Ethics.
Critics have said for years that Houston’s flood maps are not accurate. “I was really shocked to find out that this place has flooded a few times,” Giles says. “I thought the FEMA indicator, which says it’s low flood risk, was very misleading. I’m still trying to figure out how that works.”
After flooding in May 2024, Hurricane Beryl came and knocked out Giles’ electricity for two weeks. “The house is very storied,” she says. “It’s just disaster after disaster.”
Jemison’s home has also been through its own share of disasters. Her late husband’s mother and stepfather built it while her husband was in Vietnam, so it’s been in the family since 1967. The structure was moved about a mile and a half from a neighborhood near the San Jacinto River bottom to its current location in 1979. Prior to the move, it flooded 13 times.
Jemison’s husband died last September and though her five children are grown and the home is too big for her now, she plans to stay there.
Several residents of the neighborhood talk about how much they love Forest Hills, their homes and the proximity to the W.G. Jones State Forest. Giles says she hopes the elevation will protect her home the next time heavy rains pass through.
“I’m thinking that the house has been disastered enough,” she says with a laugh. “I think the risk level will go down. I think I’ll stay there for a long time if nature will let me.”
