Housing assistance for Puerto Ricans displaced by Hurricane Maria is set to end May 14 after the Federal Emergency Management Agency extended the deadline last week.
FEMA has twice extended the Transitional Sheltering Assistance program after threatening to cut off the funding. Since the hurricane, $64 million has been spent on hotel vouchers for 7,017 families. Without an extension, 1,700 families would have been considered ineligible for further aid. Most recently, the funding was due to end April 20, but a plea from Puerto Rico's governor, Rosselló Nevares, caused FEMA to hold off.
"With this extension, those families will be allowed to continue participating in the program while FEMA performs additional case reviews of their eligibility," the agency said in a statement Friday.
"This has been really depressing for all of us," Jeanette Soto, a hurricane survivor who fled to Boston, told the Los Angeles Times. "We don't know when the time will come that we're out on the streets."
"Good people are not being put out on the street," Diane Yentel, president and chief executive of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, told the L.A. Times. "They still have a place to stay with their families. But the fact that they're still in hotels seven months after the storm means we're doing something very wrong.
"It's OK that we have extensions and we're not on the street," Soto added. "We appreciate that. But the bottom line is, if we're American citizens, we should have a right to have a house in an emergency. We should have priority. We have waited months to have an apartment."
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