Hurricane Ian’s storm surge took less than 24 hours to flood homes and rip down walls, but some Southwest Florida homeowners have waited more than 10,000 hours for their homes to be livable again.
Nine residents of Naples’ Vanderbilt Towers III, which stands just off the Gulf near Delnor-Wiggins Pass State Park, have banded together to file an injunction against their homeowner’s association after their first-floor condos were gutted down to the studs and concrete, and then left exposed to the open air.
They have remained so until January of 2024.
“The whole first floor was wide open,” said condo owner Nancy Penoyer. Penoyer is one of the nine first-floor condo owners suing the Vanderbilt III HOA. “You can walk condo-to-condo through the studs. The whole first floor is unlivable.
“I begged them to put up plywood just to close it in,” Penoyer said. “They wouldn’t. They said it was too expensive.”
In a year and a half, the first-floor condominium owners have not been able to get back into their condos. Some relied on the condos as a source of income, renting them out for chunks of the year. Others utilized the condos as their primary residence.