Thousands Still Homeless After Sandy

RT – Tens of thousands of Hurricane Sandy victims still remain homeless, desperately waiting for government assistance while fearfully anticipating the start of another hurricane season.

Some victims are living out of cardboard boxes, overstaying
their welcomes at the homes of friends and family while their own
houses remain demolished. Families remain separated, dispersed
throughout the country as they continue to fight with their
insurance companies for assistance that has never come.
Businesses are shuttered, homes are overtaken by mold and piles of
rubble litter the backyards of the houses that now stand empty.

Victims relying on subsidized hotel rooms could soon end up on
the streets, since government relief funding is set to expire.
Advocates claim there is not enough public and low-income housing
to accommodate the hundreds who have relied on FEMA-subsidized
hotel rooms for the past six months.

In the seaside community of Breezy Point, Queens, 2,400 of the
2,800 homes remain unoccupied. The neighborhood stands as a ghost
town, illuminated only by the flames of the fire burning down the
houses red-tagged for demolition.

“Insurance and the new building codes delay everything. It’s
like Breezy is frozen in time,” Michael Sullivan, a resident of
the seaside community, told the New York Daily News.

And after six months of a gruelingly slow recovery, tens of
thousands of residents remain homeless, dreaming of a normal life
that they may never be able to return to.

“Some people are still very much in the midst of recovery.
You still have people in hotel rooms, you still have people
doubling up, you still have people fighting with insurance
companies, and for them it’s been terrible and horrendous,”
said Gov. Andrew Cuomo, ahead of the six-month anniversary of
Hurricane Sandy.

But despite the cries of the forgotten victims of October’s
superstorm, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said Monday that
President Barack Obama “has kept every promise he’s made” in
regards to the recovery effort.

“I think he’s done a good job. He kept his word,” he told
MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on the six-month anniversary of the
storm.

“Everything the president promised me they’d do, they’ve
done. I don’t have any complaint this morning on the issue of
disaster relief,” he added.

In New Jersey alone, Hurricane Sandy destroyed 360,000 homes and
apartments, many of which remain uninhabitable. And American lives
have been unnecessarily lost to the slow recovery effort. The
National Hurricane Center attributes 72 deaths directly to the
superstorm and 87 deaths to storm-related causes, such as
hypothermia due to power outages, carbon monoxide poisoning and
other accidents resulting from the cleanup process.

Many of the storm-ravaged areas look no different than they did
a few months ago. In January, victims complained that the president
broke the promises he made before he was re-elected.

After the storm struck, Obama pledged to assist the victims as
quickly as he could, posing for a photograph with New Jersey
business owner Donna Vanzant, who had lost most of what she owned.
In an image that quickly went ‘viral’, the president embraced the
devastated woman. But a few months later, Vanzant said she was
quickly forgotten by the administration.

“I have probably suffered $500,000 in losses,” she told
the Philly Post. “And we’ve lost all of our docks and our
bulkhead, and the estimate for that is $200,000, and you can’t get
insurance on your docks or bulkhead.”

At the start of the year, some lawmakers complained that
Congress had betrayed the victims of New York and New Jersey,
instilling feelings of abandonment and outrage among the residents
of storm-afflicted areas.

But while Christie announced a $1.7 billion federal grant on
storm recovery efforts and describes a “return to normalcy”,
the tens of thousands who remain homeless continue to live
shattered lives.

“Everybody’s house had pretty much the same amount of damage,
but people are getting different amounts of money, and that’s
caused some problems,” George Stauble, a New Jersey resident
who lost his home in the storm, told NBC.

But the president’s promise has been broken in the eyes of those
who were refused adequate assistance by insurance companies and the
federal government.

“We still have tens of thousands of families who aren’t back
in their homes,” Christie admitted, before announcing the
state’s $1.8 billion federal grant awarded this month. “Job one
is to get the grant program going.”

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