The House She Fought For: How SBP Helped a New Orleans Community Leader Restore Her Home Two Decades After Katrina

Darlene Jones’ house in the historic Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans was falling apart around her. Holes in the hardwood floors. A back wall pulling away from the structure. A ceiling that had collapsed entirely in the living room. She had applied for every assistance program she could find — more than once — and it had taken years just to get the back wall addressed. 

Everything else was still failing when word reached SBP. A friend who knew Darlene’s work in the community told SBP staff about her house. SBP came out, assessed the damage, and got to work.

For Darlene, that’s how help has always come: through her community.

She’s been a community activist most of her life — initially drawn in as a teenager when she was part of the first integrated class at her high school, walking through picket lines to get to her classroom. She’s been fighting ever since. Now, she’s an elected member of two political committees.

When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, she stayed through the storm — riding it out in a senior apartment building that once housed the first Black hospital in the South. She had rescued two dogs from the floodwater and would not leave them until the Army found her and airlifted her out. In a Chicago shelter, where she was evacuated along with other Katrina survivors, land speculators were already circling and offering cash for properties sight unseen. 

Katrina had exposed critical gaps in disaster recovery — the urgent need for efficient, fair, and timely rebuilding for underserved communities. In 2006, volunteers founded SBP to address those gaps and help families rebuild their homes. Darlene wasn’t waiting for anyone to save her city either.

She took her $2,500 government stipend, bought a car, drove back to New Orleans alone, photographed every property she could find, and drove back to Chicago so her fellow evacuees could make real decisions about what they’d left behind.

She made it home eventually. First to a FEMA trailer in her father’s front yard, then into an 825-square-foot house in the Tremé. Buying it in 2007 was an act of intention: she’d seen what was coming for New Orleans after Katrina and decided to move back. She planted herself in Orleans Parish and started fighting for her beloved community.

The house, it turned out, had been quietly falling apart since she bought it. Years passed before the damage made itself known.

Making It to the Other Side

“SBP saved me,” Darlene says. “Literally.”

SBP started working on Darlene’s home in November, a couple of months after the 20th anniversary of Katrina’s landfall. SBP repaired and repainted the exterior, restored the walls and ceiling in her living room, reinstalled her ceiling fan, and secured the ductwork underneath the home.

But SBP’s work goes beyond repair. In a city that knows all too well what hurricanes can do, SBP works to make homes more resilient against the threat of natural disasters by using FORTIFIED roofs and installing protective barriers for windows and doors. For longtime New Orleans homeowners like Darlene, that means a home built to withstand whatever comes next.

Darlene’s home — the one she moved back to New Orleans specifically to buy and fight for — is now safe, secure, and resilient. She has fought for a lot in her lifetime, including the repairs on her home, but she says she always chooses joy.

“I was determined that I was not going to be an old, mean, resentful, ugly person,” she says. “That was just not going to be me.” And even in the hardest moments, when the house was falling down around her, she held on. “I just gave it to God,” she says, “and I knew it was going to work out.”