HOUSTON \u2013 Doris Brown was nearly asleep when a neighbor knocked on her door, telling her to look outside. \u201cThere were no lights, nowhere,\u201d said Brown, recalling the power outage that summer night in 2023. \u201cI didn’t even know it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brown’s solar panel and battery system was keeping her power on. She’d prepared for a night like this. \u201cCall everybody,\u201d she told the neighbor. <\/p>\n
Soon around 15 \u201cneighbors and neighbors’ neighbors\u201d were inside Brown’s three-bedroom, 1 1\/2-bath home in Northeast Houston. They charged phones, cooked, and showered before work and school. Some slept over. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere were people sleeping everywhere,\u201d said Brown, 75. She was happy to be \u201ca port in a storm,\u201d despite one downside: \u201cThey ate all my snacks.\u201d <\/p>\n
Brown’s house is a \u201chub home,\u201d one of seven in a Northeast Houston pilot program meant to create emergency safe havens \u2014 not at shelters or community centers, but inside neighbors’ houses. <\/p>\n
The idea was a grassroots response to decades of community disinvestment and neglect<\/a> that got neighbors talking about what they could do to be ready for extreme weather and power outages<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s us helping us,\u201d said Brown.<\/p>\n The project was set to reach 30 more homes, until the Environmental Protection Agency in August canceled the $7 billion Solar for All program<\/a> which would have funded its expansion. Harris County, which includes Houston, is now a plaintiff in one of multiple lawsuits<\/a> over the cancellation. <\/p>\n People involved with the program acknowledge hub homes are unconventional \u2014 requiring trust and community cooperation and impacting fewer people than a larger resilience center. <\/p>\n But they also say they’re effective in creating pockets of preparedness in communities confronting more extreme weather but lacking resources to do more.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a way to increase resilience in those neighborhoods that are often forgotten,\u201d said Sam Silerio, Texas program director at Solar United Neighbors, one of the nonprofits involved with the pilot program which is also suing over the cuts<\/a>.<\/p>\n A unique approach<\/p>\n The hub homes idea started after Winter Storm Uri in 2021<\/a>, when freezing temperatures crippled Texas’ power grid for five days and led to 246 storm-related deaths<\/a>, according to the Texas Department of Health Services.<\/p>\n Power loss contributed to many of the deaths, as people with health conditions couldn’t refrigerate medicines or run life-sustaining medical devices. Nineteen people died from carbon monoxide poisoning from improperly using generators and grills to stay warm.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were like, \u2018Shoot, power grid failure is a serious thing that we are not prepared for\u2019,\u201d said Becky Selle, co-director of disaster preparedness, organizing, and operations at West Street Recovery, a Northeast Houston nonprofit founded after Hurricane Harvey in 2017.<\/p>\n WSR bought some generators for residents willing to share the resource. Brown, who almost froze to death herself in Uri, stepped up. <\/p>\n WSR added more supplies to the hubs, like life jackets and kayaks for flood evacuations, and held preparedness trainings for members.<\/p>\n When the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Solar United Neighbors approached them with a private grant from the Hive Fund to add free solar panels and batteries to several houses, WSR knew exactly where to install them.<\/p>\n The pilot had its challenges \u2014 some roofs had to be repaired before they could hold solar panels, and hub captains had to learn how to manage their batteries to not deplete them. <\/p>\n Success also required neighborly connection that modern communities often lack.<\/p>\n \u201cYou have to build that trust,\u201d said David Espinoza, a hub home captain and West Street Recovery\u2019s co-director of community organizing and language access. The 34-year-old went door-to-door on his block, introducing himself to sometimes wary neighbors. \u201cI got to know my neighborhood a lot better,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n About a dozen people are signed up on Espinoza’s \u201croster,\u201d but he said the hub is there for anyone in need, prioritizing older neighbors and those with children or medical conditions.<\/p>\n There are other upsides, too: The solar and battery system reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and cut Espinoza’s utility bill in half.<\/p>\n Espinoza, who is bilingual, said that for neighborhoods like his with mixed-status, Spanish-speaking, and medically vulnerable households, hub homes are useful even with other shelters nearby. <\/p>\n \u201cThey can access me a little easier,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n \u2018Social capital\u2019<\/p>\n Efforts to bolster local resilience have grown in recent years as extreme weather<\/a>, power outages, and electricity prices<\/a> overburden communities.<\/p>\n Average annual power interruption hours across the U.S. have jumped in the last decade, largely due to extreme weather, according to Sarah Kotwis, senior associate at the clean energy nonprofit RMI. <\/p>\n \u201cCommunities do need to be thinking more strategically about resilience,\u201d said Kotwis. <\/p>\n That preparedness begins with connections between neighbors, said Renae Hanvin, CEO and founder of Resilient Ready and an expert on \u201csocial capital,\u201d or the \u201cconnections, trust and cooperation between people.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s the missing link in the disaster resilience ecosystem,\u201d said Hanvin. \u201cAt the end of the day, the first thing you need (in an emergency) to help you is a person.\u201d <\/p>\n As disasters worsen, first responders simply can\u2019t help everyone at once, she said, so neighbors must think of themselves as \u201czero responders.”<\/p>\n Many communities have also turned to \u201cresilience centers,\u201d or locally trusted institutions like community centers or churches that are outfitted with backup power, emergency supplies, and even year-round social services.<\/p>\n Ideally, resilience investments aren’t an either-or decision, said Dori Wolfe, SUN senior Texas program associate. \u201cHub homes are one piece of the web, and there should be a resilience center at the center of each of these nodes,\u201d she said. \u201cWe need all of it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018A huge letdown\u2019<\/p>\n Solar United Neighbors and West Street Recovery planned to expand the program this fall as part of a $54 million grant awarded to Harris County by the EPA.<\/p>\n They intended to grow the number of hub homes to 30, and add more batteries to existing ones to better run heating and air conditioning during outages. The money would have also funded a local resilience center.<\/p>\n In August, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin<\/a> canceled the EPA’s Solar for All program, intended to support residential solar for more than 900,000 lower-income households. Zeldin said authority for the \u201cboondoggle\u201d program was eliminated under Trump’s tax-and-spending bill.<\/p>\n \u201cIt’s a huge letdown,\u201d said Silerio. Both Solar United Neighbors and Harris County sued the EPA in separate lawsuits this month over the cuts, as did over a dozen state attorneys general. <\/p>\n The termination \u201cpulls the rug out from the very people the federal government should be protecting,” Harris County Interim County Administrator Jesse Dickerman said in a statement to The Associated Press.<\/p>\n West Street Recovery isn’t giving up on more hub homes. The nonprofit intends to fundraise through the community and seek other grants.<\/p>\n \u201cThese programs have been a big help to the community,\u201d said Espinoza. \u201cIt’s going to be a lot harder without the funds from the federal government.\u201d<\/p>\n ___<\/p>\n Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP\u2019s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP\u2019s philanthropy coverage, visit https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/philanthropy<\/a>.<\/p>\n Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"HOUSTON \u2013 Doris Brown was nearly asleep when a neighbor knocked on her door, telling her to look…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20253,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[910,1768,14425,2327,56,58,57,14590,14591,14592,1499,7533],"class_list":["post-20252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-business","tag-climate","tag-doris-brown","tag-environment","tag-houston","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news","tag-jesse-dickerman","tag-sam-silerio","tag-sarah-kotwis","tag-u-s-news","tag-washington-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20252\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}