In the wake of Hurricane Helene, a devastating Category 4 storm that has ravaged the Southeast, leaders are rushing to restore homes, infrastructure and power for millions of people. But amid the overwhelming destruction and chaos, and a death toll already exceeding 160 people across six states, one group risks being overlooked in the scramble: the homeless population, those already vulnerable before the storm.

Disaster relief for people who were homeless prior to a hurricane has always been lacking, as FEMA, the main federal agency tasked with providing aid, has a policy that explicitly excludes those unhoused people from most forms of help, including housing and direct assistance. In recent years, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has stepped up to try to plug some of those gaps in social safety, but a new bill moving through Congress threatens these efforts.

These dynamics have grown more pressing as major hurricanes increase in frequency and the number of unsheltered Americans continues to grow. In June the US Supreme Court issued a landmark decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson, greenlighting local governments’ legal authority to clear out homeless tent encampments even if a city lacks any available housing or shelter for the unhoused person to stay in.

Since then, more jurisdictions have passed laws criminalizing homelessness, part of a broader effort to crack down on those sleeping outside. Just this week a new law in Florida — that bans sleeping on public property anywhere in the state — took effect. While the law includes exceptions during emergencies like major storms, those protections end when the hurricane order is no longer in place.

In practical terms, this means that when Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis or a county official lifts Florida’s emergency hurricane order, Floridians who were homeless before Helene — roughly 31,000 people — could face new criminal penalties. Local homeless advocates say there are countless questions and rumors circulating about how the new law will be interpreted and enforced in the wake of disasters just like Helene, which made landfall last week in Florida’s Big Bend region.

Most people experiencing homelessness were aware the new anti-camping law was set to take effect, according to Martha Are, the executive director at the Homeless Services Network of Central Florida. “Some people are already trying to relocate their encampments to harder-to-find areas,” she told me in mid-September, about a week before Helene hit Florida.

Leaders like Are have little idea yet what to expect, and she hears unofficially that most jurisdictions are in wait-and-see mode, watching to see which city gets sued first and what the judge who reviews that lawsuit decides. (Under the new Florida law, any citizen or business can sue beginning in January if they feel the anti-camping ban is not being properly enforced.)

“It’s going to be a challenge for how leaders actually enforce these [anti-camping] laws, like if I’ve lost my house from a hurricane and I’ve lived in that town for a decade, will I be found in violation of the law and are they going to arrest me?” asked Noah Patton, the manager of disaster recovery at the National Low Income Housing Coalition. “These laws create significant complications, will really make aid more difficult to sort out, and what I have been saying is it makes a community less resilient to disasters.”

It’s always a stressful scramble to try and reach homeless people when a hurricane is coming. “A lot of people have phones but they don’t have data, they aren’t getting texts,” said Kelly Young, the CEO of the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston and Harris County.

Typically, homeless outreach workers will try and go out to spread the word, and existing homeless shelters will work to make extra room, sometimes allowing people to sleep in places like the kitchen and hallways. Unhoused individuals can usually seek refuge in convention centers and public schools, or at newly-erected Red Cross emergency shelters. Some governments and nonprofits arrange transport for unhoused people to get indoors, while others leave it on the individual to figure out their own travel.

“We had up to 13,000 people at George R. Brown Convention Center after [Hurricane] Harvey and there was no distinguishing between the homeless versus people who had just lost their homes and needed a place to be,” said Larry Satterwhite, who leads the Houston Mayor’s Office of Public Safety and Homeland Security.

Not everyone experiencing homelessness gets the information they need, and not everyone living outside feels comfortable going to a shelter, said Eric Camarillo, the executive director of SALT Outreach, which works with unsheltered homeless people in Orlando and central Florida. Some people fear losing their personal belongings, while others may have had traumatic prior experiences at shelters.

“The face of homelessness is not the same as it was 50 years ago,” Camarillo added. “These are single moms who can’t afford day care, these are seniors in their 70s and 80s on fixed incomes who can’t afford their rent increases, and youth and young adults.”

The new anti-camping laws are intensifying the already tumultuous disaster response situation, as many homeless people living outside now try to become less visible to avoid jail time. The punitive laws are also expected to increase distrust between local government and homeless individuals, making it even more difficult for people to accept help if they are found.

“These laws exist, in my opinion, to push people away and out of sight which makes our job tougher,” said Eric Samuels, the president of the Texas Homeless Network. (Texas passed its statewide camping ban in 2021.) “And if people are badly hurt and they’re miles from public view because they don’t want to get a ticket, then emergency crews might not be able to get out to help.”

FEMA has the primary responsibility of providing disaster relief and works with states and local communities to manage emergency shelters, which are mostly run by the Red Cross. FEMA prohibits housing assistance from going to those who were already homeless — “because the need for housing was not caused by the disaster,” as their policy states — though homeless individuals may qualify for temporary transportation, funeral, child care, and medical aid.

FEMA policy does permit those who lived, pre-disaster, in “non-traditional forms of housing” like “tents, certain types of huts, and lean-to structures” to apply for a few months of rental assistance. But to receive this FEMA money, applicants must obtain verification of their pre-storm situation from “a credible or official source” which, according to Patton, makes accessing the aid virtually impossible.

“People do not apply,” he said. “It’s an exceptionally burdensome and administratively difficult process.”

Recently, in light of this, and after years of advocacy by housing organizations, HUD stepped up to establish the Rapid Unsheltered Survivor Housing (RUSH) program, using unspent funds from another emergency grant program. RUSH aims to help those who were homeless prior to a storm or other climate disaster, and the first grants were deployed in the wake of Hurricane Ian in 2022.

“We were very pleased to have the ability to launch the program because we see that people who are doubled up or experiencing homelessness during the disaster often don’t access FEMA funds or receive support from FEMA for long,” said Marion McFadden, HUD’s principal deputy assistant secretary for community planning and development. “By providing funds specifically for these situations, we’re filling in gaps.”

The other way HUD comes in is through its Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery program (CDBG-DR), which is a highly flexible, long-term disaster aid program that can be used to provide months of rental assistance and build new affordable housing well after FEMA is gone. However the program is not permanently authorized — meaning it relies on periodic appropriations from Congress, which are often delayed and insufficient. The Biden administration has called for Congress to permanently authorize CDBG-DR, and a bipartisan bill in Congress has called for the same.

Yet a separate bill currently moving through Congress seeks to move much of this longer-term disaster recovery work back over to FEMA, something low-income housing advocates believe will threaten those who are homeless before a hurricane.

“We are concerned that the bill, as written, may lead to the misuse of scarce federal recovery funds and prevent critically needed long-term recovery assistance from reaching low-income disaster survivors,” more than 35 national housing advocacy groups wrote in a congressional letter last week.

McFadden, of HUD, said there’s “a real role” for her agency to play in supporting communities after disasters. “We are making billions of dollars in grants every year and we understand the unique needs of low-income people and of low-income housing,” she told Vox.

FEMA was noncommittal when I inquired about the agency’s plans for unhoused individuals during a disaster if Congress granted them new authority, or whether they’d reconsider their stance on aiding the pre-disaster homeless.

“If additional or new authority is passed by Congress and signed into law, FEMA would then develop guidance necessary to implement the new authority,” an agency spokesperson said. “FEMA would focus on supporting communities’ recovery in addressing needs resulting from a disaster and adhering to the intent of Congress in approving any new authority.”

As climate change escalates, communities across the US face increasing threats not only from hurricanes but also from heat waves, floods, and wildfires. Advocates have been petitioning FEMA over the last year to expand its criteria for disaster aid to include heat and smoke, emphasizing the need for more adaptable responses to these challenges. The nation’s severe shortage of affordable housing worsens the struggles of both the newly displaced and the long-unsheltered, and addressing these intertwined crises of climate resilience and housing stability has never been more urgent.