A tiny Florida beach town is rebuilding after a hurricane. Is it becoming a preserve of the rich?
When Hurricane Michael made landfall on October 10, 2016, the city of Marathon was in the path of the Category 4 storm, with a sustained wind speed of 145 miles per hour.
According to the National Weather Service, the hurricane blew trees and debris across the city, destroyed structures and left the area littered with broken glass and other debris.
Fifty people were killed and 3,800 buildings were destroyed around the coast of Florida.
“This was a really hard-hit town,” says Dan Bongers, the mayor of Marathon, a small city of 1,200 residents located in the Florida Panhandle.
“It’s been hard. There’s been a lot of pain, a lot of brokenness, but we’re getting through it, and we’ve been through it before.”
What’s not hard
The city has already begun to build back up. But most of the hurricane-ravaged area has been left vacant since most of the structures were destroyed.
That’s because it is a designated historic area.
“You have to fill in the gaps,” says Bongers, whose office has made the announcement that the city is adding more housing and apartments at two community centres.
Bongers says the new additions will help meet the city’s goal of being able to offer a much-needed safety net for residents who lost their homes to the hurricane.
“We want to help those people, and you want to help those people that are in a really bad situation,” he says.
“Once they have a place to live, once they get some services in that will make their life better once they get off of welfare or anything, once they find their own property and can take care of themselves, then then they’ll be a lot more stable people.”
Bongers says his office has also provided money for the building of a park in the area and has provided the demolition of a vacant church to city councillors.
In fact, the church, which sat at the