House Built From Beginning Using All Pay-checks From 3 Jobs Destroyed By Hurricane Ida

Taylor would set aside money each week to buy studs and bricks. Parts of the house would arrive on the back of a truck, ready to be assembled.

In East 36th Street in Reserve, Louisiana, sits a family house constructed from the bottom up with bricks and mortar, plywood and cement.

Robert Taylor built this family home in stages, using pay-checks from the three jobs he worked and assistance from the Farmers Home Association, the now defunct federal government agency that assisted low-income rural communities to buy land.

It took three years to complete the first floor, and by 1968 Robert Taylor was ready to move in with his wife and four children. He became the first on his mother’s side of the family to own a home.

“It’s my entire life,” he said. “I put everything into it.”

For Taylor, the house symbolized his family’s ascension to economic stability. His father had worked on a nearby sugar plantation and lived much of his life in company housing near the fields.

“The bourgeoisie [in the neighbourhood] said we were the poor people,” he said. “But I was so happy because I was poor. I still am. But now we were homeowners. And look at us today, we’re successful people who worked hard, struggled to build our homes, invested in them and our children can now inherit them.”

As an afternoon thunderstorm echoed across the nearby levees, Robert Taylor, 79 years old, returned this week to what remained of his house. Even in a neighbourhood decimated by the storm, the destruction to Taylor’s house stood out as particularly pronounced.

Almost the entire second floor had been destroyed by Hurricane Ida’s winds leaving insulation, roofing and furniture strewn across the lawn. The walls of the lower floor that still stood were encased by mould. There appeared little to be salvageable other than old family photographs that escaped water damage.

Taylor has been profiled for more than two years by the Guardian as part of a series of reports examining toxic air pollution in his neighbourhood. Reserve, a majority Black community, has America’s most polluted air according to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data, where the cancer risk is 50 times the national average, primarily due to a nearby synthetic rubber plant, the Pontchartrain Works Facility, operated by the Japanese chemicals firm Denka. He invited the newspaper to join him as he surveyed the damage caused by Ida for the first time.