Disabled and being kicked out, help us relocate!
Disabled and being kicked out, help us relocate!
Disabled and being kicked out, help us relocate!
Disabled and being kicked out, help us relocate!
Disabled and being kicked out, help us relocate!
This campaign is closed
Disabled and being kicked out, help us relocate!
My name is Aleksandir Trieste. I am 24 years old, disabled, and as of January 9th 2018, I will be homeless. So I'm asking for your help, however big or small, to help my family get together the money to move and pay for initial expenses like security deposit and first month's rent.
The long and the short of it, the tl;dr version, is that my family has been routinely and repeatedly screwed over by natural disasters, corporate greed, rampant incompetence, malicious lies, and just life. It's gotten to be a saying in our house that if it can go wrong, it will go wrong. And now we're here with depleted savings, maxed out credit lines, a lease termination notice and no money for a security deposit anywhere else. We own two small houses that were decimated by Hurricane Sandy (our house and the house that was my grandfather's next door), there is a $200,000 insurance settlement sitting on our lawyer's desk that he refuses to let the mortgage company cash, $50,000 of insurance settlement that needs to be reissued to our mortgage company because the check got old waiting for the lawsuit, & our mortgage company still has $70,000 of another insurance payment that they refuse to release so that we can do work because they want the work to magically happen before the money. It's getting absurd.
I'm disabled. I have been on disability since I was 18. I have never worked. I have a combination of mental health issues (anxiety, bipolar 2, & adhd, to name a few) and physical health issues (including a combination of fibromyalgia and a degenerative connective tissue disorder known as Ehlers-Danlos that together leave me in fairly constant pain) that make it so my capacity on any given day varies greatly from "I made it through a day at a con thanks to lots of painkillers!" to "I brushed my teeth today and that was a lot!" But I still try to do what I can. Unfortunately, it means I can't just go out and get a job to fix my situation. I can only do what I can do. But normally that's okay.
On August 28th, 2011, the house I lived in with my mother and my best friend Joseph was hit by Tropical Storm Irene. Our house was flooded by two and a half feet of water on the first floor. The Atlantic Ocean took out our floors, cabinets, appliances, electrical outlets, the bathroom tile, and most of our furniture, not to mention trashing the antique pressed tin walls. It took six months to get the final eighty thousand dollar settlement out of the insurance company. The check was deposited by the mortgage company who said they would hold onto it and dole it out as we hired contractors or finished repairs.
Having to do most of the work ourselves because the settlement barely covered enough for the supplies, we maxed out credit cards and depleted personal savings and finished our repairs a few months later with the help of very few contractors. We installed our kitchen appliances as the last step and called the mortgage company to ask them to come and inspect and verify the repairs were done so they could release the other seventy thousand dollars that they were holding onto. They said they were backed up and that they would come and inspect in a month.
Our new stove was 22 days old when Hurricane Sandy hit us.
Where Irene was manageable, Sandy was devastating. My grandfather's house which was next door to ours floated on the storm surge and landed three feet away from its foundation. The legs of our lawn table were bent and sticking out from under the house like the wicked witch. Our house shifted just an inch. Not much, you'd think, but enough to break every pipe in the house and severely damage the entire structural stability of the house.
The town building department condemned my grandfather's house and wrote ours up as "more than 50% damaged".
Needless to say, both houses were left completely and totally uninhabitable.
The mortgage company inspector came and said because everything was wet and ruined that they "couldn't certify the repairs were completed" even when we were standing there with a stack of receipts and before and after pictures, clearly proving everything had been replaced since most of the materials had been changed. So they decided they wouldn't release the $80,000 they were holding onto from Irene until the Sandy repairs were done. Even though we'd already spent that money on repairs and run up debt because of it, they decided they were just going to hold onto it for longer.
Then the insurance company adjuster came and offered us thirty thousand for the Sandy damages. It was almost insulting. For Irene, where the water had been two and a half feet, we got an eighty six thousand dollar settlement and here for a five foot water line we were being offered thirty thousand. We negotiated and had lawyers contact them and finally they sent an engineer.
The engineer the flood insurance company sent wasn't even licensed. He added on a mere $5,000 in claims.
Finally, we got to the level of a FEMA appeal. The FEMA judge ordered the insurance company to send another adjuster, specifying in the decision that this one had to be licensed. The insurance company wound up offering us another $15,000. So we had to hire a lawyer and took them to court. We weren't the only ones, thousands of people had to file these lawsuits. The lawyer warned us not to let the mortgage company cash the $50,000 of checks we'd been given for the storm so far because it could be argued to be us agreeing to that number. So the checks got too old to cash.
Meanwhile during this process, New York State started the New York Rising program to help rebuild the houses who were tied up in lawsuits like ours or who didn't have insurance like my grandfather's. We applied right away. It seemed like an answer!
New York Rising lost our file.
...Twice.
And when they finally did decide to properly process our application, they gave us a grand total of $88,000. Our house is under 900 square feet in size. You physically cannot build a house in our county for that price at that size. Especially when it's a waterfront property that needs 14 foot deep helical pilings and a nine foot high foundation to comply with current code. The foundation alone is slated to cost about $50,000. The lowest estimate we found from any construction company after no less than ten bids was $180,000 not counting the architect. NY Rising expected us to be able to rebuild for a fraction of that. So we started looking into finding other financing while waiting on the lawsuit to continue going through.
We looked to hire our neighbour's architect because he was something resembling almost affordable. We gave him a deposit. ...A few weeks later, he had a heart attack in the town building department's office. ...A few weeks after that, he started being investigated for embezzling money from his clients.
And then my grandfather who had been a major contributor to our household finances had a severe stroke. Six months later, he died. And suddenly we were $3,500 tighter per month. But we made do as best as we could. FEMA was paying for the rental house we were living in while going through all of the appeal and lawsuit procedures and, when we hit their funding cap, New York Rising's IMA program stepped in to pay "whichever is less, your rent or mortgage". It still meant higher costs as the rent around here is more than our mortgage. We were tight but we could get by.
Then, New York Rising hit a cap on IMA funding. Which… sucked. But then the program was extended and that was awesome. And then it ran out again. They told us we would be eligible for a little more funding. But only once we demolished the existing house. In order to demolish the house, we had to pay for a construction company. New York Rising expected us to be able to demo the house for $5,000. The lowest bid we received was for $9,000. When we told them this, their reaction was essentially "yeah, we know, just make it work".
We finally won our lawsuit. The judge ruled the insurance company had to release a full payment to the policy maximum of $250,000. But because flood insurance is federally underwritten, we were still out our legal fees. Some flood insurance companies realized they'd fucked up and as a result agreed to pay for the legal fees. Our flood insurance company wasn't so generous. But a check was still generated by the flood insurance company thanks to the judge.
And then the lawyer refused to sign the check.
Apparently our lawyer's had dealings with our mortgage company before and run into the same problem as we had with their "we'll release funding at the end" theory. Except for him that meant "we won't pay you your legal fees until the house is finished". So they wanted him to sign the check over to them, he wanted them to sign the check over to him, and they've spent years now arguing over a piece of paper with some dollar signs on it while we go needlessly further into debt.
Eventually, New York Rising started to realize that their $160 per square foot amount just wasn't enough when it came to houses like ours. So they started a program called the Recon 100 program. The goal of this program was supposed to be that New York Rising would take over the build process, they would hire contractors and architects in bulk, essentially hiring them for 'bundles' of 10 or 20 properties at a time to get them to accept a lower profit per house because they would be guaranteed months of solid work. We were signed up into the program.
Now, as a condition of this program, we knew we'd eventually have to return the money New York Rising sent, whatever hadn't been spent on repairs already. But New York Rising was bragging about how they had programs that would allow you to repay the funding over several years. And that was all well and dandy because once the repairs were done, the mortgage company would release what they were holding and we were confident the lawyer would be sorted by then.
Meanwhile, our rental assistance hit the next cap. They told us not to worry because once this paperwork was approved, we'd get extended rental assistance. It was just a matter of waiting for the paperwork to get approved.
Then our caseworker at New York Rising decided she was going to deny our receipts for funds already spent. And that she wasn't going to file the appeals that we explicitly asked her in writing to file.
Then NY Rising decided that, before they'd do anything, they wanted us to give them the money that was still sitting in those $52,000 of paper checks that went old. They decided we either had to magic the money out of thin air or else it was up to us to get them reissued, get them deposited by the mortgage company and somehow get the mortgage company to issue that money to New York Rising. All in under a week. Because they decided this in the last phase of our approval process and there were other deadlines really close. ...Needless to say, the mortgage company was like "lol um nah" to the idea of giving the money to NY Rising.
Our NYR caseworker told us she wasn't going to file the appeals that we explicitly asked her in writing to file.
Then we discovered that at some point our NYR caseworker had decided to not sign us up for the extended timeline repayment thing after all. And that now she wasn't going to apply for us because oh it's full now. So we'd best pay up every penny we got immediately or else we're kicked out of the rebuilding program. Including the checks still sitting in paper form with no way for us to access them & an unyielding mortgage company illogically insisting "work first, money after". So they said "too bad, figure it out yourself and PS because you're not in this program anymore, we won't give you the continued rental assistance, why aren't you done yet?" As if we weren't waiting on them for months and weren't months overdue on the rent because we were "just waiting for the paperwork to finish processing".
The landlord finally sent a notice saying "I've waited long enough, get out".
We have very few resources. We are a house of disabled people. We don't have the money to pay the security deposit on somewhere else to live, nor to pay back the overdue rent now that New York Rising caught us in this absurd bait and switch. And, we still don’t have access to the insurance settlement money to repair our house.
So all in all here we sit with less than a month to find a new place to live and having no resources to do so. Which is why I'm making this plea for help. Being able to afford the security deposit, first month's rent, and moving costs to get someplace else to live would make a world of difference. Otherwise… I don't know what we're gonna do. Scatter our family across friends' couches, I guess.