FEMA Is Set to Stop Paying Hotel Cost for Storm Victims

Subject: Fwd: FEMA Is Set to Stop Paying Hotel Cost for Storm Victims
Date: 11/17/2005 12:12:23 AM Eastern Standard Time
From: CPerez3052
To: Reysmontj


November 16, 2005

FEMA Is Set to Stop Paying Hotel Cost for Storm Victims
By ERIC LIPTON

JACKSON, Miss., Nov. 15 - The Federal Emergency Management Agency moved Tuesday to nudge victims of Hurricane Katrina toward self-sufficiency, announcing that it would cut off financing for most of the 60,000 families in government-paid hotel and motel rooms by the end of this month.

The deadline, three months after the hurricane struck, will bring the agency's assistance packages more into line with the customary array of federal disaster aid.

"There are still too many people living in hotel rooms, and we want to help them get into longer-term homes before the holidays," the agency's acting director, R. David Paulison, said in a statement. "Across the country, there are readily available, longer-term housing solutions for these victims that can give greater privacy and stability than hotel and motel rooms."

The cutoff will come in two phases. In the first, payments for hotel rooms occupied by about 50,000 of the families will end on Dec. 1. In the second, an apartment shortage in Louisiana and Mississippi has led the agency to give the 12,000 families living in hotels in those two states until Jan. 7 to move out, or assume the cost on their own.

Assuming that their permanent homes still cannot be occupied, FEMA will offer people in both of those groups temporary-housing rental assistance worth an average of $786 a month. That is less than half what hotels have been costing the government in a typical month.

Nicol Andrews, a FEMA spokeswoman, said the agency's caseworkers, as well as charities that it is helping to finance, would assist these families in the search for housing.

"We are just trying to help people move on," Ms. Andrews said.

But Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on a House panel that oversees housing issues related to the hurricane, said FEMA was not giving the families enough warning.

"Two weeks' notice is outrageous," Mr. Frank said. "These are not people who can easily find alternative accommodations."

The agency has also notified state and local governments that it plans to end financing on March 1 for a program, set up in about two dozen cities, through which apartments have been rented on behalf of storm victims. Houston alone has issued 39,500 vouchers for evacuee families, costing the federal government more than $100 million.

The goal of this program was to speed the move from shelters or motels into more stable housing. But FEMA wants to get out of the business of directly financing the rental of apartments. The agency has told state and local governments that as of this week, they can no longer sign leases of more than three months. As of Dec. 1, they will no longer be able to sign any new leases. And finally, as of March 1 the government is to stop paying for all outstanding leases, although FEMA officials said Tuesday that state and municipal authorities would be permitted to apply for extensions.

It remains unclear what will happen in cities like Houston, where officials have signed many yearlong leases for evacuees from the storm.

None of this prevents victims from using direct aid from FEMA - the $786 a month on average - to rent apartments or assume control of leases that the state or local government has initially rented on their behalf. Housing aid for these families will last up to 18 months; a total of $1.2 billion in such aid has been given to more than 500,000 families so far.