Sara Hutchinson

89 Oregon Ave. Waretown, NJ. This was my first home, my little bungalow by the bay. I bought a foreclosure with an FHA loan when the government was offering first time homebuyers tax credits. Buying this home was my first lesson in bureaucracy. I struggled getting title insurance because of riparian rights. I learned that it is not what you know but who you know. Turns out my experience with bureaucracy was foreshadowing what was to come. Superstorm Sandy barreled into my home and my life like a freight train. My experience with her was a life changing event that not only showed me the raw power of nature but taught me the true idiocy of bureaucracy.

I fought hard to get my little bungalow by the bay.  The national flood program got stuck with another bill in congress, so I watched congressional hearings for weeks waiting to see if the bill would pass so I could buy my home.  Once that finally went through, I was presented with an aerial view of my home with a creek hand drawn in to show the tidal creek that had run through the property in 1836.  I needed to buy the rights to the land bordering said creek to have a free deed.  My application to the NJDEP sat in limbo for months.  My lawyer was not getting his calls returned.  I reached out to a friend of the family who was a congresswoman.  Voila my application was magically found in someone’s inbox and was put on priority.  When I hit the next roadblock, someone from the RFA reached out to the NJDEP.  My brother worked for the RFA and his co-worker loved battling the NJDEP, especially when laziness and ineptitude were at work.

The storm

Nature has always inspired a sense of awe in me.  Her strength, fury and lack of discrimination balanced with her beauty, tranquility, and ability to create is not only complex but tangible.  I looked forward to riding out storms so I could see her strength firsthand.  Sandy was different; Sandy scared me.  Plus, I had my yahoos to worry about, my ragtag team of two dogs and three cats.  It wouldn’t be easy to evacuate during flooding with them in tow.

The storm itself was a blur.  I was in my friend’s kitchen and seeing the top half of her neighbor’s tree fly across the backyard; it was something straight out of the Wizard of Oz.  My neighbor called near the peak of the storm to tell me our other neighbor’s tree had fallen on my home. Then my mom called, panicking; one of the giant pines had fallen up against their front door, jamming it shut.  The last words she said to me that night were, “I’m scared” then the phone went dead.

The day after Superstorm Sandy hit was my birthday and I spent it trying to get to my home.  I waited until low tide, but the streets were still impassable by car.  Boats from the marina down the street were floating and colliding in the streets, like a slow game of bumper boats.  I made it within a block before the current in the thigh high water got too strong for me to safely continue but I was able see my home.  I could see that the neighbor’s tree was just resting on my home and had not ripped through the roof.  The next day I was able to make it home.  My front porch steps were gone, in their place was a piece of driftwood, a little present from Sandy.  My six-foot stockade fence was down, the water line on my home was about five feet high.  I gathered up my courage and went inside my little bungalow by the bay.  I had gotten up to two feet of water in places.  I knew that anything touched by salt water was essentially destroyed and everything in there was touched. I cried and I cried hard.  I cried so much in the next few weeks, I had to take a Mucinex-D every day to combat the sinus headaches.

Friends and family came to my aid ripping out anything touched by water. I slowly started making my pile in the front yard by the street. The township said pile everything up and we’ll come take it eventually. As you drove through neighborhoods all you saw were piles. Piles of people’s lives; piles of memories that took years to develop and one night to take away.

My sister’s ex-husband, Frank, showed up with his contractor friend, Larry. Frank was an electrician and rewired my entire home from top to bottom only charging me for materials Larry was able to finish the repair of the interior of my home within ten months. I moved back in until it was time to raise.

 I called myself a “self-contractor”, subcontracting out repairs to Larry and taking care of all the permits myself.  The permit office quickly learned my name as I was not one to deal with bureaucracy without telling everyone how incredibly stupid and inefficient it was.  Every time I went in, I was told I needed something different.  I spent every lunch hour going to the permit office then going to see Larry at my home to tell him the office had changed what they needed yet again, and we needed to do whatever stupid thing they had come up with this time.     

RREM

I gathered everything I needed for my first meeting with the RREM program. I spent hours filling out the paperwork, printed out my pictures, and double checked to make sure I had everything in place.  I arrived on time and waited about four hours before I finally got to meet my project manager.  When I showed her my giant pile of paperwork that I had worked so hard on and I was met with, “Sorry, but they just changed how they want everything done.  I need you to fill this out instead” as she pulled a fresh pile of paperwork out.  She then informed me that they hadn’t gotten proper training yet on the new paperwork, so she was learning it along with me.  The only thing that didn’t change in the paperwork was the part that said by signing this contract you are signing to have a lien put on your house.  That part always made me worry but I had no choice. Two hours later I walked out the door more frustrated than when I walked in.  This exact same scenario, waiting for hours and having to redo everything because they changed the procedure, happened at least four more times.  The rules and guidelines were forever changing and always in a way that made it more difficult for me, the homeowner, to receive my funds for work to be done.  This constant change often left workers and Sandy victims confused and frustrated.   The only thing that didn’t change was the lien on my home. My project manager changed about every three months.  Right after my project manager would start figuring out how to deal with me, I would get a call from a new upbeat person ready to help me put my life back together.  Those upbeat attitudes never lasted long.  Dealing with the RREM program was a joke and at this point I had no idea just how bad of a joke it really was.

I opted to repair the interior of my home first and worry about raising after that was done.  I had gotten a letter of substantial damage so I would have the ICC money and RREM money to put towards that.  The interior of my home was finished, and I was back in within ten months.  The RREM program was satisfied that I had accounted for all the money they had given me, and I thought I had the RREM program figured out. I was in the best mental and physical health of my life and I was ready to fight for my home.  That bitch Sandy may have knocked me down but I got up stronger than ever.  My dad and stepmom were snowbirds; I would move in to their home while they were in Florida and be back in my home by the time they returned.  I had it all figured out.  Oh, how wrong I was.

The house raising

I decided I wasn’t going to be a self-contractor this time.  Dealing with the permit office of Waretown was exhausting and I didn’t need any more lessons in bureaucracy.  Instead, I was going to find a turnkey house raiser.  Someone who took care of everything from start to finish.   My home was small, I mean really small.  It was almost a perfect square with a very small addition.  It was about the easiest and cheapest type of house to raise.  I had $30,000 coming from the ICC money and the RREM program had allotted me a whopping $4,000 for house raising. I didn’t want pilings; I just wanted to do concrete block, thus saving me a good amount of money. I figured it would cost about $50,000 to raise.  I hadn’t received the maximum from the RREM program so I thought I could probably get more to cover the gap. 

I found SHL and they said I could in fact do concrete block instead of pilings and it would cost about $65,000.  I reached out to the RREM program and questioned the $4,000 allotment for house raising when I was getting estimates from $65,000 – $150,000.  I was told someone obviously made a mistake, and they would investigate it.  SHL assured me they could get the home done in the time while my parents were in Florida.  Things were all coming into place.  This was going to work out just as I had planned.  Yep, wrong again.

SHL started jerking me around from the beginning.  They started about three months late.  I was being the squeaky wheel as best I could with little success.  Finally, they started, and my home was up in the air on cribbing, what I liked to call the jenga blocks.  I was seeing progress and knew things were starting to go my way again.  But they never came back.  I called repeatedly.  It wasn’t until I threatened to start making formal complaints and have my lawyer call that the owner would finally call me back with some lame excuse and ask for just a couple more weeks.  At this point, my home had been sitting on the cribbing for months through multiple storms.  The dirt under the cribbing was beginning to erode, putting my home at risk.  I needed a mason to come pour the footings to help shore up the earth under the cribbing.  I found a mason and explained my situation, he went over and poured the footings right away.

Next was finding someone to look at the cribbing and make sure everything was sound before the mason started the foundation.  Someone from Amon met me at my home and told me that SHL had used the wrong type of wood for their cribbing, had not raised my home high enough, and had not supported the addition correctly putting it in danger of collapse. They needed to start ASAP to keep me from losing my home.  Amon’s workers told me it was one of the worst raising job they had ever seen and that they were scared when they were working under it.  Amon did right by me, they didn’t charge me for the extra work that securing the addition caused, and they continued to follow up on how I was doing for a few months after they were done.  SHL, between not finishing what I paid for, and the extra costs incurred to fix their shoddy workmanship, defrauded me for over $35,000.

This is when things with the RREM program really started to go downhill.  SHL had defrauded over 60 other people in the RREM program.  The RREM program was going to go after them so there was little, I needed to do but I couldn’t get any more of my money.  I think I was on my fifth project manager at this point and probably the only competent one.  He explained why they couldn’t give me more money.  The RREM program had given me money for specific things to be done.  I paid that money to SHL and they didn’t do those things.  I could not be paid twice for work done, but once the fraud case was finished, the money that I was out because of SHL would be returned.  He followed up with me regularly and kept me in the loop.  Unfortunately, he only lasted about two months.   

I hated seeing my home sitting in limbo, but I didn’t have the money to keep it going.  I entered the mortgage forbearance program so I could use my mortgage payments towards my home, and I borrowed money from family to keep it going.  During this time, my mason had walked off the job and stopped returning my calls.  I had another mason come in to give me an estimate of finishing the job.  Not only had Faria’s concrete not finished what they were paid for, but they had put the footings in the wrong place.  So, I threatened the absentee mason with a call from my lawyer if they didn’t reimburse me what I estimated to be about $5,000.  He said he only owed me $1,500 and continued to dodge my calls.  Shortly thereafter, I received a letter stating they were filing for bankruptcy.  My project manager told me that there was nothing that could be done and I could kiss that money goodbye. 

The RREM program was now run by the Division of Community Affairs (DCA).  My project managers at the RREM program started changing regularly and I quickly learned that the ineptitude of the program was getting exponentially worse.  I decided to no longer communicate with anyone from the program by phone, everything was to be done by email in order to document everything that was said to me.  Every conversation was completely different from the last and I heard, “I never said that” more times than I can count.  Can this really get any worse?  I think we all know the answer to that.

I received a letter from the RREM program stating that I owed them $14,000 and I needed to make good on it immediately, otherwise, I would be kicked out of the program and would need to pay back everything they had given me, plus, there was a lien on my home.  I had spent significantly more money than they had given me and had sent them the invoices and posted checks to prove it.  I called my project manager at that time to find out what was going on.  He gave me some song and dance trying to explain why I owed the money, and I called bullshit on him.  He said he would investigate it.  A month later he was at my work for an in-person meeting to explain my account information.  He proceeded to tell me that $10,000 had mysteriously disappeared from my account.  They were never able to explain where that money went but they magically came up with another $10,000 to put back in my account.  So, now I only owed $4,000.  He asked if that cleared everything up and wasn’t I happy now that my account wasn’t in such bad shape.  Are you freaking kidding me?  I had some choice words for him, I didn’t owe them anything, and he better work harder to figure this out.  He did work harder, and, in the end, I was owed about $5,000, not including the fraud money I was owed, but I wouldn’t be eligible for that money until the fraud case was settled.

Enter the DCA

My dad had me reach out to the daughter of an old friend.  Not only had Amanda Devecka-Rinnear and her family been affected by Sandy and the red tape of RREM but she was doing something about it.  She is one of the founders of the NJOP.  They came into my life when I was ready to give up and gave the strength to persevere.  This is, also, when the DCA took over the running of RREM, just when I thought the RREM couldn’t get any worse.

Then I got word that the fraud case was settled, and I would be seeing my reimbursement soon.  I got called to a meeting to get my check.  At this meeting they explained that it was determined that I was defrauded by about $35,000, but I would only be reimbursed for $28,000 of it.  To get the money, I needed to sign a paper saying I would not ask for any more money.  I was flabbergasted but I just wanted to be done.  I signed the paper and asked for my check so I could go on my way, but I wasn’t getting my check that day as I still needed an inspection to see what needed to be done.  At this point the RREM program was being run by the Division of Community Affairs (DCA).  After months of unreturned phone calls, I reached out to Eileen Mutz.  Eileen was a higher up at the DCA who had helped me earlier on with my problems with the RREM.  She had told me to reach out whenever I hit roadblocks.  She made some phone calls and suddenly my project manager called to tell me I hadn’t gotten an inspection because I needed a contractor to give them an estimate of how much it was going to cost to complete the work for which I was getting reimbursed.  I, as calmly as I could, explained that I didn’t have an estimate because the work was already done, and all the paid invoices were already submitted.  She explained that I needed an estimate so they would know how much it would cost.  I, again, explained that the work was already done, and they had all the invoices to prove it. Yes, I had to explain that simple statement more than once.  “Oh, we’re not used to people getting the work done already, most people wait until they get the money to proceed.  We’re not sure how to handle this.”  She never did see how asinine this statement was even though I tried multiple times to explain.  I eventually hung up on her and called Eileen again.  After I explained what was going on, she told me she would reach out to RREM, and I was to get the entirety of my fraud amount in one check to proceed.  When I got my check, it wasn’t even half of what I was supposed to get but I cashed it and used it to proceed with my home.  I called my project manager and tried to get an answer as to why I only received a portion of money.  She explained that some people’s money was “put in the wrong buckets” and this was causing inconsistencies in award amounts. This made as much sense to me as it does to you as you read this.

My project manager called a few weeks later to say that I had a new meeting with her, my housing advisor, and the people that were running the fraud department to discuss my money.  I showed up to the meeting and was met by an armed guard waiting for me outside the building.  He escorted me to the room where we would be meeting. I noticed other meetings going on in other rooms all being watched by their own private armed guards.  This was not going to be good. The only person missing from my room was my project manager.  When they said we were waiting for her, I told her I’d rather she not be present as she just pisses me off.  I don’t think they appreciated that, so we waited for her.   Once she arrived, they proceeded to tell me that my money was “put in the wrong buckets” but they were making changes to the way things were being done and the new paperwork I needed to sign was going to make it easier to get my money draws to finish up.  Again, with these mysterious buckets.  I explained that I just needed what was awarded to me in the fraud case and I could finish my home.  I didn’t need anything else, and I had already signed a contract with these same people saying that if they gave me my full fraud amount, I wouldn’t ask for more money.  I was then told if I didn’t sign the new paperwork, I wouldn’t receive another dime from them and I would be in violation of my contract with them. Violation of contract means the lien on my home card gets waved in my face again.   I tried to argue but I couldn’t stop looking at the armed guard watching me through the glass, so I finally signed the paper.  The new system only made it harder to be eligible for anymore money and I never received the remainder of my fraud award. Later, my next project manager said I never was in a situation where I had to sign paperwork from them under duress. Really?! What do you think?

I am not alone

I recently reached out to Amanda and the NJOP to see if I was alone in my struggles and to see what the NJOP was doing to help people. I asked if she knew the numbers of how many people never made it home.  Amanda informed me, “Unfortunately, nobody knows the exact number of Sandy families who still aren’t home, likely due to the fact that no federal or state agency has been tracking these people.  This recovery process has been so broken that many storm survivors have fallen through the cracks entirely.”  The NJOP continues to work hard to help New Jersey and her residents.  Not only do they continue to lobby for Sandy and other storm victims, but they have lobbied for rental and housing assistance during Covid, the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, and Medicare for New Jersey residents.    

I was not alone in my frustration with the bureaucracy of Sandy recovery.  I have met many others that struggled navigating the red tape of RREM, even some that, also, never made it home.  Alex Greer and Joseph E. Trainor conducted a study that was published in 2021.  They sent out questionnaires and conducted interviews of Sandy victims in Sea Bright, NJ and found a lot of frustration with the programs that were in place to help people as well.

Most notably, we found a fundamental disconnect between how policymakers and homeowners viewed the housing recovery process.  In particular, survivors highlighted the amount of complexity-laden paperwork associated the aid process, unfavorable interactions with government employees and a system that seemed to have goals that were inherently different from their own, and the sense that the rules associated with aid were constantly changing.

Greer, Alex, and Joseph E. Trainor. “A system disconnected: perspectives on post-disaster housing recovery policy and programs.”

My final sacrifice

The final straw for me was with the mortgage company.  Even though I was in the mortgage forbearance program they informed that I would need to pay $40,000 in full to reinstate my mortgage.     It was then that I finally lost the will to fight.  I gave up and walked away from the RREM program, the DCA, and my home I had fought so hard to keep.  I had to sacrifice my home to save my sanity.

Superstorm Sandy may have destroyed my home, but it was the bureaucracy of the permit offices, the RREM program, and the DCA that destroyed my spirit. They took something from me that I thought I would never get back but with the support of loved ones and a stubborn strong will I am starting to get back my fight. 

(Originally published in 2024 as “How a Storm and Bureaucracy Almost Took Down the Strongest Woman You Don’t Know“)