When Hurricane Michael tore through the Florida panhandle last October, it killed at least 43 people, caused an estimated $25 billion in damage, and destroyed thousands of homes. In Mexico Beach, Florida, where the storm made landfall and the damage was concentrated, nearly half the homes were destroyed and almost all of them were damaged. Many residents were still living in substandard housing six months after the storm, and competing for a shrunken pool of rental units with workers who had come to town to assist in the storm recovery, according to a report in The Washington Post. Other areas of Florida were already facing challenging housing shortages. And earlier this year, as Next City reported, the state legislature once again pulled money from an affordable housing trust fund to pay for other programs, including disaster relief.
Housing damage from extreme weather events like Hurricane Michael “further compounds the nationwide affordable housing crisis,” the Center for American Progress, the left-leaning D.C. think tank with close ties to the Democratic Party, wrote in a report released earlier this month called “A Perfect Storm: Extreme Weather as an Affordable Housing Crisis Multiplier.”
Continue reading Next City here, courtesy of Jared Brey.