President Trump visits the Florida Panhandle today, seven months after the area was devastated by Hurricane Michael. On full display is his administration’s inept response to the housing needs created by the disaster. FEMA’s inexplicably and unacceptably slow response leaves thousands of low-income survivors continuing to sleep in tents, cars, doubled or tripled-up with other low-income families, or paying more than half of their incomes on rent, putting them at increased risk of evictions and homelessness.
Hurricane Michael damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of homes in Florida. FEMA’s response has exacerbated the affordable rental housing crisis that existed in the state prior to the storm. To this day, FEMA has not provided adequate rental assistance or alternative housing, such as trailers or mobile homes, to some people made homeless by the storm. After the storm, families sleep in tents while waiting for assistance and even those families face displacement as encampments are bulldozed. Thousands did not receive any assistance from FEMA at all. Florida’s Bay County reports that more than 5,000 children are now homeless as a result of the storm.
The Trump administration’s failure to address the housing needs of the lowest-income survivors isn’t unique to Florida; it has similarly failed after all the most recent major disasters in California, Texas, the Carolinas and Puerto Rico. After last summer’s California wildfires, survivors continue today to sleep in cars or trailers while waiting for assistance. In the Carolinas, families displaced from their communities, jobs, and social supports likewise struggle to find affordable places to live while they get back on their feet after Hurricane Florence.
After each storm, the lowest-income and most vulnerable survivors became homeless. More than a year and a half after Hurricane Harvey, the number of people experiencing homelessness in the Houston area has increased for the first time in seven years. Nearly twenty percent of the people living unsheltered in the city cited the hurricane – and FEMA’s lack of assistance – as the cause of their homelessness. Homelessness rates also increased by double digits from 2017 to 2018 in both Connecticut and Massachusetts, where large numbers of Puerto Ricans fled after Hurricane Maria, with no adequate housing assistance from FEMA.
After each disaster, FEMA consistently refused to provide critical housing solutions, like the Disaster Housing Assistance Program (DHAP), to help the most-vulnerable survivors get back on their feet. DHAP provides families with stable, affordable homes as they rebuild their lives and connects them to local housing professionals to find permanent housing solutions, to secure employment and to connect to public benefits. Instead, FEMA forced thousands of struggling families to live out of motel rooms through its Transitional Shelter Assistance (TSA) program. In doing so, the agency relied on a program that, by design, prevents many of the lowest-income people from receiving help altogether.
Participating hotels turn away displaced families by charging fees on top of the amount FEMA will cover or requiring families to pay security deposits or have credit cards, all of which serve as barriers for low-income families who have already depleted their limited savings. FEMA pressures those survivors who are able to access FEMA-funded motels to leave the motels under arbitrary deadlines, regardless of whether their homes are repaired or they have secured alternative housing. When FEMA evicted survivors of Hurricane Maria from motels last summer, hundreds became homeless. Despite a lack of affordable and available alternatives in the Florida Panhandle, FEMA recently ended its TSA motel program leaving 200 people without safe places to sleep.
The Trump administration has failed to address disaster survivors’ most basic need: a safe, stable, affordable home. The families still sleeping in tents in Florida’s panhandle are evidence of this inexcusable, shameful and consistent failure. If the administration won’t act, Congress must – by holding FEMA accountable and finally addressing the housing needs of the lowest-income disaster survivors in communities across the country.
The author is the president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.