January 9, 2009
Evacuees in the city face another move
After spending 40 nights at the Ramada Plaza Hotel near LaGuardia Airport, Justin Samuels, a Hurricane Katrina evacuee from Alabama, is happy to be moving into a studio apartment in Hell's Kitchen.
"I'm probably moving tomorrow, definitely by the end of the week," Samuels, an aspiring filmmaker, said yesterday. "Everything is set with the new place. I'm just waiting to move the rest of my stuff."
Samuels, 29, is among the many evacuees lucky to find a new place to stay before today's deadline to be dropped from the government's emergency program that has been housing them in seven New York hotels.
Many more evacuees, however, could be forced to move from the hotels to homeless shelters because the Federal Emergency Management Agency no longer will pay for their hotel rooms, housing advocates said.
According to the city Department of Homeless Services, 327 households were staying in FEMA-funded hotels in November. By Monday, that number was down to 89 households, including 65 single adults, 10 adult families and 14 families with children, the department said.
Eleven of the households can remain in the hotels through next Monday for reasons ranging from delays in paperwork to needing more time to move their belongings, the department said.
The stress of having no place to go was enough to keep Rodolfo Rosales awake at nights.
"I don't feel good," said Rosales, 23, a Honduras native who was working at the Ritz-Carlton in New Orleans when Katrina stuck in August.
FEMA began paying for him to stay at the Holiday Inn at Kennedy Airport in September.
As with thousands of eligible evacuees nationwide, the government would continue helping Rosales by paying up to $26,200 in rent reimbursement over 18 months - so long as he had a lease by today.
Rosales, who speaks limited English, said last week that he had looked at four apartments in the city, none of which he liked.
"If you've got to live there for 18 months, you've got to like the neighborhood," he said. "But some people, they don't understand that."
Rosales could not be reached for comment yesterday.
Nationwide, FEMA has paid more than $560 million for hotel and motel rooms for hurricane evacuees since August, with a peak of 85,000 rooms a night, agency officials said.
In New York, today's deadline ends the reprieve won last month when a group of political figures and housing advocates persuaded the government and hotels to allow evacuees to stay until apartments are located. The advocates continue to criticize FEMA for leaving evacuees without a place to stay.
"Our basic position is that there should be no deadline until people find suitable housing," said Brenda Stokely, a longtime labor and community activist who lives in Brooklyn.
Stokely is among the organizers of the NYC Solidarity Committee for Katrina/Rita Evacuees. The group held a rally yesterday outside FEMA's office in lower Manhattan to protest the agency's handling of the aftermath of the two hurricanes.
Stokely said of the evacuees: "People have really been doing the work themselves, not getting help from the government or the social service agencies assigned to help them."
FEMA spokeswoman Nicole Andrews disagreed, saying that agency and nonprofit representatives have worked every day with evacuees at the hotels.
"We're working with everybody on a case-by-case basis," Andrews said. Asked whether any evacuee would be forced to stay at a shelter, she said, "I feel extremely confident that that's not going to be the case."
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