Natalie Perez woke up Sunday morning with the carpet in her basement apartment soaked with water at 55th and Pulaski on the city’s Southwest Side.
The 20-year-old Gage Park resident, who is studying to become a nurse, said she lost everything.
“My whole room got flooded. My bed, my MacBook got ruined, my shoes, my clothes, everything,” Perez said Wednesday morning. “Hopefully they can do something about it. I live with my grandparents. They don’t make a lot of money. Our basement is really ruined now. We have wooden floors. Hopefully they can help financially with the repairs or anything like that.”
Perez said her grandparents have lived in the same house for nearly 50 years.
“My grandparents told me they haven’t had a flood like that for 20 years,” Perez said. “I live downstairs with my aunt. She lost everything. Her computers, her clothes, TVs. We threw away a lot of carpets, a lot of clothes and blankets. Just threw it away.”
Perez was among dozens of residents who arrived Wednesday morning to 14th Ward Ald. Jeylu Gutierrez’s office to file a survey on damage to their properties from recent rainstorms that drenched much of the Chicago area.
“This area was hit really hard. People are devastated. They lost everything. The three biggest communities in my ward, Archer Heights, Gage Park and Chicago Lawn suffered not once, but twice, some of them with flooding,” Ald. Gutierrez said. “I hope we can get some funding, because our communities need that relief.”
The storms came at a particularly bad time with school just starting up this week.
“Many of the families lost their school supplies and their school uniforms,” Gutierrez said. “They need to put new walls, new floors. They lost their washer, dryer, AC, heater, boilers. Everything. So they need to buy everything new and some of them are renters. That’s another concern that they have. That the tenants will be able to get some assistance.”
Gutierrez said just in her ward alone, an estimated 1,700 families are impacted by flooding.
“The numbers are clear. Six communities on the Southwest Side have more than 60% of all the flood reports in the city of Chicago. And, the numbers are pretty consistent going back more than one year,” Gutierrez said. “That means thousands of families with ruined basements, lost savings and unsafe homes. Our residents deserve real help, real accountability and real investments that keep their home safe.”
At a press conference outside Gutierrez’s office, State Rep. Edgar Gonzalez (D-23rd), said storms also hit his area of Little Village, Brighton Park and the town of Cicero two years ago with the state and federal government providing assistance.
“We were able to declare disaster zones in those areas and thankfully we were able to get money from the federal government. Keep in mind, that was two years ago and that was under President Biden. Now we have President Trump, so we’ll see if we can actually get some of that money,” Gonzalez said.
Gonzalez said some of his constituents feel let down by state and federal officials to help cover the cost of damage from past storms.
“They feel resigned to the fact that they might not get any help from the government,” Gonzalez said. “That’s the type of rhetoric that we want to avoid, that we want to combat.
Gonzalez said the state has appropriated $1.6 billion to help with water infrastructure projects.
“I want to make sure that we have some of that money that can be used to help people renovate their basements. Because right now, that’s the biggest cost for everybody,” Gonzalez said.
Teresa Ramos, who lives near Damen Avenue and West 59th Street, hopes she can access some of that money if the state and federal government declares it a disaster area.
“They gave me the phone number to FEMA. I called FEMA and they said they cannot help because it hasn’t been declared a disaster,” Ramos, 65, said in her native Spanish. “I’ve been living there for 25 years. I never had flooding. Where do you go if everything is flooded?”