New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration has hired a new housing czar, Brad Gair, to help find housing for those displaced.īut Wednesday’s storm, named Athena after the Greek goddess, is making it painfully clear that for all the good intentions and multiple press conferences, local and federal government officials haven’t kept pace with reality. On Monday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it would provide vouchers for people to stay in hotels, paying as much as $295 a night as well as subsidizing longer-term rents. Either their houses have been demolished or they are unfit to live in because of severe damage and the absence of power, heat and water.Īnd now they all need a place to live in a region with some of the lowest apartment vacancy rates, and most expensive hotel and rental rates, in the world. Just a week after the worst storm in many years to slam the Eastern Seaboard trashed thousands of houses and left nearly 1 million people without electricity, local and federal government officials hav e said that tens of thousands of people in New York and New Jersey are likely to need temporary hous ing. “All my neighbors are still living here, old people, too, and it’s getting cold,” said marble-installer Eddie Romanoff, 33. Now, as another storm began hammering through on Wednesday, dropping temperatures to freezing, they see the new reality getting only grimmer as they shiver in the Stygian dark with no heat. They’ve lived without cellphones, stores, or showers, eating vacuum-packed, government-supplied ready-made meals of rubbery chicken and paste-like potatoes. They’ve watched their flashlights die, their toilets clog up, and their neighbors kids bawl a lot. They’ve walked up stairs, some as many as 13 flights, to the top of housing complexes like the Dayton Towers in Rockaway Park. The windowless passageways feel like a crypt, unnerving even the most hardened of residents.įor more than a week, ever since Superstorm Sandy turned their community into a beachfront dystopia, flattening cars, mangling the boardwalk, twisting their roads, and cutting off their power, these residents have made do. NEW YORK, Nov 7 (Reuters) - At nighttime, high up in the apartment buildings that tower over New York’s Rockaway Peninsula, it’s so inky black inside that residents have to use their hands to feel their way along the concrete walls, inch by inch, to get up and down the stairs, over to their neighbors, or back to their front doors.
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