Sadie Council walked up to an empty pink house on Ford Road. Flooding had branded the deteriorating house with a yellowish streak nearly halfway up the front window. There was a pile of high-heeled shoes faded and worn from water damage on the front porch, and the musty smell of mold wafted from the interior.

“This was home to me, right here,” she said.

Council, 77, lived at 339 Ford Road — a repetitive flood area — for 35 years. Now in a new home at 113 Greenview Drive, the plague of rising water is a mere memory for Council, the first Vicksburg flood-zone recipient of a low-interest loan from the USDA Rural Development’s Housing & Community Facilities Program.

Ford subdivision is in a low-lying area northwest of downtown Vicksburg. When the Mississippi River rises out of its banks, the few residents who have remained know it first. More and more are moving out, some on their own, some using a cocktail of incentive programs.

“It was my home for so many years,” she said. “And no matter what, you don’t want to leave your home.”

After 1973’s crest reached the roof of Council’s house, she spent about $9,000 to buy a mobile home. More floods came in the 1980s and eventually destroyed her mobile home, so Council built a house of cypress, which would better withstand the water.

The river hasn’t changed, but the laws have. Vicksburg’s flood plain damage prevention ordinance, required for participation in the National Flood Insurance Program, kept Council from returning to her home after the 2008 crest, so she turned to an alternative. To avoid repeat claims on the taxpayer-subsidized flood insurance, structures damaged more than half of their appraised market value must be raised above flood level or remain unoccupied.

“What sense does it make to raise your house when the water comes up again anyway?” Council said. “At my age, at 77 years, I’m going to go up and down those stairs? No, no, no.”

Through Rural Development, Council applied for and received a loan to make repairs on her house. Council had intended to wait to use the loan after the water receded, but when faced with the city ultimatum, she returned the money and applied for a home loan instead.

“The flood came and the water stood there,” said Janet Smith, an area specialist at the USDA Rural Development office in Hazlehurst. “I mean, her house was totally under, like so many other ones in that area.”

Rural Development offers direct and guaranteed loans of up to 38 years for applicants with very low, low or moderate incomes — below 50, 50 to 80 or 80 to 100 percent of the area median income. To qualify, applicants must have no adequate housing and be unable to get credit from another lender, yet be able to afford mortgage payments.

Although Vicksburg is not considered rural — defined by a population less than 25,000 — a congressional waiver exempted the city from 2005 to 2010 and allows qualified Vicksburgers to be eligible for the loans. Beatrice Moore, director of Vicksburg’s Housing & Community Development program, pushed for the waiver years ago and now hands out Rural Development HCFP loan applications in her office — at least two a day, she said.

“It’s always been an eligible activity for the county, but it’s the city we were trying to get included,” Moore said. “The reason we always fought to get it was because we knew that we had a low-income population that could use it.”

Whereas applicants might face a 6 or 7 percent interest rate from a traditional lender, interest rates through the USDA program could be as low as 1 percent, Moore said.

If accepted for the Rural Development loan, applicants may try to merge it with other homebuyer-assistance programs, such as an $11,000 loan through the city’s Affordable Housing Program.

Council’s assistance was entirely through Rural Development, and with it she moved into her three-bedroom home in November.

“I’m just living it up,” she said as she proudly conducted a tour through the home.

From the repairing, rebuilding and replacing, Council estimated she spent about $150,000 because of flooding during her time on Ford Road. Although the money she spent over 35 years is more than enough to buy a house in Vicksburg, Council never had enough at once.

Six years ago, Jenette Docson, Council’s former neighbor in the flood zone, moved out of her house of nearly 40 years, but she said many residents are stuck the way she and Council had been.

“It was frustrating, but we couldn’t do no better,” Docson said. “Just clean it up and start over.”

Mold — one of many problems spawned from floodwaters — might have caused Council’s breathing problem back in 1995, she suspects. But she said it doesn’t bother her anymore.

Now, less than a year in her new house, Council can look forward to a check from the city’s home buyout, watch the water rise down the hill and celebrate June’s National Homeownership Month.

“Probably I’m going to be paying for it the rest of my life,” Council said. “But that’s OK. Can’t anybody make me move.”

*

Contact Andrea Vasquez at avasquez@vicksburgpost.com