Orange County’s Board of Commissioners recently approved bridge funding to help residents displaced as a result of flood damage sustained during Tropical Depression Chantal. Until last week, funds provided by the county and Town of Chapel Hill paid for hotel rooms to temporarily house flood victims, but that emergency housing fund is now dry.
The $20,000 transferred from the county’s Social Justice reserve to the Department of Social Services (DSS) will both work to extend temporary housing for flood victims and help pay the application fees and security deposits for new units. Qualifying county residents include those earning up to 200 percent of the poverty level and who were displaced from their primary residence.
The funds will particularly support residents of Camelot Village, a lower-income neighborhood located in the floodplain of Bolin Creek. In an interview with 97.9 The Hill on Aug. 27, Chair of the County Commissioners Jamezetta Bedford said while some of the 25 residents staying at the hotel are about to move into permanent homes, others still rely on the temporary housing.
“I know at least six people will be moving into housing very soon, and others need some additional funding for those nonrefundable application fees. A number of them, because the water was so scary and being rescued in the water up to your waist, they don’t want to go back to the prior unit. They want to find a new place, and I think we all know it’s very hard to find affordable units.”
Bedford said individual assistance checks from the state will not be available until October and expressed how the bridge money is a short-term solution until the county’s next business meeting, where it can then distribute an additional $74,000 raised through community donations.
“That group is going to meet Thursday,” Bedford said. “Like ‘Whoa, this cannot be long-term recovery anymore.’ If those checks are going to be a month out, we got to speed this process up, get that committee meeting, and start awarding these funds to help people that really need it.”
At a press conference organized by the Triangle Tenant Union on Aug. 21, many Camelot residents said they are struggling to find affordable housing options in Chapel Hill. And during the board meeting on August 26, they also voiced concerns about whether the bridge funding will run out again before they can find permanent housing.
“I’m a person,” Pam Wright said. “I need a roof over my head. I need to be able to take a shower, do the personal things a woman needs to do, anybody needs to do. It’s sad to treat everybody differently than the homeowners and the renters, and that’s not fair. We all were in the flood. We all lost everything. I don’t want to go back to the flood zone.”
Citing the town’s lack of affordable housing, Camelot resident Heather Gibbs explained how the problem is the “waiting game” and how it can take a long time to get off a waitlist for an affordable unit or for it to pass inspection. In the meantime, C.R. Clark, an organizer with the renters-run Triangle Tenants Union, also stressed how funds should more directly support residents.
“The $20,000 additional funding is not enough for these folks,” Clark said. “And this funding, [it is either] extending to the hotel stay or that’s going to the landlords for rental application fees. Where’s the funding that’s going to directly support these people as they try and move on with their lives and get set up in new homes.”
Bedford said how the community-giving fund could help address those basic needs for displaced residents, and she said the board will look at how to disperse the dollars at the upcoming September 4 meeting.
But Vice Chair Jean Hamilton said she believes the county needs to be more “nimble” about how it responds to future flood emergencies. Specifically, she advocated for how the board should better anticipate for if and when a funding source runs out, acknowledging how this is not the first time Camelot Village has flooded.
“Because I think the other thing I heard from the folks affected is that it’s sort of the [lack of] communication [about what’s going to happen],” Hamilton said. “That you can stay in this hotel room up to this point because that’s that funding source, right? So it’s all that uncertainty that gets built in, that for an individual that’s just faced this trauma and they have disabilities, it’s overwhelming.”
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