FEMA & The Elusive Sanctity of Home

Two of the thousands of Puerto Ricans displaced by
Hurricane Maria temporarily living in U.S. motels

As I was getting ready to go to work early Tuesday morning, I heard a news segment on WNYC public radio about the approaching deadline for the approximately 2,300 Puerto Rican families displaced by Hurricane Maria last fall.

If Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) officials in Washington don't extend an emergency aid program known as the Transitional Sheltering Assistance (TSA) program in the next two days, thousands of hurricane refugees could face eviction this Saturday June 30th.

As a real estate professional who works in the industry, there's nothing more heart-breaking to witness, or be a part of than an eviction - even if a resident has done something to deserve it.  

In the same way that separating immigrant children from their parents and incarcerating them is a violation of the very principles the United States was founded upon, the idea that an agency of the federal government could be responsible for a mass eviction of U.S. citizens who fled an island nation ravaged by a hurricane is simply outrageous.

And just as outrageous as the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court upholding Trump's overtly racist and discriminatory travel ban earlier yesterday in a closely-watched 5-4 decision.

Even as thousands of Americans prepare to attend mass protests against the Trump administration's heartless immigration policies this Saturday June 30th in Washington, New York and other cities, it could be a really shitty weekend for many of the 2,300 displaced Puerto Rican families currently depending on vouchers from FEMA's TSA program to live in motels around the U.S.

Given Trump's full descent down into a dark, racist, unhinged obsession with scapegoating and vilifying non-white immigrants in a desperate effort to rally the conservative supporters who applaud his vile bigotry and concocted rage, it's not surprising that mainstream media coverage of his repugnant tweets, repeated lies and conflicting statements on immigration is overshadowing so many other important news stories.

Like the ongoing crisis in Puerto Rico and the looming expiration of FEMA's TSA voucher program.

Maria Baez-Claudio and her 5-YO grandson who
has cerebral palsy wait for his school bus to arrive

But not all mainstream media content producers have moved on from reporting on the lasting effects of Hurricane Maria.

For example, "The Disaster Is Not Over", an 8-minute digital documentary produced by NBC News' NBC Latino, looks at the story of Maria Baez-Claudio (pictured left).

She's a healthcare professional from Puerto Rico displaced by Hurricane Maria who currently lives in a Super 8 Motel in Kissimmee, Florida with the help of a TSA emergency rental subsidy voucher provided by FEMA.


She's a the sole caregiver of her 5-year-old grandson Christian Dariel, a wheel-chair-bound special needs child with cerebral palsy who needs constant supervision to eat, and dress - he must wear diapers because he is unable to use the toilet on his own.

As the short NBC documentary shows, Baez-Claudio applied to FEMA for an extension on the emergency rental subsidy she receives, but her application was denied because FEMA officials now claim that Puerto Rico is now "livable".

But as CBS News correspondent David Begnaud reported back on June 1st, on the first official day of the 2018 hurricane season, a staggering 11,000 customers of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority who lost power last fall after Hurricane Maria hit, are still without electricity.

And many of the homes that are still partially standing, particularly those in hard-hit rural areas, still haven't been repaired and have roofs and walls covered by blue plastic tarp at a time when Puerto Rico's hot, muggy season stretches from May to October - temperatures in July are expected to average in the upper 80's and low 90's.

Activists in Florida are currently urging the passage of some kind of humanitarian intervention by Florida Republican Governor Rick Scott and the Republican-majority Florida legislature - but that's the same state legislature that has diverted $1.3 billion over the past decade from state funds earmarked for affordable housing to the general fund to spend on other programs.

Tamara Rivera-Santiago & Marinelys Cartagena in front
of the Lancaster, PA motel where they've been living

Barring action in the next few days, like the 610 other displaced Puerto Rican families currently being housed in motels around the state of Florida, Maria Baez-Claudio and her grandson will be forced to vacate the Super 8 motel where they currently live by Saturday June 30th.

With no clear idea of where she and her grandson will go, or how they will live.

Try and imagine having that on your mind as you look across a motel room at your 5-year-old grandson.

An innocent child afflicted with cerebral palsy.

That same haunting uncertainty is also being faced by hurricane-displaced Puerto Ricans in 30 other states including Lancaster, Pennsylvania where Tamara Rivera-Santiago and her three children, and Marinelys Cartagena (pictured above) and her four children have been staying in the Budget Host Inn just outside Lancaster with the aid of temporary emergency vouchers provided by FEMA's TSA program.

As reporter Tim Stuhldreher reported for Lancaster Online back in April, both women fled their respective towns in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria last fall due to lack of electricity and long lines for  basics like food, fresh water and gasoline. 

According to Stuhldreher's article, Rivera-Santiago had a job in Puerto Rico working at a bakery, but the business closed when it could no longer get supplies from the U.S. mainland to operate - so she had to flee the island with her children.

While Stuhldreher reports that various local charities in the Lancaster area have organized to try and assist some of the hundreds of Puerto Ricans who arrived in the local area after Hurricane Maria (Lancaster already had a fairly large Puerto Rican population before the storm), at least seven families temporarily being housed in the Budget Host Inn with FEMA assistance could be forced to leave this Saturday.

Embattled (and reviled) DHS Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen

While Florida Democratic Senator Bill Nelson is one of many politicians appealing to FEMA to grant another extension of the TSA housing program, the prospect of help from a federal agency in the Trump era isn't good.

Remember, FEMA is under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security which is currently headed by Kirstjen Nielsen - a heartless, right-wing Trump sycophant whose become the face of Trump's vile anti-immigrant bigotry.

Nielsen spent much of the past two weeks defending a widely-reviled border policy that criminalized people seeking asylum in the U.S. and separated their children from them.

Nielsen was famously confronted by protesters who booed and shouted "Shame!" at her at a DC-area Mexican restaurant last week, and according to Yahoo News, last Friday morning, a large group of protesters stood outside her townhouse in Virginia and played audio recordings of unaccompanied immigrant children crying for their parents and chanted "How do you sleep at night?" 

So even though Puerto Ricans are in fact American citizens, in the narrow lens of a Trump administration rooted in racism, xenophobia and bigotry, they are non-white people - the likelihood of DHS extending FEMA's TSA housing voucher program is slim.

In addition to insisting that Puerto Rico is now "livable", FEMA (under Nielsen and Trump) is instead contacting some of the 2,300 displaced Puerto Ricans currently housed in motels around the U.S. and offering them one-way plane tickets back to the hurricane-ravaged island as hurricane season gets underway.

NJ Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy visits a shelter
 in San Juan, Puerto Rico back in December

Given the grim reality that that's how the Trump administration is treating U.S. citizens, the burden is falling to individual states to take action.

Here in New Jersey, back in February, two months after visiting the island of Puerto Rico with other state politicians to inspect the devastating hurricane damage, newly-elected Democratic Governor Phil Murphy signed an executive order creating an 18-member, three-month commission tasked with finding ways to help the 30,000-plus displaced Puerto Ricans currently living in the Garden State.


Back in March, I listened to a segment on NPR's The Takeaway documenting the many difficulties faced by some of the many Puerto Rican Americans still living in motels around the country six months after Hurricane Maria devastated the island - where hundreds of small business that residents depend on are still closed on an island that was already facing an economic crisis.

I heard some of those stories first-hand from displaced Puerto Ricans in months following Hurricane Maria.

One of the most difficult aspects of my day job managing the leasing for a residential apartment community in Hamilton, New Jersey is having to be the person responsible for delivering bad news to anxious people in transition desperate to get an apartment.

It's especially hard when you have good people whose applications are denied due to circumstances that they had nothing to do with; like a messy divorce that torpedoed someone's credit because of an ex-spouse's poor financial decisions.

Or an applicant who works two jobs and has solid income who's application is denied because they were injured on the job and the reduced pay from workman's compensation caused them to be late on their rent four times in a 12-month period before they got back on their feet again.

The Quinones family in their Queens, NY hotel room

But it's even harder when potential applicants can't meet the screening criteria because a natural disaster upended their life and finances.

And the difficulties and stress of the transition made it extremely difficult to find work, and arrange for child care while adjusting to living in a new city or town.

As reporter Alexandra Starr reported in a segment for WNYC back in January, the plight of Christopher and Charline Quinones (pictured left) is a perfect example.

As Starr reported, they're the parents of two young girls and they managed to find temporary shelter in a Extended Stay America hotel in Queens not far from LaGuardia Airport with the help of a FEMA TSA housing voucher.

Both parents wake early for an almost 2-hour commute into Manhattan where they search for work - they're lucky enough that grandmother Rosa can stay "home" and watch the girls during the day.

But the stress of trying to find a job, living in cramped quarters with five people and being far from their relatives who are still back in Puerto Rico weighs heavily on the family - multiply their story by thousands and you get a basic sense of the ongoing humanitarian and housing crisis that's happening to American citizens right.

Back in late November and December of 2017, more than a few people from Puerto Rico who'd been forced to flee the devastation of Hurricane Maria called or emailed my office desperately looking for affordable housing.

Unfortunately, the income and residency requirements that the privately-owned real estate management company I work for uses to screen applicants made it impossible for the displaced Puerto Ricans I spoke or emailed with to get approved for the 2-bedroom apartments they were usually seeking.

Displaced Puerto Ricans in a temporary shelter in
Orlando, Florida days after Hurricane Maria

Decent, affordable 2-bedroom apartments are hard enough to find in the Princeton, Lawrenceville, Hamilton area as it is, and with rents as high as they are these days, it was almost impossible for most displaced Puerto Ricans to find housing in this area.

That's not the case for all, a number of displaced people from Puerto Rico already had family ties or friends living in the U.S. - some were lucky enough to able to temporarily shack up with loved ones, find work and save enough money to get their own place.

But for many displaced people, meeting the application screening criteria, including income and credit checks, plus coming up with the application fees, first month's rent and security deposit (some properties also want last month's rent up front too), just made finding a decent place too steep a hill to climb - even when they had already managed to find work here.

It's not like anyone called me in tears or anything, but I could hear the tension in the voices of Puerto Ricans who called me; they called me from New York, Florida, New Jersey and I even got some calls from as far north as Boston and Connecticut.

To a degree, these were some of the lucky ones, people who'd been able to get flights off the island to reach U.S. cities like Miami, Atlanta and New York relatively soon after Maria totally devastated Puerto Rico - many were able to find temporary shelter with relatives who already lived here.

By the time most reached my office they were coming to grips with the reality that most apartment applicants need to show proof of monthly income to get an application approved.

Trump throws paper towels with thousands of
Puerto Ricans without power and many missing

And these were folks who'd had to flee their homes, loved ones, communities and jobs in a country that was already spiraling into an economic crisis.

It's not easy telling desperate Americans devastated by a natural disaster doing everything possible to get back on their feet that they can't qualify for an apartment.

The Trump administration's handling of aid to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria was epic fail.

And questionable at best (who can forget Trump throwing paper towels to displaced residents seeking federal assistance?), so in my view FEMA at least bears a moral and ethical responsibility to ensure that Americans displaced by that natural disaster have decent housing while they find a way to get back on their feet.

FEMA provided housing subsidies to victims of other U.S. hurricanes like Katrina for two or even more years - it's only nine months since Hurricane Maria and the federal agency under Kirstjen Nielsen and Trump are already trying to yank housing vouchers out from under the feet of those who still need them.

A decision that's clearly linked with the heartless ethnic and racial bias that's defined the Trump administration's approach to, well, pretty much everything.

FEMA has two days left to grant an extension of the TSA program.

But with the White House currently obsessed with deporting non-white people (even American citizens like Puerto Ricans), this Saturday when the TSA deadline expires, the sanctity of finding a home even could become even more elusive than it already is for those still in need of a helping hand.

Pfizer's Irish Tax Dodge & 21st Century Conservative Ethics

Trump supporter grappling with a protester in VA (AP)

The headline-grabbing violence erupting between rival protesters at recent Donald Trump rallies serves as a harsh reminder that the current state of divisive American politics, much like the one-hour "Spring Forward" earlier this morning marking daylight savings time, is an extremely sharp double-edged sword that cuts in different ways.

For those like me who are definitely not "morning people", there's an immediate lingering sense of unfairness from having a precious 60 minutes of sleep snatched away.


But on the other hand there's that revitalizing feeling that comes from the increased light stretching into the early evenings, heralding summer's approach.

While the temperatures hovered in the low 60's today, the gray overcast skies over Hamilton, New Jersey and lack of sunlight or breeze combined to create a sense of stillness that reflects the mild sense of disorientation I felt waking up into the one-hour shift forward into daylight savings time.

It's not unlike the sense of disorientation that 21st century conservative ethics, ideology and politics have cast over the American landscape.

For example, a February 25th press release issued by the organization Americans For Tax Fairness detailed the efforts of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer (maker of drugs like Viagra, Celebrex and Lipitor) to exploit gaping loopholes in the U.S. Tax Code by merging with a small pharmaceutical company based in Ireland called Allergan in a sketchy effort to avoid a staggering $35 billion in U.S. taxes by shifting it's base across the Atlantic to Ireland.

Please note that Americans For Tax Fairness is NOT to be confused with conservative anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist's Americans For Tax Reform; the organization that created the notorious and fiscally irresponsible "No New Taxes" pledge that has been signed by hundreds of Republican politicians across the country.

Pfizer's move, a practice known as corporate inversion that enables American companies like Apple to avoid paying billions in U.S. taxes, would shift it's taxable base to Ireland even though the global pharmaceutical giant would still be headquartered in New York.

As the executive director of Americans For Tax Fairness Frank Clemente observed in the AFTF press release:

"By dodging taxes while increasing prescription drug prices, Pfizer squeezes American families and communities from two sides at once. In the company's biggest insult to America yet, Pfizer's merger would allow it to go on enjoying all the benefits of being based here - everything from a publicly-educated workforce, to an excellent communications infrastructure, to a reliable patent system - without adequately paying to support them."

Pfizer certainly isn't the only U.S. company trying to use the avoidance of paying their fair share of taxes as a strategic move to increase profits.

But it's a reflection of the power lobbyists have to spend millions to influence the politicians who create these kinds of obscure tax loopholes for large corporations - the same politicians who view unemployment insurance, nutrition assistance programs, housing subsidies and even job training programs as "government waste".

Well over a 100,000 people have signed an online petition (you can too!) that will be delivered to the White House encouraging the President and Treasury Department to deny a massive pharmaceutical manufacturer like Pfizer the right to skip out on paying $35 billion in taxes by simply changing their address.

Tap water flows from tainted pipes in Flint, Michigan

Corporate tax inversion is just one troubling aspect of a Republican philosophy of further widening the wealth gap in this nation by shifting even more of the tax burden onto the middle-class and the working poor through the pursuit of destructive policies that place profits for corporations, big institutional investors, and wealthy individual investors over the collective interests of the nation and the average American.

The suppression of wage increases for average workers, or the reluctance of Republicans in Congress to authorize emergency funds for critical infrastructure repairs to the water system in Flint, Michigan are just two examples.

You can also see that divisive philosophy reflected in Republican efforts to manipulate energy policy in favor of fossil fuel producers by trying to suppress the ability of individual American home owners to have the right to choose to use solar power to save on energy costs.

Tim Dickinson's February 11th Rolling Stone article "The Dirty War On Solar Power"  chronicles the coordinated nation-wide effort of Republican lawmakers, extremist billionaire Republican rainmakers like the Koch brothers and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) - the activist conservative policy-making think tank they finance- to pressure state lawmakers in states like Nevada and Florida to re-write laws that impose steep rate hikes and unjustified fees on home owners who want to choose renewable energy sources like solar power.

Anti-solar Republican Florida Governor Rick Scott

Dickinson's article offers a glimpse into the power that investor-owned utilities wield over state politics and the Republican lawmakers who willingly write legislation (often drafted by ALEC) that puts up barriers to rooftop solar.

The very same politicians who rail about the excessive intrusion of state and federal government into commerce and private industry use government legislation on behalf of fossil fuel providers to stop average Americans from putting solar panels on their own roofs to draw power from the sun .

As Dickinson observes, Florida Republican Governor Rick Scott (pictured above) has personally accepted over $1 million of the $18 million in campaign contributions that the state's biggest power utilities have donated to state politicians in Florida since 2004.

Ironic that the biggest political donors in the Sunshine State are anti-solar power utilities that reap profits from the burning of fossil fuels.

There's something deeply troubling and distinctly un-American about Donald Trump encouraging riled-up supporters at his rallies to engage in outright thuggery against people protesting the hatred and bigotry he peddles; and his offering to pay the legal fees of those arrested for assault.

Just as the policies and ideology advocated by the 21st century Republican party are less about the common interests and "general welfare"of the American people than the enrichment of the privileged few.

A point that seems to elude the disenfranchised masses packing into arenas to listen to yet another billionaire who exploits their anger and frustration by telling them what's wrong with the country to obscure the fact that the Republican party and the unrestricted flow of Dark Money into the political system are the architects of the very circumstances that fuel their rage against those who actually have nothing to do with it.