Three months after Hurricane Harvey, more than 47,000 flood victims are living in hotels and motels across Southeast Texas and beyond, a testament to the glacial pace of housing recovery.

It likely will be well into the new year before many of these families find alternatives - and they, in many respects, are the lucky ones.

Tens of thousands more have cobbled together their own temporary arrangements, living with relatives, in tents or on mattresses in barely habitable homes.

In Houston, where local officials estimate the hurricane damaged more than 311,000 housing units - roughly a third of the housing stock - no one has moved into a trailer, secured an apartment or seen repair work begin through the state's interim housing programs. More permanent solutions could be years away.

Hurricane Harvey scattered families to more than 1,500 hotels across the country

Nearly 70,000 people displaced by the hurricane were staying in hotels paid for by FEMA as of Nov. 11, the most recent date for which detailed data was available. That figure has since dropped to more than 47,000, with most people staying in the Houston area.

These delays leave Carl Williams, who has been living in a FEMA-funded room at a Marriott near Greenspoint Mall, with limited options.

"I used to be able to get out of bad situations, but this time being forced to move, being forced to rely on other people - it's just unfamiliar territory for me. I don't know what tomorrow will bring," said Williams, 59, whose longtime rental home in Houston Gardens was damaged too badly for his family to return.

Now, struggling to find another place to rent or buy, the retired UPS worker feels like he's letting down his wife and adult son.

"I can't even put it into words," he said.

Williams' 1-year-old grandson played with a leaf on the sidewalk as the pair waited in front of the hotel for Williams' wife to get back from work.

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Inside, business travelers drank at the bar as children filtered in from school and conference attendees huddled in groups. Stephanie Hernandez's 3-year-old daughter climbed on furniture in the lobby.

Life wasn't bad here, in one of Houston's hotels with the highest population of FEMA residents, all things considered.

Hernandez's children could watch Cartoon Network, there were two swimming pools, and housekeeping came every day.

Still, it wasn't home.

"The fact that you're displaced, not just relaxing here, it kind of makes you feel like you don't fit in the environment," said Hernandez, 44, who had been renting a house in southeast Houston's Wayside neighborhood.

Living in hotels and motels for extended periods is not just hard on families; it's costly for taxpayers. The Federal Emergency Management Agency had spent more than $186 million on its Texas hotel program as of mid-November - about $2.8 million a day.

It's taking too long to move displaced families into more permanent arrangements, and there's blame to share, said Tom McCasland, housing director for the city of Houston.

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"We are behind where we need to be, city, state and federal," McCasland said. "It's time to get these programs out in the community, get hammers swinging, get people moving back into their homes."

Housing recovery after a natural disaster typically unfolds in three stages. In the first stage, FEMA helps families find safe, dry places to sleep. Initial assistance can include $500 in emergency funds, a hotel room or money for a few months' rent.

At the same time, the agency works with state officials to develop programs to get families into apartments, trailers or partially repaired homes. That's the second stage. It's supposed to hold families over until their homes are fully repaired with funds from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

More than 887,000 people have requested financial assistance from FEMA to cope with Harvey, and the agency has approved more than 353,000 of those applications, doling out $1.4 billion in grants. That's an average of about $4,000 per family.

That doesn't include the cost of the hotel program, which is slated to run through mid-January but has been extended several times - and probably will be again.

FEMA's longer-term programs have been slow to reach residents.

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Although more than 9,500 Texas families had qualified for some form of additional temporary housing assistance as of Tuesday, just one had been able to move back into a home repaired through FEMA's program, and 223 were living in a trailer or mobile home. The state has not identified a single multifamily property owner willing to participate in its rental programs.

Houston officials, meanwhile, have yet to approve an agreement with the state's General Land Office to manage the local rollout of FEMA's interim housing programs, and flood victims here likely will not start benefitting from federally funded apartments, trailers or repairs for several more weeks at the earliest.

None of this is new. Federal efforts to rebuild housing after natural disasters are notoriously sluggish.

"We know from all these years after Katrina and Sandy that housing is very, very difficult and slow to recover," said Mary Comerio, a University of California Berkeley architecture professor who specializes in disaster recovery. "In all cases, it will be way slower than you want it to be, and it will be years, not months."

With that in mind, Zack Rosenburg, CEO of a New Orleans-based disaster recovery organization, the St. Bernard Project, gave local and state officials high marks.

They "are ahead of where the vast majority of recoveries are, yet recognize they're not where they need to be," Rosenburg said.

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Shannon Van Zandt, a fellow at Texas A&M's Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center, praised FEMA's and the state's emergency response but was more critical of their housing efforts.

"There's a transition from response to short-term recovery and then long-term recovery," Van Zandt said. "I don't know that FEMA is acting, and I don't know that the state is communicating with FEMA very well in terms of the temporary housing."

Heather Lagrone, deputy director for the land office's community development and revitalization program said the state is doing everything it can to get programs up and running.

"You just can't move as quickly as you need to move," Lagrone said.

FEMA spokesman Robert Howard pointed to bureaucratic challenges.

"You have to make sure you're going through all of the local regulations and all of the different issues, and it does take time. And that's why, realizing this, there are programs like TSA," Howard said, referring to the hotel program.

Even once FEMA's housing programs launch in Houston, it does not appear they will come close to meeting the city's full temporary housing needs.

The city's pending agreement for up to $424 million in federal reimbursements is based on an estimate that fewer than 3,900 local families will need interim housing from the federal government.

MORE: Houston families who lost homes during Harvey find sleep where they can

"Effectively, in the United States, housing recovery is seen as a private sector issue. It is not what government provides a great deal of support and funding for," Comerio said.

Bolstered by philanthropic giving in Harvey's wake, nonprofits have stepped in to help fill the void, or at least a small part of it.

"We're not a first responder. Normally we would not be involved in mucking and gutting and things like that," said Christine Holland, CEO of Rebuilding Together Houston. "But we knew right away just based on the magnitude that we had to do something."

Rebuilding Together had begun work on 25 homes as of mid-November, and Holland hopes to complete a total of 250 next year.

Avenue CDC, which primarily builds new affordable housing, has ventured into disaster recovery as well and plans to make basic repairs to 145 homes over the next four months.

"What we really want is to get people back into their homes as quickly as possible," Avenue CDC's executive director Mary Lawler said. "Because living in a hotel in another neighborhood is not ideal, especially if you have kids in school."

Nonprofit executives acknowledged their efforts will leave many families in need.

"The most worrisome thing is just the capacity. How are we going to get over 100,000 houses rebuilt?" Holland said. "When all of the money that has been donated to people is distributed, we still won't be anywhere near done."