Miss. Hurricane Victims to Lose Subsidized Hotel Rooms

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More than 1,200 families left homeless in Mississippi by Hurricane Katrina will lose their federally subsidized hotel rooms beginning Monday.

Federal Emergency Management Agency officials said Saturday that hotel authorization codes will expire this week for a total of 12,000 families nationwide.

Libby Turner, head of the Hurricanes Katrina and Rita transitional housing unit for FEMA, said 10,500 of the 12,000 families have received cash assistance to help them transition into long-term housing.

“This is not equivalent to eviction. This is about billing,” Turner said in a conference call with reporters across the country. “As we come to the end of the program, folks who choose to stay in their hotel rooms can (pay with) FEMA rental assistance. How they choose to use those funds is certainly up to them.”

There are 1,271 Mississippi families that must find new housing.

The Hampton Inn in Hattiesburg said it has 11 Katrina families, but it would not identify the families by name.

Last week, some evacuees were ousted from Jackson-area hotels to make room for visitors in town for the Dixie National Rodeo at the Mississippi Fairgrounds.

FEMA’s hotel-motel housing program is ending nearly six months after Katrina made landfall Aug. 29. Monday’s deadline will bring to 16,500 the number of families weaned off their sponsored hotel stays in the past two weeks.

The FEMA move, however, comes at a time when many south Mississippi and southeast Louisiana storm victims are still struggling to recover.

People whose homes were destroyed or severely damaged – and have not yet been repaired, have been bunking for months all over the country with friends, with family or in hotel rooms.

Displaced families living in hotel rooms had plenty of warning that they would need to seek other housing options, Turner said.

Evacuees in hotels were notified through a massive communications campaign that they had to register by Jan. 30 for authorization codes that would give them two extra weeks to transition into longer-term housing.

“Emergency sheltering help is not the type of assistance that is needed long-term,” Turner said.

Though the hotel-motel program is closed, hurricane victims who have yet to identify themselves to FEMA can still request assistance, FEMA spokeswoman Natalie Rule said.

Among the 12,000 families who will lose their hotel rooms, FEMA said 1,100 are ineligible for further housing assistance because their homes are inhabitable or they were already homeless before the storm.

Turner said those evacuees have been referred to other charitable programs.

FEMA said it would continue to pay for families in 5,000 hotel rooms across the country.