As Kentucky builds climate-resilient housing, one town has their own plan

The former coal camp of Fleming-Neon, Kentucky was utterly devastated by the 2022 floods . Cars were lifted onto porches and people spent weeks scraping putrid, ankle-deep mud out of businesses on Main Street. The destruction was so apparent, it was where most national TV cameras came for footage.

Now two years later, the town is mostly cleaned up. But it feels empty.

Ricky Burke says he became part-time mayor after the flood to make improvements. He learned that leading disaster recovery isn’t for the faint of heart.

“The day I took office in January, I started that day arguing with FEMA,” Burke said. “I don't ever in my life want to have to deal with FEMA again.”

Burke said he got less money than he understood FEMA was promising on several occasions.

For instance, he said there was a misunderstanding between him and FEMA on how much money the town could get for their new city hall. Burke thought they could get nearly $1 million for a new government center; in the end they got less than $300,000.

“I thought that was pretty dirty. We’re small, rural eastern Kentucky,” Burke said. “We have fueled America for years with coal, and I just feel like they've done us wrong. I really do.”

He said the decades-long decline of coal started the exodus from Fleming-Neon, and the flood certainly hasn’t helped .

So Burke began contemplating ways to bring residents back to his town — especially “middle class” residents like “teachers and police officers,” he said.

But they'll require land to live on. So when some land became available right next to downtown that was out of the flood plain and cheap, the city snapped up about 20 acres.

Burke took me up a gravel road to check out the land, which he calls “Neon Heights.”

“I mean, look here, you can see downtown,” Burke said, before suddenly stopping and turning off the engine. “Listen. It’s quiet up here.”

Burke said they bought it just before the state announced they were seeking viable land to build dozens of homes on.

Kentucky’s plan would involve layers of government: a web of state contracts and federal grants targeting low-income families.

Burke instead opted to keep the plan quiet.

“If we go on our own, we can actually control who lives there,” Burke said. “I hate to be that way, you know what I mean? But I think this needs to be for middle-class working Americans. A house of your choosing.”

A small group that calls themselves the “Neon Rising Initiative” leads the design process. In a guiding document, they imagine the future of Fleming-Neon as a place brimming with citizens fiercely proud to call it home.

“For me, it's not about control, it's more about choice,” Jeff Hawkins said.

He’s restoring a building across from city hall – one of the only businesses left on Main Street – and he’s a key part of the group.

“How do we fit people with a place that makes them feel comfortable?”

Hawkins says he doesn’t want to disparage the state’s high ground sites, but displacing people sometimes miles away from generational homes makes him uneasy.

“We're not picking them up and saying ‘You need to move up to that strip job because that's out of the floodplain,’” Hawkins said.

He said it’s also murky to him who will receive the hundreds of millions that the state will spend on building roads and laying water lines to their sites.

“I just worry that we pushed into this and local folks were not involved in a great part in that decision,” Hawkins said.

The “Neon Rising Initiative” had a class from the University of Kentucky come up with a design for public parks, ATV trails and the “Neon Heights” housing site.

Some challenges were quickly apparent to the students.

One student estimated around half of the site was too steep or unstable from previous mining to be safe for houses. Another wrote “the site challenged the very premise of affordable housing” due to the engineering it would require.

Jordan Phemister taught the landscape architecture class. At the end of the spring semester, her students presented a design for 11 multi-family buildings -- which wasn’t quite the vision the town leaders started out with.

“I hope it opened their eyes to the challenges of developing that site,” Phemister said. “I’m very hopeful for them because [of] the sense of community, the environment there – it's a really special place.”

Phemister said if they take their time and continue to be thoughtful and systematic about the kind of community they want to create, she believes they can pull it off.

This is the third part of a three-part series on high ground housing. Read the first part here and the second part here .