(MintPress) – “This was not a once in a hundred years storm; it was a 500-year storm,” says 62-year-old Faith Liguori of Seaside Heights, N.J.
Speaking to Mint Press News, she recalls the night of Oct. 29, 2012, when Hurricane Sandy changed her life forever.
Although they had lost power even before the superstorm came ashore, Liguori and her husband stayed in their two-story house four blocks from the ocean. “We thought it would be like Irene and we could take care of it,” she explained.
Around 9 p.m., they went outside with a flashlight and saw ocean water pouring down the street. “We knew it was too late to leave,” she sighed. It was also too late to save anything in the downstairs apartment occupied by Liguori’s parents. “Fifteen minutes later, water was pouring in and around the foundation and up through the floor,” she said. “It was pretty awful.”
The Liguoris, along with Faith’s parents, took friends up on an offer to stay in their summer home,
which was on a lagoon in a nearby town and had escaped major damage.
Three months later, they are still there. “It is staggering,” Liguori said of the confusing government mandates and seemingly endless delays in collecting insurance.
Homeless and frustrated by the red tape she encountered, Liguori wrote an open letter to President Obama, Congress, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and local legislators and sent it to her local Patch website. Titled “My Descent into Madness by Way of the Rabbit Hole,” Liguori’s letter received 100s of comments and was widely published by other newspapers and websites.
“Today, I feel like Alice in Wonderland. I have fallen into the rabbit hole and my world no longer has any logic to it,” it began. “There is nowhere to go to get answers to the problems you are facing and no one place that can offer help, advocacy and guidance.”
“FEMA centers are certainly not the panaceas of assistance they are made out to be,” she continued. “I find it amazing that our government believes that families who have lost their homes, who are struggling to make sense of recent events, fully expects us to plow through hundreds of brochures on the FEMA website, to find an answer to what needs to be done, to negotiate with insurance companies, mortgage companies and contractors.”
Catch-22
Just listening to Liguori outline the dilemmas she and countless others have faced is an exercise in frustration.
She explained that FEMA has issued elevation guidelines for victims who are rebuilding their homes, suggesting they raise the houses to a certain level off the ground. But to be eligible for the Increased Cost of Compliance (ICC) payment of up to $30,000 in order to elevate homes, the homeowner has to prove that more than 50 percent of the structure was damaged or that 50 percent of it has been damaged by a storm at least twice in the past 10 years.
If he or she can prove they are eligible for the ICC and receive the certification, Ligouri said, then they are obligated to raise their home. Small catch: There are only three companies in New Jersey that are licensed to lift homes and there is a wait of more than a year for their services.
If a homeowner instead chooses to simply restore the house to its original state, their flood insurance premiums could skyrocket by as much as $10,000 to $18,000 a year.
“I understand the flood insurance program was going broke, which is why FEMA is now raising rates. But how can they impose these kinds of regulations on working class or retired people without any thought as to whether they can afford (it)?,” Liguori asks.
On top of that, she said, there is a so-called “freeboard,” which is elevating a building’s lowest floor above predicted flood elevations by an additional height (generally 1 to 3 feet above National Flood Insurance Program minimum height requirements). There are no public funds available to cover that cost.
To complicate matters further, Liguori continued, many mortgage companies are insisting that homeowners not make any changes to the original structure or elevation level regardless of what FEMA or municipalities may require.
For most people to do even that they need insurance money to cover the cost of rebuilding. Few can afford to do so out of pocket. But given the influx of claims following the storm, only a small percentage have actually been processed.
And even then insurance companies have often depreciated the value of a homeowner’s assets so that they may receive substantially less than the replacement costs, Liguori said.
Those who are still waiting to receive any compensation before doing anything may find that they have to add mold and mildew to their list of troubles.
And if you are lucky enough to have a job, Liguori said, good luck keeping it because you need to make dozens of calls to FEMA, insurers, contractors, Conde Enforcement Officers and mortgage companies, all during working hours.
Liguori herself works for Ocean Housing Alliance, a New Jersey nonprofit that operates a 48-bed residential health care facility located in Pt. Pleasant Beach.
“This is the storm that could cause financial ruin not only for myself, but for thousands of people in New Jersey who don’t have the money to do things,” she says angrily. “We need affordable, doable options.”
Living on the edge
At least for now, Liguori has a roof over her head. Many homeless Sandy victims who have been staying in hotels paid for by FEMA have nowhere else to go.
Hundreds of thousands of homes in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut were damaged or destroyed by the hurricane. There is still no official data on how many people remain homeless.
FEMA’s deadline for its transitional sheltering assistance program has already been extended four times. Now the deadline is Feb. 9 for most recipients, although others have already lost the financial support.
Helen Hooper, the assistant manager at Days Inn in Wildwood, N.J., tells Mint Press News that in the weeks after Sandy, 15 to 20 rooms were occupied by singles, couples and families who lost their homes. Now there are five.
At the time of the last extension on Jan. 11, 250 of the 1,300 New Jersey families living on FEMA vouchers found themselves out of luck. Seven of those had been staying at Hooper’s hotel. She says that four are now on rental assistance while they try to make other arrangements. Three are middle-aged men who share a tiny one-bedroom apartment made temporarily available by the landlord.
“The FEMA extension comes at 7 p.m. on a Friday night, and those who don’t receive it are supposed to check out the next day. They are left in limbo. It’s horrible,” Hooper said. FEMA has not said why some people are given extensions and others are not.
“We let them stay over the weekend and called everywhere we could to try to get them housing. It’s a matter of humanity. How could we put them out on the streets? We exhausted all of our resources though. There were no relief agencies, no Red Cross, no Robin Hood to help put them up.”
The Wiegman family from Seaside Heights has been living out of a hotel room since Nov. 6. Now they are waiting to see what happens next.
“It’s stressful, the nerves, scared, the insomnia, the worrying, the praying, wondering if we’ll be living under the boardwalk,” mother-of-two Jackie told a local newspaper. “Somebody has to help us in Wildwood. They forgot about us here. And that’s sad.”
The same scenario is playing out at Days Inns and other hotels throughout the hardest hit areas of New Jersey and New York.
56-year-old Lori Stein of Long Island’s Long Beach says FEMA has not allowed them enough time or money to find a new home. She has been living at a hotel in Garden City since two weeks after the storm. “There’s nothing out there for us to go to, so where do you want us to go?”she told Newsday. “I’m going to be with other people — literally on the street — if they don’t pay for the hotel.”
Shelter from the storm
In New York City, the shelter system was overcrowded even before Hurricane Sandy. Advocacy group Picture the Homeless says the number of those seeking shelter every night was between 46,000 and 48,000, including 20,000 children. Thousands more were displaced by the storm, and the the organization says the city is facing a serious housing crisis.
“Everybody that’s been in the shelter system goes through all the avenues to try to find housing, but all they find is nothing,” Raul Rodriguez, an organizer with Picture the Homeless, told The Observer.
The group and some of its allies have staged rallies in Harlem to draw attention to the problem and call on the local administration to convert vacant city-owned buildings into affordable housing and shelters.
Meanwhile, in Atlantic City, the homeless youth population exploded after Sandy. Even beforehand, Covenant House, a nonprofit that serves New Jersey’s homeless youth, had already filled its 60 beds and was putting people on cots and couches.
Said Executive Director Jill Rottmann: “When the news of the hurricane surfaced, so did homeless kids needing to find emergency shelter.”
Making matters worse, Atlantic City soon evacuated, forcing these youth to spend nearly three weeks moving among four temporary locations in South Jersey and Philadelphia.
Covenant House is now working to cover the extraordinary expenses during and after the storm. Rottman says it now needs state and or federal funding as well as the sustained commitment of donors.
Faith Ligouri is a volunteer at a similar nonprofit, Home Town Heroes, whose mission, she says, is to “help people who have slipped through the cracks.”
It now has requests for assistance from hundreds and hundreds of people in New Jersey for things as basic as food and clothing. “The magnitude of everything they need is staggering to me,” Liguori said.
“It’s a whole new world. And people aren’t getting that it’s a whole new reality.”