No place like home

Sep 20, 2022 | 8:00 pm ET

By Sean Scully

Jennifer and Isidro Archuleta are waiting for FEMA rental money to arrive in the mail. (Photo by Megan Gleason/Source NM)

It’s Tuesday again, proving once more that time marches on. Let’s see what’s in the news.

The Big Takeaway

Most of us take for granted that we have a reasonably comfortable and safe place to lay our heads at night, to raise our families, and keep our things. But a growing number of Americans can’t take that for granted.

In northern New Mexico, it was a record fire followed by massive flooding that drove many residents from their homes. Now, more than two months after the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire, many residents are stuck in a bureaucratic quagmire, waiting for housing assistance from FEMA, reports Source New Mexico.

Bodi Mack told reporter Megan Gleason that he had just moved to New Mexico when his rented cabin was destroyed in the July blaze. FEMA gave him money for food and clothing, but he is still awaiting housing relief.

“FEMA’s having a hard time,” Mack said. “They keep calling me, asking me how I’m doing, and I said, ‘I’m just living out of my car. I’m staying at friends’ houses.’ And they would say, ‘Oh, we’re trying to find housing, but it’s really hard in the area.’”

Jennifer and Isidro Archuleta said they’re in a bad situation: flooding wiped out the road to their former home, meaning FEMA inspectors can’t assess the damage. That means they can’t prove their home is uninhabitable. They finally managed to convince the agency to send them some money, but it’s too little to cover their costs, less than $600 total.

“It’s been so hard to work with FEMA,” Isidro Archuleta said. “It’s a long process. They make it so hard on you.”

An agency spokesperson said the process of relief can be complicated.

“FEMA works to move families into temporary housing as quickly as possible, although each family has a specific set of circumstances that affect their specific timeline,” FEMA representative Angela Byrd said via email.

In Arkansas, residents of the Big Country Chateau apartment complex may have roofs over their heads, but they say the 151-unit facility is barely fit for habitation. A new lawsuit by the state attorney general contends that the owner, New Jersey-based Apex Equity Group, has persistently ignored unsafe conditions, including mold, sewage leaks and other horrors.

“Outside the buildings, trash, animal feces, and debris were found scattered throughout the lawn and around the pool; doors were missing, with empty doorways boarded up; windows were shattered; electrical boxes were open, with wires tangled and exposed; and the fire extinguisher hooks were all empty,” the lawsuit says.

Another New Jersey company, PF Holdings, owns another decrepit Arkansas complex, Jefferson Manor. And it just happens to share an address with Apex. Neither company responded to requests for comment.

Residents of Jefferson Manor describe similar conditions as Big Country Chateau.

“It got so bad that we couldn’t breathe, so they put us in a hotel, but they don’t provide for food or anything,” resident Vivian Allen told the Arkansas Advocate, describing a sewer line rupture that has gone unrepaired for more than a month. “All of our belongings are tied up in this building where we can’t even go back in there and get stuff out that we need.”

Allen has filed a consumer complaint with the attorney general, hoping the office will take action there as well.

But in the meantime, most residents of the apartment complexes have nowhere else to go.

“I’ve always hated the feeling of being trapped with no options,” Big Country Chateau resident Nick Black said.

Meanwhile, the news is somewhat better for people in New Jersey, where the governor has signed a new law that will require utility companies to report affordability metrics like rates, average and median customer bills and usage, arrears, shutoffs, and tax liens sold on homes for non-payment, the New Jersey Monitor reports.

Historically about a fifth of New Jersey households have trouble paying their utility bills regularly and the pandemic made things worse. State officials hope that the new data will help assess the effectiveness of existing relief programs and perhaps craft new policies and programs.

“There’s a huge data gap,” said Larry Levine, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which advocated for the bill. “This bill brings some transparency, some daylight, to that issue, and ensures that we’re going to have good data going forward about how and where people are struggling to pay their water and energy bills.”

Reproductive Rights

The battle over abortion in Ohio is causing chaos across the region, the Ohio Capital Journal reports. For 11 weeks, abortions in the state stopped, but a judge has temporarily blocked the ban through at least next week. A lawsuit contends the law violates the state constitution’s due process provision.

Patients, meanwhile, are traveling as far away as New Jersey and Washington D.C. to find care. Providers in nearby Pennsylvania and Michigan say they are struggling to find staff to meet demand. In many cases they’re having to prioritize patients, putting those with immediate health needs or who are approaching the gestation limits of the law first in line.

“Just like our staff, the clinics in the receiving states I know for a fact are working around the clock,” said Leah Mallinos, a patient navigator for Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio. “Some clinics I believe are open seven days a week now to adjust to this influx.”

This is getting harder and harder to do in many places. (Photo by Astrid Riecken/Getty Images)

Our partners at the Texas Tribune, meanwhile, report on the story of a 27-year-old Texas woman whose fetus was diagnosed with anencephaly, a neural tube defect in which the brain, skull and scalp do not develop properly in the womb.

Texas law makes no exceptions for fetal abnormalities, even the most serious, forcing Lisa Hall to travel to Seattle to have her pregnancy ended before it came to a miscarriage or stillbirth, as was highly likely with such a condition.

On top of learning the baby she wanted would not survive, she struggled with the fear and anxiety of her semi-clandestine journey out of state and running a gauntlet of protesters at the Washington state clinic. She says it has been a difficult few weeks since she returned to Texas.

“You have to suddenly leave for a medical procedure, and you don’t know what’s going to happen, so despite everything that made me leave, it was a relief to be back home,” she said. “But I’m still so angry I had to leave.”

Caught Our Eye

Arizona’s Mark Finchem is running to be the state’s top election official, the secretary of state. The Republican is somewhat famous for his white cowboy hat and his straight-out-of-central-casting Western mustache. He’s also increasingly famous for his conspiratorial views, particularly that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump.

As if to underline his conspiracy-laden reputation, Finchem held a fundraiser in California on Sunday that was hosted by a conspiracy theorist who believes 9/11 was orchestrated by the U.S. government and attended by a prominent QAnon influencer, the Arizona Mirror reports.

“Video of the event shows that conspiracy theory language and rhetoric was front and center,” reporter Jerod MacDonald-Evoy writes. “A song titled “WWG1WGA,” which is the QAnon slogan, was sung live by the artist who wrote it.”

Finchem did not respond to inquiries about whether he endorses the sometimes outlandish views of the fundraiser organizers and speakers.

From the Newsrooms

One Last Thing

A sharp-eyed reader points out that we unjustly called freshwater mussels “yummy” in Monday’s newsletter. In fact, she reports, they are said to taste like mud. So apologies to our freshwater bivalve friends. Unfortunately for their saltwater cousins, the yummy verdict remains in place.