In the wake of Hurricane Helene, a devastating Category 4 storm that has ravaged the Southeast, leaders rushed to restore homes, infrastructure, and power for millions of people. And now, another life-threatening storm, Hurricane Milton, a Category 5, approaches the Florida coast. Amid the overwhelming destruction and the mounting chaos expected from these back-to-storms, and a death toll of at least 227 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 month 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 and Milton — 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 climate disasters. 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 made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region. 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 in late September.   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. Update, October 7, 5:40 pm ET: This story was originally published on October 3 and has been updated with the current death toll of Hurricane Helene and new information as Hurricane Milton approaches the Florida coast.

In roughly 24 hours — a mere day — Hurricane Milton grew from a tropical storm to a fierce Category 5 hurricane. With wind speeds pushing 180 miles per hour Monday afternoon, it’s one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic.  Forecasters expect Milton, which is now churning in the Gulf of Mexico near the Yucatan Peninsula, to make landfall in western Florida late on Wednesday. The storm will likely lose some steam before then as it faces disruptive winds and dry air, yet Milton is still expected to be an “extremely dangerous” hurricane upon arrival, according to the National Hurricane Center. Storm surge in the densely populated Tampa Bay, which could see a direct hit, could reach 15 feet, the Center said in an advisory Monday.  Milton is not the typical Atlantic hurricane, according to Jonathan Lin, an atmospheric scientist at Cornell University. “It is exceedingly rare for a hurricane to form in the western Gulf, track eastward, and make landfall on the Western coast of Florida,” he said in an email. “There are not really any hurricanes on record that have done this and made landfall at a Category 3+ status.” What’s even more unusual is how quickly the storm intensified, defying forecasts and gaining more than 100 miles per hour in wind speed between Sunday morning and early Monday afternoon. Milton had “some of the most explosive intensification this forecaster has ever witnessed!” a National Weather Service forecaster wrote on X Monday. The simplest explanation is unusually warm ocean water.  Take a look at the chart below. It’s showing ocean heat in the Gulf of Mexico, which is near a record high. The red line is 2024 and the blue line is the average over the last decade. And heat is a key ingredient in rapid intensification, according to Brian McNoldy, a climatologist at the University of Miami, who made the chart below. Put simply, hotter water evaporates more readily, and rising columns of warm, moist air from that evaporation fuel rapid intensification. It’s not entirely clear what has caused the Gulf to warm, though scientists suspect a combination of factors, including climate change — which raises the baseline ocean temperature — as well as lingering effects of El Niño, natural climate variability, and perhaps even a volcanic eruption. Another key to Milton’s explosive growth is a lack of wind shear in its path, according to Benjamin Kirtman, director of the Cooperative Institute for Marine & Atmospheric Studies, a joint initiative of the University of Miami and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Wind shear describes the change of wind speed and direction — basically, chaotic air — and it can disrupt hurricanes. The storm is expected to encounter more shear as it approaches Florida, which will blunt its strength and make it likely to weaken before landfall.  What’s more, McNoldy said, is that Milton is also relatively small in width. As of Monday, Hurricane-force winds extended only about 30 miles from the storm center. Small hurricanes are “generally more prone to ups and downs,” he told Vox, because they’re influenced more easily by weather phenomena.  Although Milton is set to grow in size before it reaches Florida (in part, through a complex process of eyewall replacement), it likely won’t be huge when it makes landfall  — again, speaking in terms of diameter. “That is all-around good news,” he said. Smaller storms tend to produce less surge, which describes a rise in sea level. Compared to Hurricane Helene, which was an enormous system, for example, forecasters expect Milton to produce less storm surge.  That doesn’t mean experts like McNoldy, a Florida resident, aren’t worried. As of Monday, Milton appears to be headed straight for the Tampa Bay area, the most densely populated region of the state’s west coast. This is the same region where a dozen people were killed by Hurricane Helene in recent days.  “This is a very ominous forecast,” McNoldy said. “It will still be an extremely strong hurricane.”  Update, October 7, 5:30 pm ET: This story has been updated to reflect the increasing severity of the storm.

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Editor’s note, October 7, 5 pm: While our podcasts will continue to cover the conflict in the Middle East, this page will no longer be updated with new episodes. You can listen to our shows wherever you find podcasts.  The Israel-Palestine conflict goes back decades, but this latest war has taken an unprecedented toll in terms of the number of people killed, and represents a significant step back from any hopes of securing a two-state solution and a permanent peace. Vox podcasts have spent the past year covering the conflict in depth, offering our listeners context and clarity about the history of the conflict, a deeper understanding of the players in Israel and Palestine and on the world stage, and the toll of Hamas’s attack and Israel’s retaliation on the people in the region. Today, Explained, Vox’s daily news explainer podcast, has been covering the conflict since it began, with an episode posted right after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel that took the lives of around 1,200 people and resulted in the kidnapping of an estimated 240 hostages. The show has since continued to cover many threads in this story, from where Hamas comes from to how false information about the conflict has spread on social media and how information warfare is used in the Middle East. Vox podcasts The Weeds and The Gray Area have also been covering the unfolding crisis, its stakes, and its impact. You can find those and all our other episodes on the topic below. October 7, 2024 | It’s been one year since Hamas attacked Israel and started a war in Gaza. Israelis and Palestinians look back, and Vox’s Joshua Keating says Israel’s occupation is looking permanent. September 24, 2024 | It looks a lot like all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah. Semafor’s Sarah Dadouch has the latest from Beirut and CNN’s Nick Paton Walsh explains Israel’s strategy. August 29, 2024 | The two are on the brink of starting a regional war. An analyst and a negotiator say that without a ceasefire in Gaza, the Middle East could spin out of control. June 25, 2024 | Islamophobic and antisemitic incidents are on the rise. Author Moustafa Bayoumi and Vox’s Abdallah Fayyad tell us about another kind of invisible discrimination: anti-Palestinian racism. June 11, 2024 | Since October 7 there has been a lot of debate over what is and isn’t antisemitic. Rabbi Jill Jacobs and Harvard law professor Noah Feldman explain why the definition is so important. May 28, 2024 | Seven months in, Israel has not “eliminated” Hamas leadership. Newsweek’s Tom O’Connor introduces them, and Mairav Zonszein from International Crisis Group explains what it means for the war. May 9, 2024 | President Joe Biden says the US won’t supply further weapons if Israel is going to use them in Rafah. Axios reporter Barak Ravid explains what that means for the war. May 7, 2024 | The pop music competition is facing boycott calls over Israel’s participation. Switched on Pop’s Charlie Harding and historian Tess Megginson explain why the apolitical event keeps getting political. May 6, 2024 | Yes, but it’s hard. Inside Higher Ed’s Josh Moody and UC Merced’s Charlie Eaton explain. April 24, 2024 | Daily Spectator news editor Sarah Huddleston reports on the protests at her university. AAUP President Irene Mulvey explains the stakes for campus free speech. April 15, 2024 | The Economist’s Gregg Carlstrom explains. Jerusalem-based journalist Noga Tarnopolsky explores whether the unprecedented attack hurts or helps Benjamin Netanyahu. April 4, 2024 | The Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Kalin explains what happened, and Refugees International president Jeremy Konyndyk lays out what this means for Gazans. March 5, 2024 | Super Tuesday is the biggest day of the presidential primary campaign, but the biggest race in the biggest state isn’t about Biden or Trump. Instead, the leading candidates for California’s open Senate seat — three Democrats and a Republican — are finding themselves talking a lot about Israel, Palestine, and the war in Gaza. February 27, 2024 | Michigan’s primary today will test President Biden’s viability with Muslim voters amid the war in Gaza. One Arab American leader says the community is abandoning Biden and looking for alternatives — Donald Trump might be one of them. February 15, 2024 | Palestinians are trapped in Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, where about 1.5 million people have sought refuge. After Israel bombed Rafah this weekend, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is threatening a ground invasion. Palestinian journalist Aseel Mousa takes us inside Rafah, and the Economist’s Anton La Guardia explains why diplomatic efforts to halt the fighting have stalled. January 31, 2024 | Iran-backed militias use drones, missiles, and even TikTok dances to antagonize the United States and Israel. The International Crisis Group’s Ali Vaez explains how the war in Gaza has energized the self-described Axis of Resistance. January 29, 2024 | South Africa took Israel to court over claims of genocide. Courthouse News reporter Molly Quell and the International Crisis Group’s Robert Blecher explain what happened next. January 18, 2024 | Israel’s war against Hamas has now been raging for over 100 days. According to Ian Lustick, professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, history tells us what it will take to end it. January 3, 2023 | Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces trouble at home and abroad. AP correspondent Tia Goldenberg and scholar Hussein Ibish explain the significance of a high-profile killing in Lebanon. December 12, 2023 | Three elite university presidents walk into Congress for a hearing on antisemitism. Only two still have their jobs. New York magazine reporter Nia Prater tells us what happened, and a Harvard professor of Jewish history explains why he thinks resignations won’t make campuses safer. December 4, 2023 | People with no direct connection to the Middle East have taken to seeing the Palestinian cause as an anti-colonial struggle connected to their own experience. Columbia historian Rashid Khalidi explains why “decolonization” is resonating worldwide. November 29, 2023 | The Israel-Hamas war is dividing the previously united Democrats and uniting the recently fractured Republican Party. Semafor’s David Weigel explains what that means going into 2024. November 27, 2023 | After 50 days of the Israel-Hamas war, both sides took a breather to save lives. And it couldn’t have happened without Qatar. November 20, 2023 | With the world focused on Gaza, Israeli settlers and soldiers are increasing attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. Writer Nathan Thrall and journalist Dalia Hatuqa explain the decades of tension that shape life in the West Bank. November 14, 2023 | People are desperately trying to escape Gaza as the siege on the strip continues. Mohammed Ghalaieny, a Palestinian British man, tells us why he is choosing to stay, even as other foreign nationals escape through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt. November 13, 2023 | Zack Beauchamp, a Vox senior correspondent who writes about democracy and Israel, speaks with Shadi Hamid, a columnist at the Washington Post, research professor of Islamic studies at Fuller Seminary, and author of The Problem of Democracy: America, the Middle East, and the Rise and Fall of an Idea. They discuss the October 7 attack, the subsequent war in Gaza, what it means for Israelis and Palestinians, and how Jews and Muslims in the United States can find common ground amid their communities’ grief. This conversation was recorded on November 2, 2023. November 8, 2023 | If you turn on the news or scroll through your social media feed of choice, there’s a good chance you’ll see the latest on the Israel-Hamas war — and the reaction to it. But there’s one call to action making its way down social media feeds that feels different from all these other responses. It’s called BDS, short for boycott, divest, and sanction. And like just about everything related to this conflict, it’s complicated and controversial. The Weeds host Jonquilyn Hill sits down with Vox senior reporter Whizy Kim to explain the controversial movement, and with Cornell professor and author of Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America Lawrence B. Glickman to discuss the history of boycotts and whether they even work. November 8, 2023 | Protesters, politicians, and the pope are calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war, but the US and Israeli governments remain opposed. Vox’s Jonathan Guyer and Jon B. Alterman from the Center for Strategic and International Studies explain what happens next. November 2, 2023 | Israelis overwhelmingly disapprove of their government’s handling of the October 7 attacks, but their desire for unity keeps Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in power. Michael Koplow of the Israel Policy Forum explains what Israel’s government should do next, and professor Noah Efron of Bar-Ilan University describes the mood among Israelis. October 30, 2023 | Cut off from water and power and recovering from a communications blackout, Gaza is plunged deeper into crisis. It’s not just a humanitarian problem, says leading human rights attorney Kenneth Roth — it’s a violation of international law. October 25, 2023 | This was the top question we got when we asked Today, Explained listeners hat they wanted to know about this conflict. Joel Beinin, Middle East history professor emeritus at Stanford, has answers. October 23, 2023 | False information about what is happening in Israel and Gaza is taking over social media faster than journalists like BBC Verify’s Shayan Sardarizadeh can check it. That’s exactly how digital propagandists want it, says professor and social media expert Marc Owen Jones. October 18, 2023 | It’s been 11 days since Hamas attacked Israel, killing civilians and taking hostages. Israel’s retaliation has killed hundreds of Palestinians and created a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment Aaron David Miller and Middle East analyst Michael Wahid Hanna explain what role diplomacy will play in the coming days. October 16, 2023 | The US, along with Israel and many of its allies, has long considered Hamas a terrorist group. Khaled Al-Hroub, a professor at Northwestern University in Qatar, explains how its reputation is a lot murkier among Palestinians, who elected the group to political power in 2006. October 10, 2023 | This Israel-Hamas war is unlike the ones that came before it, says Haaretz’s Allison Kaplan Sommer. But it was years in the making, says Vox’s Zack Beauchamp.

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Hurricane Milton strengthened into a Category 5 storm today, becoming one of the most rapidly intensifying storms ever in the history of the Atlantic hurricane season. It’s likely within the top three fastest storms on record when it comes to rapid intensification, used to describe tropical cyclones with sustained wind speeds that increase by at least 30 knots (roughly 35 miles per hour) in a 24-hour period. Milton has seen an 80-knot increase in wind speed (more than 92 miles per hour) over 24 hours, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) said this morning. “This is almost like three times the threshold that is used. So, yeah, this is definitely off the charts,” Karthik Balaguru, a climate scientist at...

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