Uprooted By Storms, Then by Aid Running Out

NEW YORK — Over the weekend, Yanitza Cruz and her family moved. Again. Twice, in fact, for the third and fourth times since Hurricane Maria swamped their home in a rural village in Puerto Rico in September.

Their new address is, like the last two, a hotel in the Queens borough of New York, this one rented by New York City’s Department of Homeless Services as a family shelter. It is a lifeline the city offered to Puerto Rican evacuees from Hurricane Maria this past week, just as shelter assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency was about to run out. But it is also another stop in a journey that has seemed endless.

“I got rid of a lot of stuff and put it into storage,” Cruz, 28, said as she taped up boxes Saturday morning in a room crammed with shopping bags and luggage at her FEMA-provided hotel near La Guardia Airport, working around her 5-year-old daughter and infant son. “But I still feel like I have too much stuff here to take with me.”

FEMA has spent more than $84 million on a temporary shelter program for Puerto Rican evacuees of hurricanes Maria and Irma, and Saturday, after several extensions, that assistance was scheduled to run out. In the face of the deadline, New York City announced last week that it would take in evacuees instead, placing the 108 households in hotels.

The FEMA housing assistance was extended for a few more days when a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order Saturday blocking the expiration, and FEMA said the program would continue until Thursday. A hearing in the case, filed on the grounds that ending the federal program would put evacuees “at risk of homelessness and other irreparable injury,” is scheduled Monday.

Jaclyn Rothenberg, a spokeswoman for Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, said that in the face of the order, the city was “not taking any chances,” and would continue to offer help. The city said it spends an average of $222 each day to shelter a family in a hotel, including the cost of social services such as employment counseling and mental health services.

In any case, by the time the judge’s order came through, the Cruzes had already left the SpringHill Suites by Marriott, a sleek white box near the airport where FEMA had put them up for the past six months, alongside wedding parties, business travelers, out-of-town sports fans and tourists.

As Cruz packed, saving for last a crib for her 3-month-old son, Nathan, she counted her blessings. Her 5-year-old daughter, Janesty, would not have to change schools. Nathan, who has a digestive problem, receives first-rate medical care here. And her husband, Joel García, completed his training to get a barber’s license and now has a job at a barbershop in the Jamaica neighborhood of Queens.

“We’ve been good,” she said. “The only thing that we need, actually, is just the housing.”

Cruz and García are determined to rebuild their lives here in New York, rather than return to Puerto Rico, more so since Nathan was born in the spring at Bellevue Hospital Center. “He is a New Yorker, so I’ve got to give him a chance to know his city,” Cruz said.

Cruz said goodbyes to hotel staff at the SpringHill Suites, exchanging a tearful hug with one. A driver loaded the family’s belongings off a trio of bellman carts into a van provided by the city to take evacuees to their next address. Janesty cried as García fastened her seat belt.

The van deposited them at the Brewer Hotel near John F. Kennedy International Airport. But they arrived to find that the two-bedroom unit they were promised was temporarily unavailable, and the family of four was being given a one-bedroom instead.

They objected to the arrangement, even as a stopgap, “because when you get the room, it’s hard to change it to another room, because it’s a big process,” García said. After negotiating with the city, the Cruzes were sent to an AHI Group hotel, a plain brick building in Jamaica, where they said they arrived around midnight and fell into bed. While they were relieved to have a place to go, Cruz said there would be some drawbacks to the new arrangement. The city is placing most Puerto Rican evacuees in hotels, not homeless shelters, but the rules of the shelter system still apply. Residents must sign in and out when they leave, and there is a 9 p.m. curfew.

Cruz said they did not know when they would have to move again, or when they might find an apartment of their own. She is trying to maintain a positive outlook.

“It’s been appointment after appointment after appointment,” she said Sunday. “Emotionally, it has been a weight on us.

“But at the same time it’s also been an adventure. We’re learning about the system, and we’ve met a lot of good people.”