The homeless population in Florida faces and unclear future after Hurricane Helene devastated the state .
Thousands of U.S. residents are currently struggling to rebuild their lives and communities after Hurricane Helene devastated parts of Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina and Tennessee. The Category 4 storm made landfall last week with winds gusting at 140mph.
The death toll skyrocketed to 204 confirmed deaths Thursday afternoon with Georgia and North Carolina reporting more fatalities., making Helene almost as deadly as Hurricane Katrina which killed 1,392 people when it ripped through Louisiana in August 2005.
President Joe Biden is expected to arrive in Florida on Thursday to survey the damage, but what is not known is how the homeless population of the Sunshine state will fare as disaster relief for people who were homeless prior to a hurricane is severely lacking, Vox reported.
FEMA, the main federal agency in charge of providing aid following disasters, has a policy that explicitly excludes those unhoused people from most forms of help, including housing and direct assistance. Further obstacles include the recent Supreme Court " Grants Pass v. Johnson" decision that gives local governments authority to clear out homeless tent encampments even if the city lacks any available housing or shelter for the homeless person to stay in.
That has led to more jurisdictions passing laws criminalizing homelessness, the latest being a law that bans sleeping on public property anywhere in Florida that just took affect this week. The law does include exceptions during hurricanes, but those protections end when the hurricane order is no longer in place.
That means the homeless population of nearly 31,000 in the state could face criminal penalties after state officials lift Florida’s emergency hurricane order. “Some people are already trying to relocate their encampments to harder-to-find areas,” Martha Are, the executive director at the Homeless Services Network of Central Florida, told Vox a week before Helene hit Florida.
Starting in January any Florida citizen and business can sue if they feel the anti-camping ban is not being properly enforced. "It’s going to be a challenge for how leaders actually enforce these (anti-camping) laws, like if I’ve lost my house from a hurricane and I’ve lived in that town for a decade, will I be found in violation of the law and are they going to arrest me?” Noah Patton, the manager of disaster recovery at the National Low Income Housing Coalition, told Vox.
“These laws create significant complications, will really make aid more difficult to sort out, and what I have been saying is it makes a community less resilient to disasters," he added. One department stepping up for the homeless is the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which established the Rapid Unsheltered Survivor Housing (RUSH) program, that aims to help those who were homeless prior to a storm or other climate disaster.
“We were very pleased to have the ability to launch the program because we see that people who are doubled up or experiencing homelessness during the disaster often don’t access FEMA funds or receive support from FEMA for long,” Marion McFadden, HUD’s principal deputy assistant secretary for community planning and development, told Vox. “By providing funds specifically for these situations, we’re filling in gaps.”
HUD also has the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery program, a long-term disaster aid program that can be used to provide months of rental assistance and build new affordable housing well after FEMA is gone. But the only issue is the program is not permanently authorized and relies on periodic appropriations from Congress.
“We are concerned that the bill, as written, may lead to the misuse of scarce federal recovery funds and prevent critically needed long-term recovery assistance from reaching low-income disaster survivors,” more than 35 national housing advocacy groups wrote in a congressional letter last week.
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