No more hotel vouchers for displaced, distressed Puerto Ricans in Florida

Scattered across a small coffee table in Richard Gonzalez’s motel room last week were papers to keep him from becoming homeless. There was a resume in English that his daughter in Puerto Rico had made for him. There was a list of contacts for social service agencies. There was a piece of paper where Gonzalez had scrawled the phone numbers of a dozen apartments for rent.

But by Saturday morning, after finishing his 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. shift as a dealer at Seminole Casino in Hollywood, Florida, Gonzalez was preparing to check out of the Extended Stay America hotel in Fort Lauderdale, his bare-bones home for the past two months.

Gonzalez, 53, planned to drive north to Orlando, where his mother and brother have lived for several years. Like hundreds of American citizens from Puerto Rico who fled to Florida after Hurricane Maria last September, Gonzalez doesn’t know what comes next. The money keeping a roof over his head is gone. The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s hotel voucher program expired Saturday.

What Gonzalez does know is he’s not moving back to Puerto Rico — at least not yet. Asked what he will do after this weekend, Gonzalez, whose wife and adult daughter and son still live on the island, began to cry.

“I would like to go to Puerto Rico right now, but to what?” he said in Spanish, explaining jobs there are nowhere to be found. “I tell my wife: ‘What are we going to do? Without work, I can’t do anything.’”

FEMA has extended the deadline of its voucher program, known as Transitional Shelter Assistance four times since October, sometimes with just a few days to spare. But now the agency has presented a final proposition: Accept a one-way plane ticket back to the island by today, or find housing another way.

Most have chosen to stay. Of nearly 600 families in Florida who were part of the hotel voucher program Tuesday, only 44 had returned to Puerto Rico at FEMA expense, the agency said. The latest national statistics provided by FEMA show that, among almost 2,000 families who remained in hotels as of June 2, just 11 had flown home and 180 had expressed interest in doing so.

Luis DeRosa, president of the Puerto Rican Chamber of Commerce in Miami, which has been helping displaced families in the region, said FEMA was making a mistake by cutting off hotel aid.

“If you cut them off, where are they gonna go — the street?” DeRosa said. “This is called forced homelessness by the federal government.”

Most of the displaced families in Florida have landed in Osceola and Orange counties, in some cases occupying much of entire motels in Orlando and Kissimmee. Forty-six such families were still living in Miami-Dade county hotels last week, the third-most of any county in the state.

More than 7,000 families — and more than 19,000 people — have participated in the voucher program nationally since Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico nine months ago, wiping out its power grid and likely resulting in thousands of deaths. In the weeks that followed, FEMA was criticized for its slow response.

Since then, most families have managed to leave their hotels and move in with family members, find low-income rentals or return to Puerto Rico. But for the last enduring hotel occupants, affordable housing has seemed impossible to find.

“We already have an affordable housing crisis,” said Gladys Cook of the Florida Housing Coalition, a Tallahassee nonprofit that pushes for affordable housing in the state. “When you have more people that have no resources that try to get into this system, it becomes more of a bottleneck.”