13 Investigates: Hurricane Harvey victims can't find their way home

Recovering from any disaster is not easy. Recovering from a record-setting disaster like Hurricane Harvey has been near impossible for victims in the City of Houston.

For years, they've fought cumbersome federal rules and a local system that spent millions without helping more than a few Houstonians. In 2021, our work revealed just how long people have suffered and the depths of the dysfunction in a city program that was finally taken over by the State of Texas. To make it worse for Houstonians, as the year headed to a close, the man in charge of the recovery program alleged the Mayor was inappropriately picking winners and losers, pointing to a $15 million relief project that the Mayor's former law partner was a co-developer of. The investigation of that consumed our reporting for months. It continues to this day.

Throughout this investigation, our approach has always been to put victims first, allowing their stories to illustrate the depth of our findings. We believe it makes complex programs like these easier to understand when victims can explain the hardships in their own words. As you watch our reporting, imagine yourself in Sharai Poteet's position after hearing the Mayor himself said he wouldn't allow her home to be rebuilt in the city program. Imagine being Clara Logan, an elderly storm victim watching her house deteriorate as she waits for years.

Reporting like this can easily get bogged down in numbers and data and spreadsheets. We have all the data, but hope you will pay special attention to the way we use them. We only display a few numbers at a time - usually dropped into the story's environment to keep the flow of the storytelling. We believe that innovative use of carefully integrating data helps viewers understand it without distracting them with too much or giving them a visual chance to turn away.

We've measure the impact of this ongoing project in the attention its created among regulators and oversight agencies, several of whom have taken action to speed the pace of help. Just as importantly, we measure the impact in the number of Houstonians whose homes and lives have changed because we've been able to highlight their circumstances and get them through a series of bad decisions in a flawed program.

We encourage you to look at our interactive timeline, titled 'When Disaster Never Ends' and embedded below, to see how long Harvey victims have been struggling to get help. For years we've investigated the slow pace of relief, crowdsourcing photos and stories from more than 250 viewers. After some of our work was published, multimillion dollar contracts were cancelled, the City of Houston lost control of its oversight and stalled projects started moving again.

When Disaster Never Ends On mobile device? Click here for a full screen experience.