The hurricane aggravates the housing crisis in Florida: "You never think about being homeless"

By Janelle Griffith -

Before Hurricane Ian caused billions of dollars of damage in Florida, Alaura Miller thought she was part of the lower middle class.

She now says that she is mired in poverty.

The mobile home he rented for $1,000 a month and shared with his 23-year-old son in the farming community of Arcadia is so badly damaged it will have to be demolished.

"We don't know which direction to go: whether to go out of state or stay," she said, adding that without the rental assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA, for its acronym in English) she will be forced to move to Texas to live with one of his daughters.

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Miller, a 60-year-old retired hairdresser, is one of many low-income people struggling to find affordable housing in one of the country's most expensive states to live in.

"Florida came into this hurricane season already with a shortage of affordable housing, particularly for people who work in service jobs and with lower wages," said Anne Ray, a researcher at the Shimberg Center for Housing Studies at the University of Florida. .

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"And so people who have lost their homes are going to compete with people who are already trying to find affordable housing. It's a difficult situation, very difficult," he said.

Housing costs have risen in recent years for renters and homeowners, Ray said.

“The rent acceleration in Florida has been really high, especially in the last year,” he stressed, “and wages haven't kept pace.

So the general trend is this growing gap between what housing costs and what people can afford based on their wages."

"We are left with nothing."

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Miller was able to get a generator Tuesday and plans to stay in the back of her mobile home, which she says suffered less damage than the front, until her landlord tears it down.

"The kitchen and the two bedrooms are intact, but we are not going to be able to stay here for a long time because he [the landlord] is going to have to tear it down," he said.

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Miller said that between their meager savings and the money their son earns as a clerk at the Winn-Dixie supermarket, they both can't afford higher rent.

Arcadia is in one of the poorest counties in the state.

Displaced people from Arcadia will have a hard time finding something similar elsewhere in the state, Ray said.

The median sale price of a single-family home in Arcadia was $138,500 in the first half of 2021, compared with the state median of $324,900, according to data from the Shimberg Center.

The median gross income, meaning rent and utilities, in Arcadia was $750 in 2020, compared to $1,218 in Florida.

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Brenda West, 69, a widowed and retired respiratory therapy technician, was also paying $1,000 a month to rent a modest two-bedroom, one-bathroom house in Myakka City, which Ian swept away.

West shared the house with his daughter, Gwendolyn Gay, who has multiple sclerosis and whom he cares for.

Both women are on disability, West said.

With limited resources and no family in Florida, the two have been staying at a seedy motel in Bradenton that West has booked through Friday.

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"After that, I don't know where I'm going to go," he said Wednesday, "my resources are about to run out."

The couple can't go to a shelter because West said his daughter's multiple sclerosis prevents her from sleeping on a cot.

Also, her daughter has a terrier that is in the process of becoming her service dog and will make them ineligible to stay in a shelter, West said.

West has signed up for FEMA help and is waiting for the agency to assess the damage to the house he rented.

"I know there are more people worse off than us, but you never think you're going to be homeless," West said.

"You never think about it. You never think something like this is going to happen to you until you're in it. And then all of a sudden it hits you in the face: 'Oh my God, this is real, this is really happening.' It's happened to me before. And I'm sure a lot of other people haven't, but for me it's just devastating."

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He added, "I've never been put in a situation before where I have to worry about where I'm going to live or where I'm going to go."

West

Veronica Young, who lives next door to the mother and daughter, said she did not have flood insurance for either home.

She has rented from West and Gay for almost two years.

Both properties are on about 20 acres, with at least two feet of standing water in her home, Young said.

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Ray, the housing expert, said Florida has a significant affordable housing trust fund that has been used to rebuild communities, and in particular to provide affordable housing and rental units in communities that have been hit hard by disasters. .

"We're going to have to think about how those homes are built to be resistant to storms and weather hazards," he said.

Florida will also need to have a diverse housing stock that includes options for low-paid workers "and rebuild in the safest and most resilient way possible and in the safest and most resilient places possible," he concluded.