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Housing woes rise as temperatures fall after Sandy

Kevin McCoy and Martha T. Moore, USA TODAY
Hector Negron bags up household garbage in his seventh-floor Carey Gardens apartment operated by the New York City Housing Authority on Sunday. Negron says the building, has no heat, hot water or electricity after Superstorm Sandy.
  • An estimated 730,000 New York utility customers remained without power as of midday Sunday
  • About 86,000 New York-area households had registered for FEMA aid
  • Unlike those affected by Hurricane Katrina, most of Sandy's victims plan to stay put -- not relocate, even temporarily

NEW YORK -- Alina Braverman returned home Sunday to storm-battered Lower Manhattan.

Not because power had been restored to the area that was flooded by the East River storm surge. But because Braverman said she had just hours to retrieve family possessions from the seven-floor building that had been declared temporarily uninhabitable pending two to four weeks of repairs.

Emergency officials are "telling us to get as much out as we can today, because they're going to padlock the building," Braverman said. "It's a very stressful situation."

A situation multiplied thousands of times over across the New York and New Jersey metropolitan area as federal, state and city officials address a historic housing crisis left by Superstorm Sandy's devastation.

"It's starting to get cold. People are in homes that are uninhabitable. It's going to become increasingly clear that they are uninhabitable when the temperature drops and the heat doesn't go on," said New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo after a recovery planning session in Manhattan with federal, state, city and suburban officials.

"People don't like to leave their homes, but the reality is going to be in the temperature," Cuomo added. "And then we're going to have tens of thousands of people who need housing solutions right away, and a variety of housing solutions -- some short-term, some long-term."

An estimated 730,000 New York utility customers remained without electricity as of midday Sunday. And about 86,000 New York-area households had registered for Federal Emergency Management Agency assistance, at an estimated cost of $97 million, FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate said.

"There are homes that won't be repaired that were destroyed," Fugate said.

The New York metropolitan area poses unique housing challenges in the storm's aftermath.

Unlike Hurricane Katrina, the powerful storm that devastated New Orleans and the nation's Gulf Coast in 2005, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other officials say most of Sandy's housing victims plan to stay put, not relocate to other cities, towns or states.

In the city's five boroughs, an as-yet unidentified number of larger residential high-rises, including several low-income public housing projects run by the New York City Housing Authority, "are going to be out of commission for a very long time," Bloomberg said.

"The magnitude of the problem is we think we could have something between 30,000 and 40,000 people that we're going to have to find housing for," Bloomberg said. "We are working on it."

Identifying storm victims who need short- or long-term housing and communicating what relief is available is also difficult. After major storms, FEMA establishes temporary disaster recovery centers, sometimes in tents, around hard-hit areas.

But Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said Sunday that the high numbers of New Yorkers rendered temporarily or long-term homeless by Sandy's fury means FEMA needs many more of these centers than are currently in place.

"In a city like New York, to say that something's a mile away, that's 150,000 people away," Schumer said.

Staten Island, the Queens oceanfront and some other areas ravaged by the storm have few hotels nearby available for emergency housing. And Schumer said the metropolitan area's housing costs, among the nation's highest, means disaster and housing agencies should weigh authorizing higher-than-normal reimbursements.

"There's a lot of despair," Schumer said. "You see how people's lives have been ripped apart by this force of nature."

Among them is Braverman, 41, the Manhattan mom who was reunited Friday with her 11-year-old son, Max. He went to stay with grandparents after the storm evacuation on Oct. 29, she said.

Their building suffered extensive water damage to the electrical system, which must be repaired before they and other families in the building can move home. In the meantime, Max is scheduled to resume classes Monday at a middle school in the Battery Park City area on Manhattan's Hudson River waterfront.

Braverman said she has booked a hotel, "but that's a temporary solution."

"No one's communicating a lot of information to us," she said. "It was a lot easier than this after 9/11. There was a lot less uncertainty."

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