A year and a half after Hurricane Sandy hit the New York metropolitan area, destroying tens of thousands of homes, Barbara Vahey is stuck between a rock and a hard place. More specifically, she’s stuck in a funding gap between the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the bureaucratic black hole of local housing recovery programs.

Vahey, 52, had her house in Island Park, on Long Island, destroyed by the storm. She still can’t afford to bring it up to new flood standards that would enable her and her husband to either move back in or sell up.

After brief stints living with different family members, Vahey has been in a rental apartment on the other side of town since July with the help of funding from FEMA. But as of May 1, that assistance will run out and Vahey has nowhere to go.

“I have a $100,000 mortgage with Chase on the house, plus I’m paying taxes and insurance, so I can’t walk away,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for [state funding] to rebuild since it first started last April … now I’m in limbo.”

Vahey isn’t alone. She’s one of 1,300 New York and New Jersey families who until May 1 had been relying on FEMA rental assistance to get them through the last 18 months as they rebuilt their houses or found alternative living arrangements.

In theory, those 18 months should have been enough — FEMA’s programs are designed to hold people over until state- and city-level programs kick in. But housing advocates say that New York’s and New Jersey’s programs have been poorly managed and mired in red tape, leaving people like Vahey without enough money to rebuild their own houses or find a new one.

“The problem is the [local] rental programs aren’t really up and running yet,” said Kevin Walsh, the director of the Fair Share Housing Center in New Jersey, which has helped Sandy victims with legal issues since the storm. “FEMA’s assumption is that the local systems are in place. While that should be a safe assumption, in this case it’s the wrong assumption.”

A total of 137,928 households received funding from FEMA after the storm, according to FEMA figures. The vast majority of those were in New York and New Jersey.