Federal aid intended to subsidize housing costs for Puerto Ricans who were displaced by Hurricane Maria is set to expire Friday. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is still paying for hotel rooms for about 2,436 Puerto Ricans who fled to the U.S. mainland. Unless a federal court intervenes, they may be left with nowhere to go by the end of the week.
The aid program has been extended several times. If it lapses Friday, the U.S. government will offer to pay for plane tickets to return the refugees to Puerto Rico. If the refugees decline the offer, they could face homelessness. “It’s a choice between the lesser of two evils,” says Peter Gudaitis, executive director of New York Disaster Interfaith Services, a nonprofit organization that has been assisting Hurricane Maria evacuees. “Stay here and be homeless, or move to Puerto Rico and be unemployed or have no home and struggle there.”
Maria struck Puerto Rico as a powerful Category 4 storm last September. The island is still stumbling in its recovery, facing repeated power outages and severe neighborhood blight in the storm’s aftermath. About 135,000 Puerto Ricans came to the U.S. mainland after Maria, with the highest concentration of evacuees in Florida, Massachusetts, and New York.
FEMA had originally planned to stop paying for hotels for evacuees in April but extended the deadline five times. A lawsuit filed by the advocacy group Latino Justice accuses FEMA of ending the program without a transition plan for evacuees into longer-term housing.
Source:
“Displaced Puerto Ricans Face Dire Situations as FEMA Housing Aid Near Its End,” Huffington Post (Aug. 24, 2018)
