Roughly 50 families displaced by Hurricane Ida have until Tuesday to move out of a lower Manhattan hotel, and anyone without a place to go will be taken to a homeless shelter.
The city Department of Housing Preservation and Development has used hotels and other emergency shelters as temporary housing for roughly 380 families since the storm flooded sections of the city in August 2021. The agency has placed over 300 families in permanent homes, according to a spokesperson.
A FEMA program paid for the temporary housing until the federal aid dried up in December. The city was forced to foot the bill, and issued a $1.4 million dollar contract allowing displaced families to remain at the Millennium Downtown hotel on Church Street until the end of February.
But come Tuesday, city officials will transport any remaining families to the family homeless intake shelter in the Bronx.
“Even though federal funding already ended for the emergency hotel rooms, we will continue working tirelessly until all of these families have a place to call home,” a spokesperson for the department of Housing Preservation and Development said in a statement.
The agency connected families who qualified with emergency housing vouchers to use on the open market. But that was a painstaking process for many New Yorkers displaced by the storm, like John Abrams, who spent a year searching for a landlord who would accept his voucher after Hurricane Ida shuffled him, his wife and five kids between three emergency hotel shelters.
Abrams said that while HPD officials helped him navigate the process after the storm devastated his East New York home, he was turned away from roughly 25 apartments by “downright wicked” landlords who didn’t want anything to do with his emergency voucher. There was not much HPD officials could do, he said.
After visiting 50 apartments, Abrams finally settled into a Woodhaven, Queens home in October.
When asked about landlord voucher discrimination, a spokesperson for HPD said the agency has been working with developers to schedule apartment viewings and secure units that would otherwise fall under the city’s housing lottery.
Families who are undocumented don’t qualify for the federally-funded vouchers. While some were eligible for cash assistance from the state Office of New Americans, others will have to go through the city’s shelter system.
Hurricane Ida devastated low-lying areas, flooding apartments and subway tracks and destroying homes across the city.
The storm was responsible for the deaths of 13 people, all but two of whom drowned when they were trapped in basement apartments.
