Brothers’ Bakery Survived Harvey. Will Project 2025 Kill it?

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(TNS) – Few people would voluntarily crown themselves the “King and Queen of Disaster.” But Bobby and Janice Jucker, co-owners of Three Brothers Bakery, proudly embrace the title. After enduring four hurricanes, a fire, a pandemic, a freeze and a freak derecho — sustaining at least $5.39 million in total losses over 23 years — they’ve earned it.

Their South Braeswood location, which has served the neighborhood by Brays Bayou since 1960, is a monument to resilience after Houston’s worst natural disasters. Like so many properties in the area, it has been rebuilt over and over again: in 2008, after Hurricane Ike tore their roof clean off, in 2015 and 2016 after the Memorial Day and Tax Day floods filled the store with water, and in 2017, when Hurricane Harvey pumped a 4.5-foot deep river through their industrial kitchen. The current was so strong it knocked over 800 pounds of ice.

Each time, concerned customers and the media have asked the Juckers, is this it? Will the beloved bakery close for good? Each time, against all odds, they’ve been buoyed back into business with the help of two critical life rafts: the National Flood Insurance Program and U.S. Small Business Administration loans. Two things that Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s sweeping conservative blueprint for Donald Trump’s second term, hopes to dismantle.

We’ve already shared our pressing concerns about Project 2025’s dangerous policy buffet — a smorgasbord so transparently authoritarian even Trump has tried to distance himself from it. But nestled deep in the 922-page agenda is a nugget of commonsense criticism that is worth seriously engaging with. It represents the central dilemma that Houston, and other coastal cities like it, will have to grapple with to survive a new normal of extreme weather wrought by climate change.

The NFIP was created six decades ago to provide Americans affordable flood insurance at a time when many private insurers were fleeing the market. Both the left and right have criticized the program for encouraging people to buy, build and rebuild in flood-prone areas. As Project 2025 points out, taxpayers have already bailed out the NFIP 16 times in 25 years, totaling $42 billion in loans and grants, and the program is currently $20 billion in the red. Clearly, Project 2025 architects argue, the NFIP must go.

We agree something needs to change. We can’t keep subsidizing properties that flood repeatedly and incentivizing people to keep building there. But in a state like Texas, where 1 in 6 people live in a flood hazard zone and 98% of the population lives in a community that participates in the NFIP, can we afford to get rid of what is often the only thing keeping small businesses afloat after disaster?

Already, 43 percent of small and mid-sized businesses that close after a disaster never reopen and an additional 29 percent go out of business within two years, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. This year, the May derecho and Hurricane Beryl were the final nail in the coffin for several of the 15 Houston-area restaurants forced to shut their doors — some a few months after opening. The ripple effects of those losses — on the local economy and the families whom the businesses sustained — are devastating.

Without the NFIP, Three Brothers Bakery would be one flood away from closing permanently and leaving 75 people without a job, Janice told two editorial board members who met her at the Braeswood location a few weeks ago. That shop is the nerve center, servicing their three other locations in Memorial, Washington and Tanglewood. If that one goes, so do the other ones.

When Harvey flooded their labyrinthine kitchen, filling their commercial mixing bowls and more than half a dozen industrial coolers with “poopoo water,” Janice said, they were overwhelmed. The smell of spillage from the wastewater treatment plant up the street prompted the unlucky staff member who discovered the damage to throw up. Sky-high stacks of flour were spoiled. Racks and racks of baked goods were trashed. The motors on three vans were completely shot. “It was like cleaning up with toothbrushes,” Janice said.

But the Juckers pride themselves on paying their people, no matter what. It’s the number one lesson they teach other small businesses to prioritize. Armed with the funds to pay their employees overtime, they were able to reopen after only 17 days.

“The insurance made all the difference,” Thomas Baker, the shop’s manager of 14 years, told us. “Those payments helped get us back up and running and we were able to maintain our legacy.” He pointed to a photo above his office door frame. It was a portrait of Sigmund Jucker, one of the three Jewish brothers who originally founded the bakery after surviving the Holocaust and fleeing Poland in 1949. Today, it is still a staple among many Jewish families and institutions breaking challah together every Friday evening to mark another week. It’s a community that understands disaster better than some, with many Meyerland-area families themselves facing repeat floods. The financial precarity of all these disasters and loans even lost the bakery its kosher certification in 2019.

“We reached the point where we had to ask the question: Will we be a closed kosher bakery — permanently closed — or a bakery that makes Jewish-style products?” Jucker told the Jewish Herald-Voice at the time. “We had to choose the latter.”

While Project 2025 raises important points about a well-intentioned program in need of reform, it is drastically shortsighted in its solutions. For both the NFIP and the SBA loan program — without which Janice says Three Brothers Bakery would have gone broke three times — the plan insists that privatization is the answer to reduce federal bloat.

“They seem to be unaware of the fact that private insurers aren’t exactly flocking to the flood insurance market,” Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst for the environmental advocacy group NRDC Action Fund, said. That’s the very reason the program began in the first place. Already, our high-risk Houston area has prompted insurers to raise premiums to impossible highs, pricing out Houstonians who need insurance more than ever.

But where Moore agrees with Project 2025 is with the need to rethink the role of federal, state and local government in disaster recovery. “States do need to shoulder a larger burden,” he said. When states constantly rely on FEMA for smaller disasters, they leave the agency with fewer resources to respond to unprecedented events, such as in 2017, when FEMA cleaned up four major disasters simultaneously: Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria, and the California wildfires. Moore pointed out Texas’ excruciating hesitation to dip into its Rainy Day Fund — “on literally the rainiest day possible,” he said — to fund Harvey recovery efforts. From our nearly three-hour interview with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and the head of the Texas Division of Emergency Management after Hurricane Beryl, it’s clear Texas is already moving away from dependence on FEMA for immediate aid.

Janice still believes the state could do more to bring Texans relief. After the 2021 freeze, she helped push Texas lawmakers to pass Senate Bill 678, a framework for a small business disaster recovery loan program. She hopes to get it funded next session, allowing affected businesses to access “bridge loans” of up to $50,000 to pay employees and reopen after a disaster.

While we were speaking with Janice and Bobby, one customer, Linda Connelly, came over to thank them. She was touched by the Juckers’ kindness during Beryl. They had opened their doors to Connelly and her family, who were without power, and gifted them apple pie and cinnamon rolls. “These people are heaven,” she said.

It’s fair to question whether we should prop up businesses that have flooded over and over again. And even to consider whether it might be cheaper in the long run to spend millions buying out or relocating flood-prone commercial properties. But tell that to the third, fourth and fifth-generation customers who can’t imagine their neighborhood without that little corner bakery.

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