Eligibility for Housing Assistance To receive money or help for housing needs, including housing repair, housing
replacement, or rental assistance, all of the following must be true:
1. The client filed for insurance benefits and the damage to his property is not covered by insurance.
2. The applicant or a member of her household is a United States citizen, a non-citizen national, or a qualified alien.
3. The home is in a presidential disaster area. 4. The applicant lives in the damaged property for the majority of the year, i.e., it is his primary residence.
5. The applicant’s home is uninhabitable, inaccessible, made unavailable by a landlord who is meeting her own disaster housing need, not functional, or the home requires repairs because of damage directly caused by the disaster.
Several important notes should be made here when offering advice to clients.
Even if a client knows her insurance will not cover her losses, she must submit a claim and provide the denial notice to FEMA. An applicant who does not satisfy condition #2 (immigration status) may be at risk of being reported to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (both ICE and FEMA are part of the Department of Homeland Security). If an applicant has not been in his home for the majority of the year, as required by condition #4, because of military service, hospitalization, or the like, but the property is his primary residence, he will be eligible for assistance (upon showing appropriate documentation). Under condition #5, the definition of “inaccessible” under the Post- Katrina Amendments includes “inaccessible because of a household member’s disability.” Lastly, under #5, FEMA may determine that damage was not directly caused by the disaster because of “deferred maintenance.” Following Hurricane Ike, low-income FEMA applicants in Texas were often denied assistance because the agency determined that their houses were damaged only because they were in poor condition prior to the disaster. This is, of course, purely speculative on FEMA’s part, since the agency had not sent inspectors to take a look at the homes prior to Ike’s landfall. FEMA has allegedly changed its deferred maintenance policy, and in Vermont, applicants have been able to successfully contest FEMA denials attributed to “deferred maintenance.” When your client’s FEMA inspector comes to the property, chat is an invaluable way of imparting an important message to the inspector: the damage was directly caused by the disaster in that it would not have incurred such damage but for the disaster, and there was no other intervening cause that the damage can be attributed to.
Eligibility for Other Needs Assistance To receive money for needs other than housing, all of the following must be true: 1. The losses occurred in a presidential disaster area.
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