Puerto Ricans are still stuck in hotels after Hurricane Maria: 'The instability is terrible'

Displaced Puerto Ricans.
(Image credit: RICARDO ARDUENGO/AFP/Getty Images)

Hurricane Maria destroyed about 70,000 homes in Puerto Rico when it struck the island territory in late September. Four months later, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is still housing about 4,000 Puerto Rican families totaling around 10,000 people in hotel rooms in 42 states. The hotel program is scheduled to end March 20, but hotel residents' homes remain too damaged to re-occupy.

"After the hurricane hit we told the kids that every day was going to be an adventure, but not like this," said Enghie Melendez, a Puerto Rican living with her husband and three children in a hotel room in Brooklyn. "This is turning out to be really hard," she told The Associated Press. "The instability is terrible."

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.