One year after Hurricane Ian, many displaced victims are still without homes. Some are stuck in makeshift lodgings, such as El Rancho Motel.
NORTH FORT MYERS, Fla. - Right before Halloween last year, a battered Ford F-150 pulled up to El Rancho Motel, an old coral and aqua-blue horseshoe of 12 rooms off the busy Tamiami highway, in between a Speedway gas station and RJ’s bar and grill, where you can still get a steak, lobster tail and house dessert for $10.
Jorge Lopez ties up the hair of son Logan Lopez, 5, as Josiah Lopez, 3, eats dinner in their room at the El Rancho Motel in North Fort Myers, Fla. They have lived there for nearly a year since Hurricane Ian. Each time, they all shared the same frustrations and asked the same questions: Why is it so hard to get help? Why is it taking so long? How will we afford a place ever again?There’s “nothing special about any of this,” though, said Dana McGrath, small and wiry, with a shock of white hair and a striped shirt pocket always full of homemade cigarettes. “There are thousands of these,” he gestured to himself, to his motel, to its guests. “Everywhere you go. Roadside motels that are just human.
The couple has been renting rooms to storm victims since 2004, when a family living in their car after Hurricane Charley drove up, asking how much they’d charge for a night. Some people stay for a long time, like the woman in Room 7, who has been here since Irma hit in 2017. This is not charity, Dana McGrath emphasized; it’s just a different kind of business model.
Barbara Andrews talks on the phone with her health insurance company in her motel room at El Rancho, where she lives with her husband, Joe Fallon. The 72-year-old, a local Freemason chapter leader, real estate agent and self-described motelier, started his adult life living in a park tree in rural Missouri, working two jobs, after leaving home as soon as he was legally able. He glosses over that part of his life, simply stating that “the park was favorable to home.”
There is still a lot of need, though, and Ian made it much worse. But that’s not because of climate change, he harped. He doesn’t believe in that. It’s the economy, the government’s failure to help and people’s inability to save. Rehabbing his life has not gone smoothly, either. He’s on probation, in messy custody battles. In 2020, he broke his back slipping on a wet Winn-Dixie floor, making his work as a landscaper and roofer extremely painful to do. His wife now works 80 hours a week at a Publix and a gas station to support everyone.
“I had to tell him this is home when he knew, I could see that he knew, this is not home,” Lopez cried.Logan, serious and always observing, knows El Rancho isn’t a “home,” either, but he rolls with it. His football practice is down the street, and he can take the city bus pretty easily to school when his dad’s 20-year-old truck won’t start. He shares a tiny bedroom with his grandmother and 3-year-old brother.
Pabon is only 29, but life after Ian, all the hours on her feet, has wrecked her. But she has to keep working — she doesn’t “ever want to be living in a tent with my family again.”
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