Assisted living residents asked to return Sandy aid money

From CBS New York:

Several assisted living residents in Queens received a shock recently after FEMA asked for reimbursement on aid given out following Superstorm Sandy.

Residents of the Belle Harbor Manor assisted living center in the city’s Rockaway Peninsula spent four months after Superstorm Sandy moving through a series of emergency shelters due to flooding at the facility.

Now, the Federal Emergency Management Agency wants at least a dozen of those disabled, elderly and mostly poor residents to return thousands of dollars in disaster aid.

“We’re on a fixed income. I don’t have that kind of money!” said 61-year-old Robert Rosenberg, who suffers from a spinal disability and other chronic health problems.

FEMA said the money should never have been paid out since it was meant for temporary housing and instead the residents were moved from one state-funded shelter to another.

Following the storm, residents were forced to move to a huge evacuation center set up inside a Brooklyn armory, then live four-to-a-room at a hotel in a crime-plagued neighborhood, then to a halfway house on the grounds of a partly abandoned psychiatric hospital in Queens, where they bunked on cots and were barred from having visitors in their rooms.