Three months after Helene struck western North Carolina, thousands of people are still out of their homes and making do however they can for the holidays.
FEMA is still paying hotel bills for more than 5,000 people displaced by the storm, providing temporary rental assistance for more than 500, and has placed dozens in mobile housing so far.
Private charities also have put hundreds in trailers and other temporary housing.
About 25 of those FEMA placed in hotels are at the Inn at Shady Lawn in Newland. There, co-owner Suzzannah Gittner has turned the lobby into kind of a living room, with cushy chairs and couches and elaborate Christmas decorations.
A church brings lunch three times a week, and Gittner cooks dinner every night with food paid for by outside donations.
"We're trying to keep people's spirits up," Gittner said. "But I think January will be very hard, because you think if people came in October, we will be down until at least March 31 before they can start rebuilding because of the weather."
It's a diverse group at the inn 鈥� two families with teenage children, retirees, couples, singles, even Newland's mayor, Derek Roberts.
"We are loving. But we are very dysfunctional."Shady Lawn co-owner Suzzannah Gittner
In some ways, Gittner has stitched them into one big, storm-battered family
"We are loving," she said on a recent evening while simultaneously serving dinner and presiding over a birthday party. "But we are very dysfunctional."
Three living at the hotel had houses totally destroyed; others are waiting on repairs. Most aren't sure when they'll get to go home.
Pinky Anderson, a widow, is living in one of the Inn's rooms with her 14-year-old daughter, Jayden.
Their house just outside town was badly damaged. The charity group Samaritan's Purse gutted the inside so it could dry and prevent mold. She's applied for repair money from FEMA, but so far the house is just sitting .
"Everything with FEMA is pending," she said. "We're not getting any direction, any answers. They're not saying 'Okay, these are your options.' They're just saying 'We don't know. We can't tell you.'"
The atmosphere at the hotel has been wonderful, Anderson said. But there's no escaping the sense of living in limbo.
"My daughter spent her 14th birthday here, my birthday, her winter dance here, Thanksgiving," she said. "Christmas we'll be here. New Year's we'll be here. Every day she asks me, 'Are we going to be home for Christmas?' And I just have to tell her, 'No, we're not going to be.'"
Helene worsened an existing housing shortage
The hotel stays are meant to be a short-term bridge to a longer-lasting solution, whether that means going home after repairs or living in interim housing, like temporary rentals or mobile units.
The free stays were scheduled to end December 4, but FEMA has extended them until at least January 11.
FEMA's Jeremy Slinker said the agency is studying each case before it decides whether stays will be extended again.
"We've got a lot more information to gather on who's in sheltering assistance and what their needs are," he said "So we'll be doing that during this extended period."
Slinker said FEMA has been bringing in travel trailers and mobile homes 鈥� an approach to interim housing his agency is known for. But he acknowledges the process can be slow, especially if there has to be any sort of construction or utility work.
"We want to move fast, but we also don't want them to be unsafe or have a unit improperly installed, or one that couldn't withstand another storm, or 鈥� have ongoing issues with any type of utility, water, sewer, or electric."
The nature of the damage and the mountain terrain has posed challenges to using mobile units in the same way they sometimes are after disasters in flat, coastal areas.
The mountains don't have many unused tracts suitable for mass sites for dozens of units, and the few that exist may be far from utilities. The storm also damaged roads across the region in more than a thousand places, and repairs are still under way, making it tricky to move trailers to some places.
Slinker said FEMA is trying to emphasize faster solutions for interim housing.
It's signing leases with property managers for large numbers of rental units, and it's giving rent assistance to storm survivors who find their own places to stay.
Putting individual trailers beside residents' damaged homes also can be a good solution, Slinker said.
"They're either rebuilding or repairing, and they can watch the recovery while they also watch their stuff," he said.
Winter weather in the mountains is now adding to the challenges of repairing homes and setting up mobile units. And the region had a housing crisis even before Helene, driven by the strong market for second homes and folks flocking in to enjoy mountain living.
"The crisis that we have has been in existence for a long time," said Beth Russo, who runs the Asheville non-profit group Eblen Charities, which helps people avoid eviction and foreclosure." Not only did we have this problem long before this hurricane hit ... but we also lost a good stock of what was affordable housing for a lot of community members."
With housing so scarce, FEMA decided to offer up to 200% of fair market rental rates, in part to make vacation homes available for storm survivors.
Residents, charities employ 'creative solutions'
Hundreds around the region are dealing with the housing challenges by opting for creative solutions like donated so-called tiny houses.
Derek Roberts, the Newland mayor, said he's put one of his employees at his paving company in a workshop and is likely to put a second in.
"We've kind of converted our tool room into makeshift dormitory," he said. "We've got washers and dryers setting up and stuff like that."
Meanwhile, some storm survivors are getting travel trailers from private charities, like the one now parked in Izzy Miller's yard.
During the storm, the South Toe River rose until five and a half feet of water and mud filled Miller's home in the Yancey County community of Celo. It left silt and mud everywhere and destroyed his two vehicles.
Miller said he worked with FEMA for about a month and a half trying to get a trailer. Then he heard another member of the community got one from a charity called Operation Helo.
"I got back from Thanksgiving, I applied on a Tuesday," he said. "They pulled the camper up that Thursday. It was brand new."
He's only using it to sleep in. He doesn't need its kitchen or bathroom and hasn't bothered to rig water and sewer connections because he said that would take time away from working on his house, which he's repairing in lieu of paying rent.
FEMA officials did talk to him about other options, including a mobile unit at a commercial site perhaps 20 miles away. But Miller said he didn鈥檛 like the idea of living like that, away from his friends and his community. And it would have left less time for repairing the house.
"It would be kind of prohibitive for what I'm trying to do here, because I'm working at this house almost every day, trying to get it to a state where then I can actually go back to my normal job," he said.
A spokeswoman for Operation Helo said it has placed 185 such trailers with Helene survivors, mainly in Yancey County. Meanwhile, as of December 18, FEMA had put 76 families in mobile housing, some on private lots, some on commercial sites.
Anderson, the storm survivor with the teenage daughter at the inn in Newland, said FEMA had also suggested to her a mobile unit in a commercial RV site. But so far, it isn鈥檛 offering repair money.
"We don't have the funds to rebuild," she said. "As far as the rebuild, that is at a standstill. It has been on a standstill for us for close to five or six weeks now."
She said the trauma of the storm and the stress of uncertainty about the future just piles up for the Helene survivors who aren't back in permanent homes.
"I know people have considered suicide, there's depression, anxiety, alcohol is just affecting everybody in serious ways, and it's just gone on too long."
Anderson said in the weeks immediately after the storm, volunteer groups flooded the area to help and did great things. But inevitably they had to go back to their regular lives. Most have left, and media attention has waned.
"We feel like we have been left alone, left out, totally forgotten," she said. "We're not seen right now. I mean, all the big stories happened, and now we're still living the same story."
