Hurricane Adds to Ranks of New Class of Poor

Mayra Sanchez wears fine gold jewelry and has pretty clothes. Her husband earned $50,000 last year as a truck driver; their life together included a lovely home, a two-year-old Nissan pickup truck, a Ford Bronco and a speedboat that they enjoyed taking out for weekend spins on Biscayne Bay.

But Hurricane Andrew ripped the roof off the house and wrecked the boat, as well as the rig that Pedro Sanchez drove to support his wife and four children. With $950 a month in mortgage payments and not enough money to move anywhere else, the six of them now sleep in the pickup, parked in their driveway with a camper shell on top.

These days, Mayra Sanchez leans on metal crutches and wears a cast on her knee, broken when part of the ceiling fell on her. And the other day, she did something she never dreamed she would have to do: She stood in line for food stamps.

“I used to consider myself middle class,” Sanchez said, casting a bleak look at the hundreds of others who waited along with her in sticky 90-degree heat. “Now I guess I’m poor, like everybody else in here.”

Sanchez and her family have been thrust into the ranks of what social service officials in Florida call the “newly impoverished”--previously middle-class taxpayers who, having lost both their homes and their jobs to the hurricane, are suddenly dependent on the government for survival.

They are flocking by the thousands to makeshift disaster relief centers scattered about the region, seeking emergency food stamps, loans to rebuild, unemployment compensation, free medical care and counseling. So busy is the Perrine food stamp center, a blue-and-white striped festival tent, hastily erected in the parking lot of a destroyed government building, that people have been arriving as early as 3 a.m.

At that hour, the overnight security shift--National Guardsmen dressed in camouflage with rifles slung over their shoulders--hands out numbers until state workers arrive at dawn.

As South Florida struggles to rise from the rubble of Andrew’s wrath, authorities expect this new class of government dependents to put a huge strain on a social services network that is already bursting at the seams. With nearly 15% of the state’s population, Dade County already accounted for more than its fair share--21%--of public assistance recipients in the state.

As one weary state official sighed: “The hill we have to climb has just gotten steeper.”

In the wake of the hurricane, the federal government is providing extensive short-term financial help to victims. It includes more than $90 million in emergency food stamp money to give a one-month supply to people who do not currently receive the stamps, $37 million in special disaster unemployment compensation and an estimated $1.2 billion in loan money for families who lost property in the storm, with the state picking up 25% of the loans.

But as they look into the future, state and local authorities are growing increasingly concerned about the long-term economic impact of the hurricane, particularly on the middle-class residents who have always paid to support the social services system, rather than tapped into it.

There seems to be agreement in Washington that such help will be forthcoming. On Thursday, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved legislation to provide $7.2 billion in disaster relief for both South Florida and Louisiana. That is only slightly smaller than the $7.6 billion proposal outlined earlier by President Bush. In the House, Rep. Jamie L. Whitten (D-Miss.), chairman of the Appropriations Committee, has proposed relief aid worth $8.8 billion.

Much here will depend on how quickly people can get back to work--or if they can get back to work at all.

“The most effective human resources program is a job,” said Don Winstead, deputy secretary for the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services. “If, over the next couple of months, many people remain out of work and the economy does not rebound, people who right now have no choice but to rely on us for help are going to have no choice but to continue to rely on us.”

Signs of economic despair abound. “Lost home, unemployed,” reads a personal ad in the Miami Herald. “Will work however necessary in exchange for shelter for wife, 2 children, self. I speak Spanish, German and English.”

Reads another: “Lost car in storm. Recently unemployed. Need vehicle donated.”

Transportation, says Winstead, will be a major social service need. With so many cars destroyed in the hurricane, even if jobs are available people may not be able to get to and from their workplaces. Authorities also envision having to provide medical and mental health treatment to people who previously used private doctors, as well as child care and special services for the elderly who lost their homes.

The increased demand comes at a time when many local social service facilities--meals-on-wheels sites, day care centers, foster homes--were devastated by the storm. Dade County officials, seemingly overwhelmed, say their first job is to rebuild those facilities so that they can once again serve the people they were helping before Hurricane Andrew.

“In the long haul it doesn’t look well, unless there is some infusion of dollars to try to bring the level of services and facilities that we have back to normal,” said Israel Milton, assistant county manager in charge of human resources. “And even if we do that, we still have a cadre of people who are for the first time homeless and for the first time jobless. So what do we do to provide opportunities for them?”

The hurricane destroyed an estimated 60,000 homes, leaving 250,000 homeless. The jobless count is more difficult to discern; officials at the Florida Department of Labor and Employment Security have said only that many of the 86,100 people who were employed and living in South Dade, the area hardest-hit by the hurricane, will be temporarily unemployed. One official estimated that as many as 50,000 new unemployment claims would be filed as a result of the storm.

Some of those jobs will be replaced by an expected boom in construction, communications, public utilities and civil service work during the rebuilding effort, according to Marcelle Kinney, a state economist who has been studying South Carolina’s experience in the aftermath Hurricane Hugo in 1989.

But it will take months for other industries, such as retail, to bounce back. Kinney said construction jobs in the Charleston, S. C. area increased for 13 months after Hugo--an indicator of how long the economy there took to right itself. Because Hurricane Andrew caused far more damage, South Florida’s recovery will probably take longer, she said.

Andrew also hit at a time when Dade County was already suffering from a rise in unemployment. The county’s jobless rate has jumped nearly 3 percentage points here in the last two years, and stood at 10.4% in July.

Computer programmer Tom Haskins is a victim of that trend. He was laid off three months ago, but didn’t apply for unemployment compensation, figuring he could live off his savings until he found another job.

That changed with the hurricane. Earlier this week, the 40-year-old father of two showed up on the unemployment line in Perrine, at a tent just across the street from the food stamp site. He said he and his wife are considering leaving South Florida for better opportunities elsewhere.

“Let’s put it this way,” he explained. “If you had a chance to put a roof over your house or hire a computer programmer, what would you do? People aren’t worried about computers right now. They’re worried about surviving. Landscaping is going to boom, construction is going to boom. But other companies, they’re just going to tighten up and ride it out.”

For many victims, asking the government for help takes a psychological toll. Linda Hammon, a 45-year-old mother of two, lost her $25,000-a-year accounting job when the hurricane blew the roof off the building where she worked. Her house suffered so much damage in the storm that she and her husband have taken an apartment in nearby Kendall.

She stood in line behind Haskins, hoping she would qualify for the maximum $250-per-week unemployment benefit, weeping behind designer sunglasses. Her home is insured, but without help she fears that she will have to use the insurance money for living expenses. She can’t bear to think of herself as dependent on Uncle Sam, but feels she has no choice.

“We made a good income but now half of it is gone, along with the house,” Hammon said. “We never stood in unemployment lines, never had food stamps. We’re not used to these lines. We don’t know how to do this.”

Times researcher Anna Virtue in Miami contributed to this story.

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