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(YAHOO NEWS)
It is hard to sleep at night inside the tent city at Oceanport,
New Jersey. A few hundred Superstorm Sandy refugees have been living
here since Wednesday – a muddy camp that is a sprawling anomaly amidst
Mercedes Benz dealerships and country clubs in this town near the
state’s devastated coastal region.
No one is allowed to go anywhere
without showing their I.D. Even to use the bathroom, “you have to show
your badge,” said Amber Decamp, a 22-year-old whose rental was washed
away in Seaside Heights, New Jersey.
The mini city has no cigarettes,
no books, no magazines, no board games, no TVs, and no newspapers or
radios. On Friday night, in front of the mess hall, which was serving
fried chicken and out-of-the-box, just-add-water potatoes, a child was
dancing and dancing — to nothing. “We’re starting to lose it,” said
Decamp. “But we have nowhere else to go.”
The tent city is emblematic of
the crisis left by Sandy: the tens of thousands of people who have no
place to live. Some are without power and heat – even if the utilities
have their power back, their electrics and heating systems in their
homes may have been destroyed by the floods. They are the short-termers.
Others have a longer-term problem – their houses were made completely
uninhabitable by flooding, ripped apart, or burned to the ground. And
they pose a far more daunting challenge.
For now, all are without homes in one of the harshest housing markets
in the world, with low vacancy rates and high rents. “There’s inventory
in other parts of the country, but not here,” said University of
Pennsylvania Wharton School Professor Susan Wachter.To be sure, no one has been forced to stay in the tent city. But many say they have no other immediate option.
“This is an incredibly tough situation trying to find housing for these people,” said Federal Emergency Management Agency Public Affairs Manager Scott Sanders. “With winter coming, they obviously can’t stay there.”
FEMA has plans to bring trailers into New Jersey to increase the amount of temporary housing.
While FEMA is helping at the tent
city, it is being run by the state of New Jersey. The state’sDepartment
of Human Services did not immediately return calls seeking comment on
Saturday morning.
Brad Gair, New York Mayor Michael
Bloomberg’s new emergency housing czar, has also talked about the
complexities of post-disaster housing. The authorities in the region
simply don’t have access to enough alternative housing or hotel rooms
for all those who have been displaced. And all the problems this creates
are on display here, where life has been even worse than during the
storm, evacuees say.
One reason: the information
blackout. Outside of the tightly guarded community on Friday, word was
spreading that the Department of Human Services would aim to move
residents to the racetrack clubhouse on Saturday. The news came after
photos of people bundled in blankets and parkas inside the tents
circulated in the media.
But inside the tent city, which
has room for thousands but was only sheltering a couple of hundred on
Friday, no one had heard anything about a move – or about anything else.
“They treat us like we’re prisoners,” says Ashley Sabol, 21, of Seaside
Heights, New Jersey. “It’s bad to say, but we honestly feel like we’re
in a concentration camp.”
Sabol, who is unemployed and
whose rental home was washed away in the hurricane, remembers being
woken up on Wednesday at the shelter she was staying in at Toms River
High School. Conditions there were “actually fine,” said Sabol.
Sabol was told that she had half
an hour to pack: everyone was getting shipped to hotels in Wildwood, New
Jersey, where they would be able to re-acquaint themselves with
showers, beds and a door.
Sabol and about 50 other people
boarded a New Jersey Transit bus, which drove around, seemingly
aimlessly, for hours. Worse, this week’s Nor’easter snow storm was
gathering force, lashing the bus with wind and rain.
After four hours, the bus driver
pulled into a dirt parking lot. The passengers were expecting a hotel
with heat and maybe even a restaurant. Instead they saw a mini city of
portable toilets and voluminous white tents with their flaps snapping in
the wind. Inside, they got sheets, a rubbery pillow, a cot and one
blanket.
There was no heat that night, and
as temperatures dropped to freezing, people could start to see their
breath. The gusts of wind blew snow and slush onto Sabol’s face as her
cot was near the open tent flaps. She shivered. Her hands turned purple.
It has taken three days for the tents to get warm.
Power workers from out of state
who are helping utilities restore electricity to the area were starting
to bed down in the tent city, too. Some empty vodka bottles appeared on
the muddy street. There were now far more men than women or children,
and the women said it was impossible not to notice the leering of some
men.
Brian Skorupski, a manager with
Tolland, Connecticut-based Asplundh Line Construction, had just rolled
in with 50 workers, who were there to help restore power. Skorupski is
used to his house in the suburbs. He missed his king-sized bed with his
Hotel Collection sheets. “The only thing worse than this is sleeping in
your truck,” he said.
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