Venus James loved living in Matlacha, Florida. The tiny island just outside Fort Myers was quirky, with artsy shops, fishing boats and just a few hundred homes. “You could walk from one end to the other in probably an hour or less,” James says.
She knew all her neighbors. Tropical birds perched in her yard. But the thing that really made Matlacha magical, she says, was its affordability for a middle-class couple like James and her husband, who are both nurses.
“There were normal people living there,” James remembers. “It wasn’t only million-dollar homes. You could live in a trailer there. You could have roommates. We were renting for a pretty good price, for a house with a yard. You were living in paradise, but you didn’t have to be rich.”
Hurricane Ian changed all of that. In September 2022, the Category 5 storm hit Matlacha head-on. Virtually every building on the island flooded. James’s house and car were destroyed.
Nearly two years later, James and her husband are still trying to recover from the financial gut-punch of the storm. Today, they live outside Tampa in an RV with their two dogs, two cats and an elderly bearded dragon lizard named Gary. It’s only in the last few months that they’ve stopped living paycheck to paycheck. James describes her current credit score as “too low to finance a pizza.”
“There’s not the help afterwards that you might expect,” she says. “I feel like, financially, we’re in a scarier situation than 5 to 10 years ago.”
She’s not alone. Millions of Americans who survive hurricanes and other weather disasters such as wildfires and floods find themselves in dire financial straits years later. And a growing body of research warns that renters are particularly vulnerable after disasters, in part because they are less likely to have relevant insurance and may not receive adequate assistance from the government in the immediate aftermath.
“[It’s] the fundamental sin in our disaster policy in this country, that everything is based on property and possession,” says Carlos Martín, a housing and climate researcher at Harvard University. Many renters have less wealth, and receive less government assistance after disasters, than homeowners, and suffer more severe and long-term financial impacts as a result, he explains. “It compounds these differences between the landed-gentry haves and the rest of the country that are have-nots.”
And, as climate change causes more frequent severe weather across the country, the effects of that unequal disaster response are getting more pronounced. In the last 5 years, the number of weather disasters that caused at least 1 billion dollars of damage has skyrocketed, causing hundreds of billions of dollars of damage. At the same time, homes have gotten more expensive, trapping people in the rental market.
“There are a lot of families out there who are struggling financially,” says Colt Hagmaier, an assistant administrator at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). “They're struggling in terms of having secure housing, and disasters only exacerbate those problems.”
Disasters cause a cascade of financial problems for renters
People who rent face unique challenges after weather disasters. Renters are less likely than homeowners to have an insurance policy that covers the damage or helps pay for temporary housing while the home is being repaired. Renters are not generally required to have such insurance, and policies are often unaffordable, particularly in areas that are prone to flooding, hurricanes and other damaging weather.
As a result, in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, renters often face huge bills, starting with rent itself. “If you’re a homeowner, your mortgage company most likely makes some kind of special plan for you, especially after a major disaster,” Martín says. For example, mortgage companies often allow customers to delay payments if their home suffers major damage.
“But landlords are likely to start increasing rents,” he says, either because they are hoping to recoup the cost of repairs to the home, or because demand for rental properties goes up when lots of people are locally displaced all at once.
Meanwhile, the cost of temporary housing also increases in places where many homes have been destroyed. James remembers that short-term rentals in the area were unaffordable after Hurricane Ian, so she and her husband had no choice but to evacuate to her father’s house three hours away.
Nationwide, renters are more likely to be displaced after a disaster than homeowners, and to remain displaced for longer, according to a recent survey by the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
Many people displaced by Hurricane Ian ended up with no stable housing at all. The rate of homelessness in the hardest-hit counties rose dramatically after the storm, according to Michael Overway, the executive director of the Lee County Homeless Coalition.
Most of the newly displaced residents had never experienced homelessness before, and many had been living comfortably before the storm, he explains. “They may not have been living in poverty prior, but now their homes are underwater and they didn’t know what to do,” says Overway.
Local real estate agents in Matlacha have seen the displacement of residents firsthand.
“The people who were hit the hardest were the poorest,” says Char Seuffert, a longtime real estate agent on the island. She says the rental market on Matlacha hasn’t recovered since the storm, and about 70% of rental units are still vacant. The road to the island, which was completely washed away by the hurricane, is still under construction. A handful of half-destroyed homes are slowly collapsing into the sea.
“The dolphins are back, the manatees are back,” she says, gesturing to the placid canal across from her sunny office. “But a lot of the people aren’t back.”
Financial problems can cascade after disasters
It was clear to James and her husband that they needed to leave Matlacha after the storm. Their landlord raised the rent by about a third, she says, and she no longer felt safe on the island. In the days after the storm, she’d helped emergency responders manage the corpse of a neighbor, and found that her memories of that haunted her. What was once a paradise now felt more like a nightmare.
But finding a new place to live while commuting to work and rebuilding their lives was easier said than done. They were buried in bills. They needed to replace their clothing and get a new mattress. Basically all their furniture was destroyed. James needed a new car. The cost of gasoline was through the roof because the storm had damaged roads and otherwise disrupted local supply chains. They kept driving over nails, because there was debris everywhere, so that meant paying for new tires over and over.
“Disaster creates disaster,” James says. “You can’t anticipate all the little expenses that are going to happen to you.”
For example, James found that the cost of her medical care went up dramatically. “My health insurance at the time would only let you use your insurance to get medication if you got it through the mail,” she remembers. But she and her husband didn’t have a permanent address for months after the storm.
“We didn’t have the mail! And they wouldn’t make an exception, so I had to pay out of pocket for things at the pharmacy,” she says.
The couple quickly depleted their savings and started taking out loans to afford basic food, shelter and transportation, including a special disaster recovery loan from the federal government, which they are still repaying. James says her credit score plummeted as a result of all the loans. “They say it's expensive to be poor. Well, it's expensive to experience a natural disaster,” she says. “Things snowball, and a small problem becomes a huge problem.”
And such financial strain isn’t fleeting. Credit problems after major disasters can persist for years, and even lead to bankruptcy, according to recent research. And financial distress brought on by disasters is associated with a host of bad outcomes years or even decades down the line, because it affects everything from access to health care to education.
What would help? “30 extra points on our credit score and four free tires”
As climate change causes more and more catastrophic weather across the U.S., housing and climate experts have called on policymakers to rethink how money and other assistance are distributed after disasters.
In response, earlier this year FEMA expanded the types of assistance available after disasters, to include more money to help pay for hotels and other temporary shelter for both homeowners and renters, as well as basic, immediate needs such as diapers and food for people who are displaced from their homes.
“I think that there was a bit of an equity and access problem,” says Hagmaier, of FEMA. He says the agency’s goal is to get money into peoples’ hands as quickly as possible after a disaster. Survivors are now eligible for up to $750 to cover basic food and supplies after a storm, flood, wildfire or other major disaster. “It's a small payment, but I think it can really help fill a gap,” says Hagmaier. Although FEMA is gathering demographic information about who benefits from such assistance, he says it’s too soon to know what proportion of beneficiaries are renters.
Another policy change that has been gaining popularity is the idea that eviction should be illegal after disasters, at least for low-income renters. Right now, local governments sometimes choose to enact eviction bans after disasters, but “there should be national eviction moratoria immediately after disasters,” Martín says. Such moratoria should be left up to local governments, Hagmaier says.
FEMA has also streamlined the process for disaster survivors to apply for assistance – something Martín and other experts agree is a good way to help those who are most vulnerable, including renters. “Just shoot checks out,” Martín says. “Give people the resources so they don’t get into arrears on credit cards, so they don’t lose credit score [points]. Basic things like that, to ensure financial stability in the short term.”
Venus James says more immediate financial support would have gone a long way. “I made the joke many times after the hurricane that probably the most helpful thing FEMA could have done was given us 30 extra points on our credit score and four free tires, because you are constantly running over nails,” she says, laughing and shaking her head.
But, James says, the storm also revealed a deeper societal brokenness – one that doesn’t feel like it can be fixed by revamping disaster relief.
When James chose to become a nurse, one of the main things that drew her to the field was the promise of financial security. She loves helping people, sure, but what really made nursing feel like a good career choice was that she could be financially stable.
“I got to grow up in a time when I expected to own a home, and to be very comfortable with my income. And I was very comfortable with my income for a long time,” she says. “I'm still extremely fortunate! I want to emphasize that I’m so fortunate that I am a nurse, and I’ll always have that. I will be ok.”
But, she says, she no longer feels as stable as she once did. Even as a nurse practitioner. Skyrocketing housing prices plus unaffordable property insurance and escalating hurricane risk from climate change are putting the life she imagined further out of reach. “It’s not nearly as easy as it should be. Two people should not have to make $300,000 a year to be middle class,” she says. “That's crazy. That's not achievable, and it shouldn't be that way.”
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