One year after the Texas floods, home feels further away than ever

A year after the July 2025 floods killed 139 people in central Texas and caused $1.1 billion in property damage, families in Sandy Creek are still stuck between damaged homes and rebuilding costs they cannot afford. Many properties sit in a floodplain, and federal rules require that if flood damage equals at least 50 percent of a home's pre-flood value, the whole structure must be brought up to current code. In Travis County, that means elevating homes at least 2 feet above expected 100-year flood height — for one family, building 12 feet in the air with a lift to the door. That kind of work can add more than $100,000 to a rebuild, on top of engineering and survey costs, and one resident estimated 98 percent of her neighbors cannot afford it.

Help has come in pieces rather than as a full solution: FEMA assistance capped at $43,600 per household, a county donation fund, church and nonprofit grants, and a celebrity benefit concert. Only 2.4 percent of affected households had flood insurance, which usually just restores what was lost rather than covering new code requirements. Renters and landlords often fall outside nonprofit aid rules entirely, and multigenerational properties have caused some residents to be overlooked by relief programs built around single-owner homes.

The broader lesson for homeowners in flood-prone areas is that federal "substantial damage" rules can turn a bad flood into a much larger, costlier rebuilding project, and that insurance, county programs, and nonprofit aid vary widely and rarely cover the full gap. Checking your own flood insurance coverage and understanding local floodplain building rules before a disaster hits is worth doing now rather than after.